The power of words on stage sends a shiver down the spines of the powerful
(Dominic Dromgoole)
One day in 1736, an author, who remains anonymous to this day, handed Henry Giffard, manager of London’s Goodman’s Fields theatre, the manuscript of a farce entitled The Golden Rump. After reading the play, Giffard thought it would be a success but that it would be prudent to first show it to Prime Minister Robert Walpole. The Golden Rump savagely satirized King George II, the Royal Family, and several prominent figures. Its stage directions called for the backdrop to consist of a huge picture of the King’s buttocks; the actors were to enter and exit through the King’s anus. Walpole asked Giffard to leave the manuscript with him; after a quick reading, he saw that he had been handed a “golden” opportunity to bring the stage under government control.1
Walpole was a shrewd, ruthless politician. For twenty-one years, he dominated the House of Commons, following a cautious policy that kept Britain out of foreign wars and financially solvent. But his administration was continually under fire for its corruption, and he wished to avoid being attacked from the stage. (As a modern director has observed, “There is still something stubbornly subversive about the nature of theatre. Even now the power of words on stage reaching ears open to democratic thoughts sends a shiver down the spines of the powerful.”2) After waiting until he found the House in the right mood, Walpole announced that he had something of great importance to lay before it, and then he read excerpts from The Golden Rump aloud to the members. Their shock at the obscenities and the disrespect with which the play treated the high and mighty was all that he desired. He then asked the House to vote on a bill to regulate the theatres. The bill quickly passed the House of Commons and was sent to the House of Lords, where it encountered opposition from the Earl of Chesterfield, who spoke in defense of freedom, saying that the stage had a unique role in society: to expose vices and follies that the law could not touch.3 Nevertheless, the Lords approved the bill, which became law in the spring of 1737.
Walpole’s legislation, known as the Licensing Act of 1737, had two central provisions. First, it required that any performance of a play in London for “hire, gain or reward” be played in a theatre that had received a patent from the government; and, second, that before any play could be performed it had to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain, a government official, usually a high-ranking nobleman4. The Act also applied to theatres and plays performed in any part of the country outside London, although this prohibition was only enforced spottily and later was softened by the grant of patents to certain provincial theatres.5 Astonishingly, the censorship provision was not repealed until 1968. Walpole was interested chiefly in the censorship provision of the Act, and he may have added the licensing provision to buy off resistance from the owners and managers of Drury Lane and Covent Garden.6
The Licensing Act had a strong influence on the subject matter of the plays written in the eighteenth century. A result of the Act was that playwrights and theatre managers practiced self-censorship: what was the point of writing and producing plays that would never be performed? It is of course impossible to know the number or the quality of plays dealing with the controversial issues of the day that never got written or produced. Nevertheless, it is significant that during the two decades—roughly 1763 to 1783—that encompassed the breaking away of Britain’s North American colonies, no play performed in London dealt with this course of events.7 The American War of Independence acutely divided the British political and trading classes; for constitutional as well as economic reasons, many political leaders and City merchants sided with the colonists. But for the Licensing Act, these and other contemporary public issues would in all likelihood have been presented and debated on the London stage. Another unforeseen result was that it deterred actors from running afoul of the censor by improvising.8 By limiting the political themes that could be discussed on the stage and by eliminating competition from fringe theatres, the Act reduced the vitality of the London theatre.
Owing at least in part to self-censorship, the government generally exercised its censorship power with restraint, its most frequent use of the power being to protect prominent persons from insult or mockery. In the early days of the Licensing Act, the censorship was done by Edward Capell, the Deputy-Inspector of Plays, a Shakespeare scholar who himself published a ten-volume edition of the Bard’s plays.9 It is not surprising that a comfortable social as well as working relationship grew up between Capell and Garrick after the latter became manager of Drury Lane.10 The Act gave the government fourteen days to review a play after it was submitted, but Capell was willing to speed things up when asked to do so. In 1751, when Garrick submitted an addition to a play to Capell, he wrote: “If I don’t hear from you this evening or tomorrow, I shall think there is no objection to it.”11
Even before the Licensing Act, the two main London theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, were licensed under patents granted by King Charles II in the seventeenth century; the legal validity of these royal patents was doubtful because Parliament had not confirmed them.12 These two patents were continued under the Act.13 The managers of unlicensed theatres, most likely helped by clever lawyers, soon found a way to evade the restrictions.14 Since the licensing provision of the Act did not apply to performances of musical concerts, and since it covered only the performance of plays for which admission was charged, unlicensed theatre managers advertised a concert, for which there would be an admission fee, with a play thrown in for free. When Garrick made his 1741 London debut in the title role of Shakespeare’s Richard III at the unlicensed theatre of Goodman’s Fields, the public notice advertised “A Concert of Vocal and Instrumental Music, divided into two parts,” along with a note informing the public that “Between the Two Parts of the Concert will be presented an Historical Play, called the Life and Death of Richard the Third.”15
It did not take long for the Drury Lane and Covent Garden managers to move to protect their favored position by bringing lawsuits to enforce the Act, with the result that in the early 1740s Goodman’s Fields and the other unlicensed theatres were forced to close. Although the government did not subsidize Drury Lane and Covent Garden, it gave their managers something just as good, perhaps better: a monopoly of the London stage. The two managers might compete with each other for audiences, but when it came to hiring actors they sometimes presented a united front. Unless an actor had the economic power of a Garrick to draw audiences to the theatre, the Licensing Act deprived the actor of any real bargaining strength when dealing with the theatre manager. If an actor wanted to perform on the London stage, he had to agree to the manager’s terms.
