Bernard Shaw and The Censors: Fights and Failures, Stage and Screen by Bernard F. Dukore (review)

Bernard Dukore's invaluable book, Bernard Shaw and the Censors: Fights and Failures, Stage and Screen negotiates with the utmost clarity a very particular time in the history of the development of stage and screen drama. His treatise for this book on censorship is to create a better understanding of how Shaw came to engage with the censor and censorship, both unsuccessfully and successfully. Dukore's argument is very clear. He states in the preface that "the book is not only about Shaw the Failure, though that is an important part of it, but also and primarily about Shaw the Fighter, and what a splendid fighter he was" (x). The structure of the book works to create a strong narrative on the magnitude of censorship and the furiousness and dedication of Shaw to its abolition, even if he gets in his own way at times.

Setting the scene from the opening chapter of what being the censor and censorship entailed in Victorian and Edwardian England, Dukore investigates the stranglehold the censor had on the performative arts while literature was not seen to be as divisive or influential on societal mores. He provides a detailed historical context that explores the patriarchal thinking and control that monarchies and governments exercised on their subjects, especially their female ones. In truth, he exposes the hypocrisy and double standards that were in play at the time and asserted that "the demand for respectability so falsified life as dramatized on the stage that the 'theatre offered only an escape from life, not an examination of it'" (20). The chapter sets solid groundwork for the arguments to follow.

Entering stage left in chapter 2, Shaw began, in what is often used as a throwaway remark, his lifelong battle with the censor, starting as early as 1886 as a critic and emerging playwright. Dukore illuminates how Shaw's battle with censorship was intent on having "stage censorship 'abolished root and branch: exterminated, annihilated'" (44). He examines how Shaw, in admiring the work of Ibsen argued for the right of women to be portrayed not as the perceived ideal version of womanhood, but as living individuals in their own right, something that was to become a major feature in his own plays. The chapter considers in depth how the censor dealt in such a completely different manner with Ibsen's Doll's House, which was licenced, and Ghosts, which was not, and about which Shaw declared the later was less subversive than the former. The argument moves to give great consideration to the complexities of Shaw's campaign for his second play Mrs. Warren's Profession both in England and America and concludes that, on that occasion, "the censor had beaten him" (60).

"Shaw's Campaign against the Censors: Press, Public Opinion and Parliament," the third chapter, demonstrates the strength of Shaw's feelings on abolishing the Lord Chamberlain, as Dukore quotes Shaw stating that "the monarchy should be abolished, since the King rules the theatre … by divine right" (90). Dukore presents another rich tapestry in his discussion of the second part of the first decade of the twentieth century, when two of Shaw's plays, Press Cuttings and The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet, were banned by the censor. Shaw circumvented the censor by organizing that Blanco Posnet was performed (after an almighty battle with Dublin Castle) on the Abbey Stage in Dublin in 1909, over which the censor had no power. 1909 was also the year that Shaw appeared as a witness at the Joint Select Committee of Parliament to argue his case for the abolition of censorship. Dukore's detailed presentation and analyses of that meeting offers a new understanding of the stifling restraint of censorship that dramatists constantly battled and why Shaw worked so tirelessly against it.

Shaw's battle with the censor moved to a new level with the introduction of movies, as chapter 4 discusses. The...