The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet
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George Bernard Shaw >> The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet
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8 Etext prepared by Eve Sobol, South Bend, Indiana, and Distributed
Proofreaders
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: The edition from which this work was taken
was printed without contractions, so there is Ill for I'll and
dont for don't, for example, and show is spelt shew.
THE SHEWING-UP OF BLANCO POSNET
BERNARD SHAW
1909
PREFACE
THE CENSORSHIP
This little play is really a religious tract in dramatic
form. If our silly censorship would permit its performance,
it might possibly help to set right-side-up the perverted
conscience and re-invigorate the starved self-respect of our
considerable class of loose-lived playgoers whose point of honor
is to deride all official and conventional sermons. As it is, it
only gives me an opportunity of telling the story of the Select
Committee of both Houses of Parliament which sat last year to
enquire into the working of the censorship, against which it was
alleged by myself and others that as its imbecility and
mischievousness could not be fully illustrated within the limits
of decorum imposed on the press, it could only be dealt with by a
parliamentary body subject to no such limits.
A READABLE BLUEBOOK
Few books of the year 1909 can have been cheaper and more
entertaining than the report of this Committee. Its full title is
REPORT FROM THE JOINT SELECT COMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS AND
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON THE STAGE PLAYS (CENSORSHIP) TOGETHER
WITH THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE COMMITTEE, MINUTES OF EVIDENCE, AND
APPENDICES. What the phrase "the Stage Plays" means in this title
I do not know; nor does anyone else. The number of the Bluebook
is 214.
How interesting it is may be judged from the fact that it
contains verbatim reports of long and animated interviews between
the Committee and such witnesses as W. William Archer, Mr.
Granville Barker, Mr. J. M. Barrie, Mr. Forbes Robertson, Mr.
Cecil Raleigh, Mr. John Galsworthy, Mr. Laurence Housman, Sir
Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Mr. W. L. Courtney, Sir William Gilbert,
Mr. A. B. Walkley, Miss Lena Ashwell, Professor Gilbert Murray,
Mr. George Alexander, Mr. George Edwardes, Mr. Comyns Carr, the
Speaker of the House of Commons, the Bishop of Southwark, Mr.
Hall Caine, Mr. Israel Zangwill, Sir Squire Bancroft, Sir Arthur
Pinero, and Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, not to mention myself and a
number of gentlemen less well known to the general public, but
important in the world of the theatre. The publication of a book
by so many famous contributors would be beyond the means of any
commercial publishing firm. His Majesty's Stationery Office sells
it to all comers by weight at the very reasonable price of three-
and-threepence a copy.
HOW NOT TO DO IT
It was pointed out by Charles Dickens in Little Dorrit, which
remains the most accurate and penetrating study of the genteel
littleness of our class governments in the English language, that
whenever an abuse becomes oppressive enough to persuade our party
parliamentarians that something must be done, they immediately
set to work to face the situation and discover How Not To Do It.
Since Dickens's day the exposures effected by the Socialists have
so shattered the self-satisfaction of modern commercial
civilization that it is no longer difficult to convince our
governments that something must be done, even to the extent of
attempts at a reconstruction of civilization on a thoroughly
uncommercial basis. Consequently, the first part of the process
described by Dickens: that in which the reformers were
snubbed by front bench demonstrations that the administrative
departments were consuming miles of red tape in the correctest
forms of activity, and that everything was for the best in the
best of all possible worlds, is out of fashion; and we are in
that other phase, familiarized by the history of the French
Revolution, in which the primary assumption is that the country
is in danger, and that the first duty of all parties,
politicians, and governments is to save it. But as the effect of
this is to give governments a great many more things to do, it
also gives a powerful stimulus to the art of How Not To Do Them:
that is to say, the art of contriving methods of reform which
will leave matters exactly as they are.
The report of the Joint Select Committee is a capital
illustration of this tendency. The case against the censorship
was overwhelming; and the defence was more damaging to it than no
defence at all could have been. Even had this not been so, the
mere caprice of opinion had turned against the institution; and a
reform was expected, evidence or no evidence. Therefore the
Committee was unanimous as to the necessity of reforming the
censorship; only, unfortunately, the majority attached to this
unanimity the usual condition that nothing should be done to
disturb the existing state of things. How this was effected may
be gathered from the recommendations finally agreed on, which are
as follows.