In effect, the Licensing Act turned the two patented theatres into semi-public institutions, practically arms of the government. Under a tacit agreement between the theatre managers and the government, the plays performed at the two theatres were expected not to oppose the government and even to instill patriotism in the public. This managers and actors were willing, even eager, to do, as the Drury Lane manager demonstrated at the time of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.
During the first half of the eighteenth century, the threat of a Jacobite invasion of England was always present. The Jacobites were followers of James Edward Stuart, the son of the exiled King James II, who was known as the Old Pretender.16 In 1715, the Old Pretender, claiming that he was the legitimate King of England and Scotland, had led an unsuccessful invasion of Scotland. In 1745, with Britain at war with France and a large part of its army on the continent, his twenty-five-year-old son, Charles Edward Stuart, known as Bonnie Prince Charlie or the Young Pretender, landed with a small band of men in western Scotland and rallied the Highland clans to his banner. At first he was successful; the rebels defeated a British army in Scotland and marched south into England, reaching Derby, 125 miles from London.
The London theatres did their bit to encourage recruiting for the citizen army that was formed to resist the invaders. The lovely Peg Woffington stepped out on the Drury Lane stage, dressed in a feminized military uniform, to shame the male members of the audience into joining the government forces defending the capital, and to promise them female affection if they did:
For if in valour real manhood lies,
All cowards are but women in disguise.
To no base coward prostitute your charms,
Disband the lover who deserts his arms:
So shall you fire each heroe to his duty,
And British rights be sav’d by British beauty.17
As it turned out, Derby was as far as the Young Pretender got. Failing to attract more than a few Englishmen willing to join the rebellion, the rebels retreated to Scotland, where a British army finally defeated them the following year at the Battle of Culloden Moor. Bonnie Prince Charlie managed to escape to France, but many of the rebels were butchered by the government forces. That was the end of the Jacobite threat.
When King George II died in 1760, the theatres reflected their closeness to the government by closing for three weeks.18 And when his successor and grandson, George III, was crowned a few months later, both Drury Lane and Covent Garden followed a century-old tradition by putting on lavish celebrations. A bonfire was lighted on the Drury Lane stage, which was covered by a heavy fog from the smoke, which nearly suffocated the actors.19 And when the King made a grand review of the British fleet at Spithead, Garrick honored the monarchy by staging a reenactment of the event, “complete with rolling waves and model ships and choruses of ‘Rule Britannia,’”20 using the stage in much the same way as, toward the end of World War II, Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V turned Shakespeare’s play into an inspiration for patriotism.21
By cutting off competition to the two patent theatres, the Licensing Act gave their owners a strong incentive to increase profits by enlarging the theatres. The seating capacity of Drury Lane more than doubled (from about 1,000 to more than 2,000) during the first twenty years of Garrick’s management, while the capacity of Covent Garden grew at a roughly similar pace.22 Additional expansion enabled each of the two theatres to accommodate about 3,000 spectators by 1790. The result of the expansion was to lose the intimacy of performance that had enabled the audience to see every gesture and hear every whisper of Garrick and of his most talented colleagues. It also encouraged managers to stage ambitious spectacles, and actors to embrace a more histrionic acting style.23
Now, back in 1743, Garrick and Macklin were to discover that the government, through its power under the Licensing Act, could destroy their plans to open a theatre of their own.
Notes
1 Peter Thomson, The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1966–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 87–88; Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, ii, 203–06.
2 Dominic Dromgoole, Hamlet: Globe to Globe (London: Canongate Books Ltd, 2017), 341.
3 Dunbar, Peg Woffington and Her World, 77.
4 Thomson, The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 88.
5 10 Geo. II cap xxviii. Reprinted in J. Raithby (ed.): Statutes at Large, vol. 5 (London: Eyre & Strhan, 1811), 266–68; Thomson, The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 111, 115.
6 Judith Milhaus, “Theatre companies and regulation,” in Donohue, ed., The Cambridge History of British Theatre, ii, 122–23. The licensing provision of the Act was repealed in 1843. Thomson, The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 184.
7 Thomson, The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 88; Shearer West, The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991), 1.
8 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: Penguin Books, 1968), 27.
9 The Inspector of Plays from 1737 to his death in 1778 was Edward Chetwynd, but Garrick’s dealings appear to have been chiefly with Capell. Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, i, 332.
10 An undated letter of Garrick’s mentions his joining Capell for tea. Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, iii, 1277.
11 David Garrick to Edward Capell, Feb. 23, 1751, Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, i, 159.
12 Oscar G.Brockett, History of the Theatre (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1968), 267.
13 A third patent was granted to Samuel Foote to manage the Haymarket theatre in 1769, but only to perform plays during the summer months.
14 In the 1730s there were four unlicensed theatres in London. Brockett, History of the Theatre, 267.
15 Kendall, David Garrick, 22.
16 In eighteenth-century usage, the word pretender meant claimant.
17 [Anon.], “The Female Volunteer,” in The Theatre of Wit; or A Banquet of Muses. A Collection of Pieces . . . in Prose and Verse (London: Jacob Bickerstaff, 1746), pp. 33–34. (BL), shelfmark 12314.ee.4.(2.)., 126.
18 Wilkinson, Memoirs (reprint), 143.
19 Ibid., 232.
20 Nick Bunker, An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 191.
21 David Thomson, Why Acting Matters (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 9.
22 Allardyce Nicoll, The Garrick Stage: Theatres and Audience in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1980), 40, 54.
23 Auburn, “Garrick at Drury Lane, 1747–1776,” in Donohue, The Cambridge History of British Theatre, ii, 163.