*
Shaw was to write more than fifty articles against the censorship, reinforced with many speeches and letters to newspapers. As late as 1950 he could still be heard objecting to the appointment of ‘an ordinary official with a salary of a few hundreds a year to exercise powers which have proved too much for Popes and Presidents’. In fact the Lord Chamberlain never read plays but delegated this job to a series of under-paid clerks. These officials fell back on making a list of controversial subjects (religion, sex) that must not be mentioned, and words that must not be used: they then worked to this list automatically. Professional pornographers soon learnt these inventories and how to get round them, with the result that the commercial theatre had become a prostitution market masquerading as theatre.
Shaw argued that the censorship was damned both by the pernicious trash it allowed, and by the good work it suppressed. Its purpose was to suppress immorality: but what it meant by immorality was deviation from custom. It was assumed that every Englishman knew the difference between wicked and virtuous conduct. But Shaw reasoned that what was wanted from dramatists, and all other writers, was a constant challenge to such accepted knowledge. The notion that everything uncustomary was wicked helped to keep people in line with their neighbours and gave Government what appeared to be a moral basis for penalizing change. But without change there could be no development. Progress depended upon the toleration of unexpected behaviour, and heresy was essential to the welfare of a community. A nation that did not permit heresy was stagnant.
Shaw realized that he must not only discredit this function of the Lord Chamberlain’s office, but also propose a better control of the stage by the community. The alternative was not anarchy, he wrote, but control by local authorities. ‘The municipality will not read plays and forbid or sanction them,’ he explained. ‘It will give the manager both liberty and responsibility... Let him manage how he pleases, knowing that if he produces utterly vile plays, he will find himself without a defender in council when the question comes up as to whether his licence shall be continued.’ It was important, Shaw stressed, to license the management, not the theatre. A manager could then pursue his business as any other professional man, while the annual licensing system would ensure that he could be struck off like a solicitor. Shaw was therefore taking a moral line more democratic than the official guardians of morality by recommending a transference of the care of the nation’s morals from a few paid clerks to the county councils and city corporations, with watch committees to warn them when managers were conducting their theatres as disorderly houses.
He was propelled into the front line when Granville Barker’s new play Waste was refused a licence late that year. This ban, and another in respect of Edward Garnett’s The Breaking Point, led to a renewed attack by the playwrights. ‘Stiffen your back,’ Shaw exhorted Gilbert Murray. Throughout 1908 he kept up this campaign, luring the censorship into a serious blunder.
*
For half a dozen years Beerbohm Tree had been prompting Shaw to write him a modern stage version of Don Quixote. As a rather startling variation on this theme, and reverting to his method in The Devil’s Disciple, Shaw dashed off The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet between 16 February and 8 March 1909. This one-act ‘Sermon in Crude Melodrama’, as he subtitled it, was commissioned for a matinée performance at His Majesty’s to benefit a children’s charity. ‘I wrote a perfect triumph of this made-to-measure art for Tree in Blanco Posnet, and he was simply shocked by it, absolutely horrified,’ he remembered. Tree was then three months short of his knighthood. What worried him were Blanco’s references to God as ‘a sly one... a mean one’, and his statement that the chief witness in the trial had had ‘immoral relations with every man in this town’, including the Sheriff. He appealed to Shaw to ‘cut that bit about God and that other bit about the prostitute’. But Shaw convinced him there was nothing to fear. If the Examiner of Plays passed the words, Tree would have obtained official blessing; and if he didn’t the actor would never have to utter them. So Tree submitted the play to the Censor: and the Censor, on the grounds of blasphemy, refused to license it.