1. The drama is to be set entirely free by the abolition of the
existing obligation to procure a licence from the Censor before
performing a play; but every theatre lease is in future to be
construed as if it contained a clause giving the landlord power
to break it and evict the lessee if he produces a play without
first obtaining the usual licence from the Lord Chamberlain.
2. Some of the plays licensed by the Lord Chamberlain are so
vicious that their present practical immunity from prosecution
must be put an end to; but no manager who procures the Lord
Chamberlain's licence for a play can be punished in any way for
producing it, though a special tribunal may order him to
discontinue the performance; and even this order must not be
recorded to his disadvantage on the licence of his theatre, nor
may it be given as a judicial reason for cancelling that licence.
3. Authors and managers producing plays without first obtaining
the usual licence from the Lord Chamberlain shall be perfectly
free to do so, and shall be at no disadvantage compared to those
who follow the existing practice, except that they may be
punished, have the licences of their theatres endorsed and
cancelled, and have the performance stopped pending the
proceedings without compensation in the event of the proceedings
ending in their acquittal.
4. Authors are to be rescued from their present subjection to an
irresponsible secret tribunal which can condemn their plays
without giving reasons, by the substitution for that tribunal of
a Committee of the Privy Council, which is to be the final
authority on the fitness of a play for representation; and this
Committee is to sit in camera if and when it pleases.
5. The power to impose a veto on the production of plays is to be
abolished because it may hinder the growth of a great national
drama; but the Office of Examiner of Plays shall be continued;
and the Lord Chamberlain shall retain his present powers to
license plays, but shall be made responsible to Parliament to the
extent of making it possible to ask questions there concerning
his proceedings, especially now that members have discovered a
method of doing this indirectly.
And so on, and so forth. The thing is to be done; and it is not
to be done. Everything is to be changed and nothing is to be
changed. The problem is to be faced and the solution to be
shirked. And the word of Dickens is to be justified.
THE STORY OF THE JOINT SELECT COMMITTEE
Let me now tell the story of the Committee in greater detail,
partly as a contribution to history; partly because, like most
true stories, it is more amusing than the official story.
All commissions of public enquiry are more or less intimidated
both by the interests on which they have to sit in judgment and,
when their members are party politicians, by the votes at the
back of those interests; but this unfortunate Committee sat under
a quite exceptional cross fire. First, there was the king. The
Censor is a member of his household retinue; and as a king's
retinue has to be jealously guarded to avoid curtailment of the
royal state no matter what may be the function of the particular
retainer threatened, nothing but an express royal intimation to
the contrary, which is a constitutional impossibility, could have
relieved the Committee from the fear of displeasing the king by
any proposal to abolish the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain.
Now all the lords on the Committee and some of the commoners
could have been wiped out of society (in their sense of the word)
by the slightest intimation that the king would prefer not to
meet them; and this was a heavy risk to run on the chance of "a
great and serious national drama" ensuing on the removal of the
Lord Chamberlain's veto on Mrs Warren's Profession. Second, there
was the Nonconformist conscience, holding the Liberal Government
responsible for the Committee it had appointed, and holding also,
to the extent of votes enough to turn the scale in some
constituencies, that the theatre is the gate of hell, to be
tolerated, as vice is tolerated, only because the power to
suppress it could not be given to any public body without too
serious an interference with certain Liberal traditions of
liberty which are still useful to Nonconformists in other
directions. Third, there was the commercial interest of the
theatrical managers and their syndicates of backers in the City,
to whom, as I shall shew later on, the censorship affords a cheap
insurance of enormous value. Fourth, there was the powerful
interest of the trade in intoxicating liquors, fiercely
determined to resist any extension of the authority of
teetotaller-led local governing bodies over theatres. Fifth,
there were the playwrights, without political power, but with a
very close natural monopoly of a talent not only for play-writing
but for satirical polemics. And since every interest has its
opposition, all these influences had created hostile bodies by
the operation of the mere impulse to contradict them, always
strong in English human nature.
