The Censorship of English Drama 1824–1901 by John Russell Stephens, and: Lost Angels of a Ruined Paradise: Themes of Cosmic Strife in Romantic Tragedy by Erika Gottlieb (review)

Reviews 85 John Russell Stephens. The Censorship of English Drama 1824-1901. Cambridge University Press, 1980. Pp. xiv + 206. $39.50 Erika Gottlieb. Lost Angels of a Ruined Paradise: Themes of Cosmic Strife in Romantic Tragedy. Victoria, British Columbia: Sono Nis Press, 1981. Pp. 183. John Russell Stephens takes up the account of censorship in 1824 as a sequel to L. W. Conolly’s The Censorship of English Drama 1737-1824 (Huntington Library, 1976). Lines of battle between censor and stage continued to be drawn over profaneness, sexual immorality, political and personal satire, and depiction of crime. On the assumption that theaters were profane by definition, virtually all religion was banned. The theaters of London—which are the theaters at issue—were regarded as such explosive gathering places that general social commentary of kinds com­ mon in the novels of Dickens and Disraeli could not be risked in a single line spoken from the stage. Neither the Queen nor any member of the Cabinet was to be identifiably mentioned. If a script could not be saved by deletions, public performance was forbidden. From 1824 to 1854 all scripts submitted for licensing were preserved in the Lord Chamberlain’s office; from 1855 scripts refused license were either returned or otherwise removed from study by scholars and from temptation by posterity to produce the plays. The Examiner of Plays, who was in practice the person chiefly responsible to decide what was unfit, had to regard especially “the younger portions of the Pit & Gallery audiences at the Minor Theatres.” As in debates over film and television today, supporters of strict censor­ ship quoted young criminals who said they had learned their trade from Jack Sheppard and other Newgate dramas. Enforcement was lax for the provincial theaters. Music could mute if not conceal sin. The sometime Examiner William Bodham Donne wrote to Fanny Kemble in 1856: “My old enemy La Dame aux Camélias has at last escaped from her four years’ bondage, and is now performing at the opera La Traviata, in the full bloom of her original horrors!” Stephens serves best in letting the Examiners of Plays come to life in such bits from their reports and correspondence. He is “dispassionate” (page 1), enough so to convey less than Conolly of the quality of the plays from which passages were eliminated. Even more clearly than Conolly for the earlier period, he establishes the prime importance of the Examiners. Dispassionately he reveals the small incon­ sistencies of each. He handles well a more difficult question: With suc­ cessive Examiners, different Lord Chamberlains, and changing mores, how far did the censorship reflect the opinions, or fear of the opinions, of the drama critics and the larger public? Theater managers understand­ ably thought the Examiners often needlessly severe. The Examiner for his part had to anticipate an outcry from critics or public, and conse­ quently a personal reprimand or cooling from the Lord Chancellor, if his advice proved more lenient than views publicly expressed. The two books before us are poles apart. Lost Angels of a Ruined Paradise reverses our direction from pursuit of facts to the livelier realm of thesis. The English Romantics, Erika Gottlieb explains, were physically so far from the events of the French Revolution, which brought actuality 86 Comparative Drama to Schiller, Goethe, and Hugo, that the English turned optimistically to the cosmic dilemma, “Man’s fall from innocence and his claim to Para­ dise.” Creation and moment of Paradise are one (a more orthodox doctrine than Blake’s that Creation and Fall are one). “Man kills because he loves; he loses Paradise because he claims Paradise” (p. 95). The result is “white romanticism,” the error of optimism. Removed from the schematic, the idea might be plausible. Claude Lévi-Strauss would seem to provide the controlling model for the method, from the setting up of polarities to the diagrams in the Conclusion, and much in between is like reading René Girard through a skrim, but the masters of procedure declared in the book are Northrop Frye and M. H. Abrams. David Perkins of Harvard is quoted on the dust wrapper: “This is the best—most comprehensive, sensitive and intelligently speculative...