Set in a Town Hall ‘in a Territory of the United States of America’ sometime during the nineteenth century, Blanco Posnet is pervaded with an air of unreality. ‘Let the imagination play,’ Shaw advised Martin-Harvey. ‘There never was no such place and no such people.’ His own imagination was literary and showed its derivations from Bret Harte, Dickens and Tolstoy’s play The Power of Darkness. What he wanted was a respectable provenance for a piece of moral propaganda that had as its point the protest of a horse-thief against his punishment for an admitted crime. From the consequence of this crime he would have escaped but for his yielding to the first good impulse of his life: the giving up his plunder to an unhappy woman in order to save her sick child. By using some phrases from the Lord Chamberlain’s proscribed list, he adapted this blameless drama into a ten-inch gun in the censorship war. ‘I have taken advantage of the Blanco Posnet affair to write a tremendous series of letters to The Times,’ he informed Trebitsch that summer; ‘and the result has been that the Prime Minister has promised to appoint a Select Committee of both Houses of Parliament to enquire into the whole question of Censorship.’
Shaw’s methods were to harass the enemy as a dramatist by all ingenious means: then hurry to their rescue as a responsible committee man. The opportunity of performing Blanco Posnet to the maximum embarrassment of the Censor came after a visit by Lady Gregory to Ayot. Shaw gave her the play, and she took it back to Coole where Yeats read it and agreed to put it on at the Abbey Theatre – Dublin being the one place in Britain beyond the Lord Chamberlain’s jurisdiction.
As soon as the Abbey production was announced, the Under-Secretary of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland wrote from Dublin Castle threatening to revoke the Abbey Theatre’s patent. Lady Gregory and Yeats were summoned to the Castle by the Viceroy Lord Aberdeen, and one of the Castle lawyers warned their solicitors that if Blanco Posnet was performed, the authorities would use against the theatre all the legal powers at their command. Yeats found himself forced into a position where he had either to abandon the principle of theatrical freedom or risk, by the closure of the Abbey, the livelihood of its players and the fruit of half a dozen years’ work. He and Lady Gregory decided to confront the Lord Lieutenant’s precautionary notice with a manifesto.
‘If our patent is in danger it is because the English censorship is being extended to Ireland, or because the Lord Lieutenant is about to revive, on what we consider a frivolous pretext, a right not exercised for 150 years, to forbid at his pleasure any play produced in any Dublin Theatre... we must not, by accepting the English Censor’s ruling, give away anything of the liberty of the Irish theatre of the future... what would sooner or later grow into a political censorship cannot be lightly accepted.’
The issue had now been adroitly spread from blasphemy to cover almost the whole area of Anglo-Irish politics. Having defied the Castle, Lady Gregory tactfully offered the Lord Lieutenant a small face-saver in the way of two tiny omissions. It was essential, Shaw pointed out, that such concessions should be ridiculous. As he explained in a programme note:
‘To oblige the Lord Lieutenant, I have consented to withdraw the word “immoral” as applied to the relations between a woman of bad character and her accomplices. In doing so I wish it to be stated that I still regard these relations as not only immoral but vicious; nevertheless... I am quite content to leave the relations to the unprompted judgement of the Irish people. Also, I have consented to withdraw the words “Dearly beloved brethren”, as the Castle fears they may shock the nation.’
The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet opened at the Abbey, with Lady Gregory’s The Workhouse Ward and Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan, on 25 August 1909. It was Horse Show Week in Dublin, the peak of the summer season, which ‘draws to the Irish capital a vari-coloured crowd, of many languages,’ wrote James Joyce. ‘...For a few days the tired and cynical city is dr
essed like a newly-wed bride. Its gloomy streets swarm with a feverish life, and an unaccustomed uproar breaks its senile slumber. This year... all over town they are talking about the clash between Bernard Shaw and the Viceroy... between the representative of the King and the writer of comedy... while Dubliners, who care nothing for art but love an argument passionately, rubbed their hands with joy.’ Many people now entering a theatre for the first time in their lives were offering guineas for standing-room in the wings. Foreign newspapers had sent their critics – James Joyce sent in a review to Il Piccolo della Sera. Charlotte was there with her sister but G.B.S. stayed strategically in Parknasilla. Lady Gregory’s fear was that there might be a hostile demonstration, or complaints from the Church, that would give the Viceroy an excuse for taking legal action.
