On 20 May 1737, the House Commons agreed to hear the government bill that soon afterwards became (to use the historic name it eventually acquired) the Licensing Act. About the time this bill was being drafted, Sir Robert Walpole, thinking to predispose the House, showed few members both parties some extracts from manuscript called Rump, farce or entertainment allegedly unprecedented outrageousness, allegedly also intended or at any rate offered for actual stage production, until it fell instead into the hands the minister. From the shock these samples gave his colleagues, and at their non-partisan urging, Walpole made bold to read from the captured document to the whole House during debate, whereupon a general conviction prevailed, according to Walpole's biographer Coxe, of the necessity putting check to the representation such horrid effusions treason and blasphemy.' The play thus performed that one time only, by Sir Robert on the floor the House, and not otherwise published or preserved, had been brought to Walpole by Henry Giffard, the manager the playhouse at Lincoln's Inn Fields. How it came to Giffard, or who wrote it, we do not know. The bill it led to, and was possibly contrived to lead to, limited play performances to those theaters doing business by royal authority-meaning in practice only Drury Lane and Covent Garden-and provided further for the separate licensing all new plays and play material prior to performance. This famous legislative proposal, though famously opposed by Chesterfield in the House Lords, passed rapidly and easily into law on June 24.2 The emotional trigger in Parliament was play nobody knew anything about. But everybody knew that it was Henry Fielding's Haymarket playhouse, and not any Golden Rump, at which this bill was chiefly leveled.3