Background and Introduction of the Stage Licensing Act

Censorship of the stage was not new to England in 1737 when the Stage Licensing Act (10 George II c. 28) was passed by Robert Walpole’s government. Historically, the Master of the Revels had kept a watchful eye over theatrical proceedings in London but theatre managers, who sought to exploit loopholes and precedent to evade his strictures, had challenged his power in the 1720s. By the 1730s a number of factors converged to bring about the passage of the Licensing Act whose effects, remarkably, were to linger, in one form or another, until 1968.

Certainly, the emergence of a more politically abrasive theatre in the 1720s was a major contributor to the origins of the statute. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) poked fun at sitting politicians in a manner that could scarcely be described as veiled. Following Gay, Henry Fielding’s satirical jibes at Walpolean corruption and venality hit a nerve, particularly Pasquin (1736), The Historical Register, and Eurydice Hiss’d (1737). Eighteenth-century writers, from Colley Cibber to Charles Dibdin, certainly saw Fielding, and these plays in particular, as being the major catalyst behind the Licensing Act.

However, we now have a more capacious and variegated perspective on the introduction of statutory theatre censorship and the legislation must be seen in the context of a number of contemporary factors: a general uneasiness with the debilitating effect that theatres were perceived to have on public morality; a more competitive commercial environment for theatres; and a pervading sense of societal instability, amongst others.  A steady increase in the number of London theatres exacerbated these anxieties, most famously expressed by Jeremy Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) but by no means restricted to those of his puritanical bent: however much people enjoyed going to the theatre in early eighteenth-century London, the view that some form of regulation was needed was universally shared. And when an announcement was made in early 1735 that a new playhouse was planned for the parish of St Martins le Grand (near St Paul’s Cathedral), one London politician decided enough was enough.