The reception of the play must have disappointed many who had come looking for a disturbance. The audience took to Blanco Posnet enthusiastically, laughing at its humour, passing over the dangerous passages with sympathetic blankness, and at the curtain interrupting their applause with vain calls for the author. There was general agreement that Mr Posnet was a very mild-spoken ruffian in comparison with the reports of him; and some people questioned whether they had been victims of an Abbey hoax. ‘There is no feeling in Dublin except amusement about the more or less false pretences by which a huge audience was attracted last night to the Abbey Theatre,’ reported The Times. ‘Everybody today is enjoying the story of Mr Shaw’s cleverness and the Censor’s folly... The play is perfectly innocuous; it could not shock the most susceptible Irish feelings.’ The Churches refused to make a protest (some clergymen actually preached sermons celebrating the play); and the Irish Times commented that if ridicule were as deadly in Britain as in France, the censorship would be ‘blown away in the shouts of laughter that greeted Blanco Posnet’.
Shaw sent his congratulations. ‘You and W.B.Y[eats]. handled the campaign nobly,’ he wrote to Lady Gregory. ‘You have made the Abbey Theatre the real centre of capacity and character in the Irish movement: let Sinn Fein and the rest look to it.’ The Abbey had vanquished the Castle, but no one could tell what effect this Irish victory would have on the Censor in England.
It was this that Shaw set out to test by applying for a licence to produce Blanco Posnet at Annie Horniman’s repertory theatre, the Gaiety, in Manchester. The play was submitted in its Irish version which, as George Redford noted, was ‘practically identical’ to the text sent to him by Beerbohm Tree. Under these circumstances, Redford added, ‘there is no ground on which I could ask the Lord Chamberlain to reconsider his decision’. But Shaw was able to remind him that plays could be considered more than once. The performance in Dublin, which had elicited good opinions from critics and clergymen, was ample evidence, he contended, that an error of judgement had been made. He therefore requested a re-submission to the Lord Chamberlain. This Redford was obliged to do: but the Lord Chamberlain gave the same decision. ‘What the Censorship has actually done exceeds the utmost hopes of those who, like myself, have devoted themselves to its destruction,’ Shaw wrote in The Times.
There was one more move for him to make. He allowed Blanco Posnet to be performed in London by the Abbey Theatre Company under the protection of the Stage Society. The English could now see for themselves that his reputedly blasphemous piece was no more than a ‘sentimental tract,’ as Desmond MacCarthy was to describe it. The whole affair, including Shaw’s publication in a newspaper of the words to which the Lord Chamberlain took offence, had dramatized the full absurdity of the system. ‘Let us all dance on the prostrate body of Mr Redford as violently as we can,’ exhorted Max Beerbohm in the Saturday Review.
*
‘Mr Redford has a fixed delusion that I am a dangerous and disreputable person, a blasphemer and a blackguard,’ Shaw wrote to the manager of the Gaiety Theatre, Ben Iden Payne.
He used Payne for an extra skirmish that summer. Between the end of March and the beginning of May 1909, he had composed a one-act satirical farce called Press Cuttings. Exploiting his own fear of women and merging it with the general fear of a German war, he coupled the cause of feminism to his fight against the censorship by naming two of his characters General Mitchener and Prime Minister Balsquith (who enters dressed as a woman). On 24 June Redford returned the manuscript in order to give its author ‘the opportunity of eliminating all personalities, expressed or implied’. He called attention to the rule: ‘No offensive personalities, as representation of living persons to be permitted on the stage.’
This was what Shaw calculated would happen. In various newspapers, he assured the public that he had been ‘careful not to express a single personality that has not done duty again and again without offence in the pages of Punch’. Privately he let it be known that he had used the name Mitchener ‘in order to clear him of all possible suspicion of being a caricature of Lord Roberts’. As for the well-worn Punch figure of Balsquith, it was neither Balfour nor Asquith ‘and cannot in the course of nature be both’.