WHY THE MANAGERS LOVE THE CENSORSHIP
The only one of these influences which seems to be generally
misunderstood is that of the managers. It has been assumed
repeatedly that managers and authors are affected in the same way
by the censorship. When a prominent author protests against the
censorship, his opinion is supposed to be balanced by that of
some prominent manager who declares that the censorship is the
mainstay of the theatre, and his relations with the Lord
Chamberlain and the Examiner of Plays a cherished privilege and
an inexhaustible joy. This error was not removed by the evidence
given before the Joint Select Committee. The managers did not
make their case clear there, partly because they did not
understand it, and partly because their most eminent witnesses
were not personally affected by it, and would not condescend to
plead it, feeling themselves, on the contrary, compelled by their
self-respect to admit and even emphasize the fact that the Lord
Chamberlain in the exercise of his duties as licenser had done
those things which he ought not to have done, and left undone
those things which he ought to have done. Mr Forbes Robertson and
Sir Herbert Tree, for instance, had never felt the real
disadvantage of which managers have to complain. This
disadvantage was not put directly to the Committee; and though
the managers are against me on the question of the censorship, I
will now put their case for them as they should have put it
themselves, and as it can be read between the lines of their
evidence when once the reader has the clue.
The manager of a theatre is a man of business. He is not an
expert in politics, religion, art, literature, philosophy, or
law. He calls in a playwright just as he calls in a doctor, or
consults a lawyer, or engages an architect, depending on the
playwright's reputation and past achievements for a satisfactory
result. A play by an unknown man may attract him sufficiently to
induce him to give that unknown man a trial; but this does not
occur often enough to be taken into account: his normal course is
to resort to a well-known author and take (mostly with misgiving)
what he gets from him. Now this does not cause any anxiety to Mr
Forbes Robertson and Sir Herbert Tree, because they are only
incidentally managers and men of business: primarily they are
highly cultivated artists, quite capable of judging for
themselves anything that the most abstruse playwright is likely
to put before them, But the plain sailing tradesman who must be
taken as the typical manager (for the West end of London is not
the whole theatrical world) is by no means equally qualified to
judge whether a play is safe from prosecution or not. He may not
understand it, may not like it, may not know what the author is
driving at, may have no knowledge of the ethical, political, and
sectarian controversies which may form the intellectual fabric of
the play, and may honestly see nothing but an ordinary "character
part" in a stage figure which may be a libellous and
unmistakeable caricature of some eminent living person of whom he
has never heard. Yet if he produces the play he is legally
responsible just as if he had written it himself. Without
protection he may find himself in the dock answering a charge of
blasphemous libel, seditious libel, obscene libel, or all three
together, not to mention the possibility of a private action for
defamatory libel. His sole refuge is the opinion of the Examiner
of Plays, his sole protection the licence of the Lord
Chamberlain. A refusal to license does not hurt him, because he
can produce another play: it is the author who suffers. The
granting of the licence practically places him above the law; for
though it may be legally possible to prosecute a licensed play,
nobody ever dreams of doing it. The really responsible person,
the Lord Chamberlain, could not be put into the dock; and the
manager could not decently be convicted when he could procure in
his defence a certificate from the chief officer of the King's
household that the play was a proper one.
A TWO GUINEA INSURANCE POLICY
The censorship, then, provides the manager, at the negligible
premium of two guineas per play, with an effective insurance
against the author getting him into trouble, and a complete
relief from all conscientious responsibility for the character of
the entertainment at his theatre. Under such circumstances,
managers would be more than human if they did not regard the
censorship as their most valuable privilege. This is the simple
explanation of the rally of the managers and their Associations
to the defence of the censorship, of their reiterated resolutions
of confidence in the Lord Chamberlain, of their presentations of
plate, and, generally, of their enthusiastic contentment with the
present system, all in such startling contrast to the
denunciations of the censorship by the authors. It also explains
why the managerial witnesses who had least to fear from the
Censor were the most reluctant in his defence, whilst those whose
practice it is to strain his indulgence to the utmost were almost
rapturous in his praise. There would be absolute unanimity among
the managers in favor of the censorship if they were all simply
tradesmen. Even those actor-managers who made no secret before
the Committee of their contempt for the present operation of the
censorship, and their indignation at being handed over to a
domestic official as casual servants of a specially disorderly
kind, demanded, not the abolition of the institution, but such a
reform as might make it consistent with their dignity and
unobstructive to their higher artistic aims. Feeling no personal
need for protection against the author, they perhaps forgot the
plight of many a manager to whom the modern advanced drama is so
much Greek; but they did feel very strongly the need of being
protected against Vigilance Societies and Municipalities and
common informers in a country where a large section of the
community still believes that art of all kinds is inherently
sinful.
