Shaw the Fighter

Bernard F. Dukore. Bernard Shaw and the Censors. Fights and Failures, Stage and Screen. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. xxiv + 261 pages.

The subtitle of Bernard Dukore's latest book, Bernard Shaw and the Censors, points to its astonishingly comprehensive scope. Shaw's skirmishes with censors and the impact of censorship on his plays are its leitmotif, but along the way Dukore has also provided an overview of print, stage, and film censorship that opens with Pope Paul IV's Index of Prohibited Books of 1559 and closes with the Theatres Act of 1968, which abolished stage censorship in the United Kingdom—and which received the Royal Assent, he observes, on Shaw's birthday. Throughout, Shaw's clashes with various individuals and organizations are examined within their socio-politico-cultural context. A tall order masterfully executed.

"This book," writes Dukore, "is … primarily about Shaw the Fighter," one who, in his valiant campaigns against censorship, "sometimes won but usually did not." Which is not surprising, given the power and influence wielded by his adversaries, among them the Lord Chamberlain (Shaw dubbed him "the Malvolio of St James's Palace") and his Examiner of Plays ("the most powerful man in England or America"), Catholic Action (whose objections prevented Twentieth Century Fox from filming Shaw's 1934 screenplay of Saint Joan), and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1873 by the morally upright (and clearly uptight) Anthony Comstock, America's first federally appointed censor. His name entered the language in 1905 when Shaw coined the word "Comstockery," defined by Merriam-Webster as "1. strict censorship of materials considered obscene" and "2. censorious opposition to alleged immorality (as in literature)." Comstock is responsible for alerting the police to Arnold Daly's October 1905 New York production of Mrs Warren's Profession ("which he neither read nor saw," notes Dukore), which was shut down after a single performance.

It may be no exaggeration to state that almost all of Shaw's censorship issues stemmed from his plays' "alleged immorality." However, as Shaw wrote in 1891 in his Quintessence of Ibsenism, "Immorality does not necessary imply mischievous conduct: it implies conduct … which does not conform to current ideals." Commenting on this passage, Dukore reminds us that "Shaw's admission that Ibsen's plays were immoral was and would continue to be unfortunate, therefore bound to fail, since what registered more on many of his readers … was the adjective rather than his definition of immorality." Hence Shaw's protracted confrontations with, for example, Edward F. Smyth Pigott, Examiner of Plays from 1874 to 1895 ("a walking compendium of vulgar insular prejudice"), and his successor, former bank manager George Alexander Redford, who, wrote Shaw, "is not appointed to make the theatre moral, but solely to prevent its having any effect on public opinion." In his 1898 Preface to Plays Pleasant, Shaw excoriated the Examiner of Plays "who robs, insults, and suppresses me." One should note, however, that the actions of the Examiner of Plays, writes Dukore (quoting Samuel Hynes), "'angered only a minority of intellectuals' but were approved by the majority of the upper and middle classes."

Dukore describes at length how Pigott, Redford, and assorted other expurgators set to work suppressing, among other plays, Mrs Warren's Profession (for prostitution, procuring, and possible incest) and The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet (for promiscuity and blasphemy). Even film versions of Shaw's works were either prevented from reaching the cinema—Shaw's own screen adaptation of Saint Joan was never filmed—or, if they did, were severely cut by the Hollywood censors, as with Pygmalion and Major Barbara: the latter's 7 April 1941 London world première was 121 minutes long, while its New York's 14 May première lasted 115 minutes. The film, writes Dukore, was then "mutilated throughout the English-speaking world," with further cuts made when it went to British provincial cinemas. Shaw called this "sabotage."

In his perennial struggle to defend himself against charges of "alleged immorality," Shaw's greatest...