Two ‘private receptions’ of the play were given under the auspices of the Women’s Suffrage movement at the Court Theatre early that July. Shaw then altered the names of Mitchener and Balsquith to Bones and Johnson (the ringmaster and clown of the Christy Minstrels) and Iden Payne re-submitted the play which was licensed for public performance on 17 August, and opened the following month at the Gaiety in Manchester. ‘In the crucial scene the Prime Minister forced his way into the War Office disguised as a militant suffragette,’ wrote Iden Payne. ‘...When he had removed his woman’s attire, Bones exclaimed, “Great Heavens, Johnson!” When the innocuous name was heard there was a roar of laughter, followed by loud ironic applause, which was repeated when Johnson could be heard to answer “Yes, Bones”.’
There were some who felt that Shaw was prostituting his talent in these forays against the censorship. Yet many playwrights agreed that some liberalization of the law was needed. It was important that those interviewed by the Select Committee should speak with a reasonably unanimous voice. In various multigraphed letters to members of the Society of Authors, Shaw assigned to himself the job of voice-trainer. ‘Witnesses must be careful not to put forward the contention that the freedom of the stage would be absolutely safe. The proper reply is that its risks would be no greater than the risks of the freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of public meeting... they are the price of liberty and progress.’
These letters to fellow-writers were accompanied by an 11,000-word statement that Shaw had prepared as his own evidence. His examination was to consist of questions on this written evidence which, at the Committee’s invitation and his own expense, he had distributed beforehand. However, the Committee informed him that it could not admit his printed statement into the record since to do so would be acting against precedent. Shaw argued that some of the distinctions he wished to make were not easy to bring out simply in replies to questions, and he cited three precedents from the 1892 Committee which had accepted written evidence in favour of the censorship. At this the Committee cleared the room, discussed the matter in camera, and then repeated without explanation that ‘it would not be permissible to print the statement as part of the evidence’.
Shaw was completely taken aback. ‘The sudden volte face when I cited precedent, the dramatic secret conclave, the point blank refusal without reason given, are too good to be thrown away... I shall fly to the last refuge of the oppressed: a letter to The Times.’
Shaw’s letter appeared on 2 August; and three days later, when he arrived to resume his evidence, he was told that the Committee ‘have no further questions to ask you’. It was hard to conceal his resentment. He incorporated his rejected evidence, as a form of minority report, into his Preface to The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet which Conrad judged to be ‘somewhat imbecile – in the classical meaning of the word’. Shaw had sought to inflict imbecility on those members of the Committee who supported the censorship: to embezzle them of their wits. He was acting the modern Don
Quixote Tree had wanted him to dramatize in Blanco Posnet, the man who ‘is always right and always apparently wrong with smaller and more practical people round him’. He had turned his plays into the accoutrements with which the Don set out to fight his battles.
‘I saw that I had to deal with a hostile majority,’ Shaw excused himself, ‘...so I misconducted myself.’ His words spilled out all over the place. He could not stop. The Committee had treated Redford – ‘the filter that my life’s work has to pass through’ – most decorously. He felt aggrieved; he felt aggravated. He had made himself better informed on censorship than any member of the Committee. Then he had worked by the rules, won every round fairly and been counted out.
The Report was published on 8 November 1909. What comes out strikingly is the evidence of what Shaw would call the idealists. Theatre managers’ organizations argued that censorship had not inflicted any injury on serious drama in England; actors’ associations spoke of the desirability of maintaining a censorship which protected their members from taking unpleasant parts in undesirable plays; A. B. Walkley, drama critic of The Times and President of the Society of Dramatic Critics, believed the censorship to be justifiable because it reflected the common sense of the man in the street, while Lena Ashwell, lessee of the Great Queen Street Theatre and soon to play the Polish aviatrix in Misalliance, wanted the Censor as protection against the man in the street; W. S. Gilbert thought it imperative that audiences be protected against ‘outrages’ – the theatre was ‘not the proper pulpit from which to disseminate doctrines possibly of anarchism, of socialism, and of agnosticism’. Many authors too, if they were doing well, did not really want to change the system. ‘A censorship of any kind acts inevitably as a protection to the average author,’ Shaw explained. ‘He is never censored; and those who are censored are not only his commercial rivals, but are generally putting up the standard on him and changing the fashion.’
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