Shaw’s Campaign Against the Censors: Press, Public Opinion, and Parliament

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In the Edwardian decade and the following years before the Great War, English dramatists wrote or wanted to write plays that, like Ibsen’s, dealt seriously with social issues. What stood in their way was the threat of the Lord Chamberlain’s refusal of a license. Unsurprisingly, as James Woodfield states, a chief argument of those who supported the abolition of stage censorship was discrimination against serious dramatists. Like authors of music hall skits or sketches, who did not have to submit them to the Examiner of Plays for a license, novelists and poets were censorship-free, and “even dramatists could publish their plays subject only to the normal laws of libel and decency.” English critics knew of this and of the rise of non-commercial free theatres (i.e., free of the restrictions of censorship) in major European cities, which produced new and different types of plays. In London, theatres sprang up to circumvent the Lord Chamberlain’s ban on serious drama by the same means that productions of The Cenci and Ghosts had circumvented it: private performances for members of a society or club who did not purchase tickets at the box office but received them as part of their membership dues. In 1891, the Independent Theatre, inspired by the Theâtre Libre and the Freie Buhne, produced Ghosts and Zola’s Therese Raquin. The Stage Society, founded in 1899 also as a private club, produced plays refused licenses by the Lord Chamberlain or licensed plays unlikely to be performed on commercial stages. Its first production was Shaw’s You Never Can Tell, and in 1902, it performed Mrs Warren’s Profession and The Marrying of Anne Leete, the first play by Granville Barker (also called Harley Granville-Barker). In the first few years of the new century, the Stage Society produced works by European playwrights—including Maurice Maeterlinck, Gerhart Hauptmann, Maxim Gorky, and Eugene Brieux—and by English dramatists, including W. Somerset Maugham and St. John Hankin. After a production of Candida in 1903, with Barker playing Marchbanks, business manager J.E. Vedrenne and Barker, who was also a director, formed a partnership to produce plays at the Court (also called the Royal Court) Theatre, which they did from October 1904 to June 1907. Shaw, who was their house playwright and who directed his own plays, silently gave them financial concessions. The Vedrenne-Barker management also produced works by contemporary Europeans (Ibsen, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, and Arthur Schnitzler), Englishmen and Irishmen (including John Galsworthy, Hankin, Maurice Hewlitt, W.B. Yeats, and John Masefield), and an American woman (Elizabeth Robins), as well as three plays by Euripides.