The Role of the Censor in the Regulation of the Eighteenth-Century Stage

This essay takes as its subject matter the manuscripts submitted to the Lord Chamberlain by the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane during the tenure of the Linley-Sheridan management regime, which operated haphazardly and yet quite successfully from 1776 until Thomas Linley’s death in 1795. Afterwards, Richard Brinsley Sheridan retained some managerial responsibilities until he was excluded completely from the business in 1809. These documents, submitted for state sanction, reveals a great deal about how theatre was prepared during the late eighteenth century. To pursue this enquiry it will be necessary to examine some of the regime’s first submissions as well as manuscripts from the later 1770s and 80s. My discussion will conclude with a consideration of one of the most eccentric, yet illuminating, manuscripts in the collection, that of the Shakespeare forgery, Vortigern. These manuscripts form part of the much larger Larpent collection, which has now been digitised for the first time. The manuscripts were submitted, according to the terms of the Stage Licensing Act (1737). The Licensing Act sought to restrict the ability of theatre managers, playwrights, and actors to disrupt what was imagined to be Georgian England’s delicate social order. Successive clauses prohibited new theatres, the right to perform, or receive payment for acting. The third clause specified that no new dramatic work could be performed unless:

a true Copy thereof be sent to the Lord Chamberlain of the Kings Household for the time being at least fourteen days at least before the acting representing or performing thereof together with an account of the Playhouse or other place where the same shall be and the time when the same is intended to be first acted represented or performed signed by the Master or Manager … of such Playhouse or Place or Company of actors therein.

This requirement constituted nothing less than a direct intervention in the playscript, and consequently the performance. Plays were changed, some banned outright; theatre was channelled away from controversy and complaint. For the most part, the Lord Chamberlain deputed the task to the Examiner of Plays. When Linley and Sheridan took over Drury Lane that office was held by John Larpent, from whom the manuscripts now take their name. Larpent and his assistants had considerable powers to curtail, amend or prohibit plays that they did not like the look of. There was little formal guidance in this role and great scope for personal intervention. Larpent, acting in close concert with his wife, Anna Margaretta, conducted the operation as a cosy but effective micro culture, as David Worrall observes, of censorship and surveillance. Much scholarly attention has been devoted to determining the extent of their interference. Larpent manuscripts have been scrutinised for evidence of an admonitory hand. Consideration has also been given to the degree to which censorship became internalised, such that prohibition, especially after the early years of the Act’s operation when outright bans seem to have been most in evidence, became more tacit.