Lord Chamberlain

The Lord Chamberlain historically has been one of the most powerful positions in England, since as the chief official of the Royal Household he often embodied or expressed the wishes of the monarch. In Elizabethan times, when companies of actors needed patronage to obtain a license for their productions, the Lord Chamberlain became one such benefactor. Shakespeare’s own company were the Lord Chamberlain’s Men prior to becoming the King’s Men upon the accession of James I in 1603. However, the Lord Chamberlain also had indirect power of censorship over the stage and public entertainments via the Master of the Revels, a court officer in his service who was increasingly given the preemptive right to censor plays.

The critical legislation was the Stage Licensing Act of 1737 (10 Geo II, c 2) granting virtually absolute powers to the Lord Chamberlain via the office of “the Examiner of the Stage.” This Act was the legal consequence of satirical attacks on various politicians, especially the prime minister, Robert Walpole, in plays by Henry Fielding (1707–1754), the noted novelist, and staged at the Haymarket Theatre. These included Don Quixote in England (1734), Pasquin (1736), and The Historical Register of the Year 1736 (1737), an outspoken exposure of Walpole’s corrupt administration.

Although the Licensing Act was in reality a form of private political revenge by Walpole, effectively silencing Fielding and bringing his career as a dramatist to an end, the powers of the Lord Chamberlain remained in place, astonishingly, for over two centuries. As with the procedure used by his predecessor, the Master of the Revels, plays had to be approved and receive a license prior to performance. Powerful initiatives to limit censorship were made as far back as 1832 and 1843, resulting in the directive that the Lord Chamberlain was forbidden to withhold his license unless on the grounds of “the preservation of good manners, decorum or the public peace.” While this concession limited refusals on the grounds of content, the Lord Chamberlain could still ban or edit plays on the original grounds of political scandal or controversy, and the representation of the Royal Family or living politicians as characters. Petitions by public authors of note made in 1865 and 1907 resulted in greater flexibility, but the responsibilities of the Lord Chamberlain for theatrical censorship were abolished only in the Theatres Act of 1968.

Grounds for the refusing of a license varied greatly and included obscenity, profanity, blasphemy, immorality, and indecency. The assessment of these problematic qualities was left to men appointed by the Chamberlain, the Examiners or Comptrollers, “mostly upper-middle-class, retired senior officers from the armed services. In the twentieth century they tended to be intelligent and diplomatic, but were also often philistine, with little knowledge of serious drama and it traditions” (de Jongh 2000, xi). In his study The Censorship of English Drama 1824–1901 , John Russell Stephens researches the activities of the six Examiners of Plays. The first, George Colman, told the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature in 1832: “Nothing on the stage is to be uttered without licence” and was especially severe on all uses of heaven, God, Lord , and even angels (Stephens 1980, 93). Among the major suppressions were Ibsen’s Ghosts (1891) and George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1894). Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1892) was described by the Examiner Smyth Pigott as “written in French—half Biblical, half pornographic,” but was allowed (Stephens 1980, 112). King Lear was prohibited during the madness of George III (Stephens 1980, 162).

If an author or manager refused to comply with the editing prescribed by Examiner, the matter would be handed over to the Director of Public Prosecutions to proceed with a case against the theatre. The files of the Lord Chamberlain and his staff from 1901 to 1968 were withheld from the public domain until 1991. On the basis of access to them and to other correspondence, Nicholas de Jongh’s study Politics, Prudery and Perversion (2000) surveys the historical evolution of this cultural struggle and delineates the various stratagems employed by authors and managers. As is usually the consequence of censorship, much ingenuity was employed in circumventing the Lord Chamberlain’s rulings. The formal device was to have a select club performance, but many anecdotes attest to the effectiveness of irony. Thus the highly successful satirical show Beyond the Fringe (1961) contained a sketch for “Bollard, the man’s cigarette” and the stage direction “Enter two dreadful queens.” Their risqué line “Hello darlings!” provoked an objection from the Lord Chamberlain’s office. The producers kept the scenario the same but simply changed the line to “Hello men!” Over the years a great deal of verbal sanitation was carried out, much of it trivial: after the sensational use of bloody in Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912), the expletive was not heard again on the stage until Noel Coward’s Red Peppers in 1936 (de Jongh 2000, 185). There was some comic confusion among examiners over the meaning of punk and screw in American plays, and some absurd suggestions, such as “Omit ‘shit’ and substitute ‘educated man’” (de Jongh 2000, 174). But serious plays dealing with war situations, like US (1966) faced many deletions, including this horrifying image: “I see his great black cock sizzling and spitting like a cabab [sic] on a skewer” (de Jongh 2000, 154). Samuel Beckett’s Endgame was acceptable in French ( Fin de Partie ) in 1957, but ran into problems when presented in English. The crux was Hamm’s bizarre expletive about God after trying to pray: “The Bastard! He doesn’t exist!” Although in the play Clov answers “Not yet,” The Lord Chamberlain would not permit the blasphemy until Beckett substituted “swine” for “bastard.”

Theatrical managements still had to negotiate with the Lord Chamberlain’s officers on a number of grounds. The previously neglected and highly contested terrain of homosexuality on stage is covered in de Jongh’s earlier study, Not in Front of the Audience (1992), which points out that J.R. Ackerley’s Prisoners of War (1925) was the first modern British play to deal openly with homosexual desire. Simulated sodomy on stage became a recurring problem, in such different treatments as Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (National Theatre 1992) and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (New Ambassadors Theatre 1996).

Although the 1960s are stereotyped as “permissive,” the ending of the Chatterley ban (1960) did not immediately extend to the stage. A parliamentary bill introduced in 1962 to abolish stage censorship was rejected by 134 votes to 77. In common with many managers, Kenneth Tynan’s tenure as artistic director at the British National Theatre (1963–1969) was typical, marked by much frustration, by minor victories (restorations of text), and by defeats. From Dingo , an antiwar play by Charles Wood proposed for 1963, “the Lord Chamberlain wanted the deletion of all four-letter words, all blasphemy … and impersonation of living persons. The play was not done” (Tynan 1988, 228). Tynan’s most scandalous production, his own nude sex revue Oh! Calcutta! appeared the year after the end of the Lord Chamberlain’s reign. Nicholas de Jongh has summed up the last decades of that reign: “Relatively speaking, the twentieth century English stage was subject to more censorship than in the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I” (2000, xv).