WHY THE GOVERNMENT INTERFERED
It may now be asked how a Liberal government had been persuaded
to meddle at all with a question in which so many conflicting
interests were involved, and which had probably no electoral
value whatever. Many simple simple souls believed that it was
because certain severely virtuous plays by Ibsen, by M. Brieux,
by Mr Granville Barker, and by me, were suppressed by the
censorship, whilst plays of a scandalous character were licensed
without demur. No doubt this influenced public opinion; but those
who imagine that it could influence British governments little
know how remote from public opinion and how full of their own
little family and party affairs British governments, both Liberal
and Unionist, still are. The censorship scandal had existed for
years without any parliamentary action being taken in the matter,
and might have existed for as many more had it not happened in
1906 that Mr Robert Vernon Harcourt entered parliament as a
member of the Liberal Party, of which his father had been one of
the leaders during the Gladstone era. Mr Harcourt was thus a
young man marked out for office both by his parentage and his
unquestionable social position as one of the governing class.
Also, and this was much less usual, he was brilliantly clever,
and was the author of a couple of plays of remarkable promise. Mr
Harcourt informed his leaders that he was going to take up the
subject of the censorship. The leaders, recognizing his
hereditary right to a parliamentary canter of some sort as a
prelude to his public career, and finding that all the clever
people seemed to be agreed that the censorship was an anti-
Liberal institution and an abominable nuisance to boot, indulged
him by appointing a Select Committee of both Houses to
investigate the subject. The then Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster, Mr Herbert Samuel (now Postmaster-General), who had
made his way into the Cabinet twenty years ahead of the usual
age, was made Chairman. Mr Robert Harcourt himself was of course
a member. With him, representing the Commons, were Mr Alfred
Mason, a man of letters who had won a seat in parliament as
offhandedly as he has since discarded it, or as he once appeared
on the stage to help me out of a difficulty in casting Arms and
the Man when that piece was the newest thing in the advanced
drama. There was Mr Hugh Law, an Irish member, son of an Irish
Chancellor, presenting a keen and joyous front to English
intellectual sloth. Above all, there was Colonel Lockwood
to represent at one stroke the Opposition and the average popular
man. This he did by standing up gallantly for the Censor, to
whose support the Opposition was in no way committed, and by
visibly defying the most cherished conventions of the average man
with a bunch of carnations in his buttonhole as large as a
dinner-plate, which would have made a Bunthorne blench, and which
very nearly did make Mr Granville Barker (who has an antipathy to
the scent of carnations) faint.
THE PEERS ON THE JOINT SELECT COMMITTEE
The House of Lords then proceeded to its selection. As
fashionable drama in Paris and London concerns itself almost
exclusively with adultery, the first choice fell on Lord Gorell,
who had for many years presided over the Divorce Court. Lord
Plymouth, who had been Chairman to the Shakespear Memorial
project (now merged in the Shakespear Memorial National Theatre)
was obviously marked out for selection; and it was generally
expected that the Lords Lytton and Esher, who had taken a
prominent part in the same movement, would have been added. This
expectation was not fulfilled. Instead, Lord Willoughby de Broke,
who had distinguished himself as an amateur actor, was selected
along with Lord Newton, whose special qualifications for the
Committee, if he had any, were unknown to the public. Finally
Lord Ribblesdale, the argute son of a Scotch mother, was thrown
in to make up for any shortcoming in intellectual subtlety that
might arise in the case of his younger colleagues; and this
completed the two teams.
THE COMMITTEE'S ATTITUDE TOWARD THE THEATRE
In England, thanks chiefly to the censorship, the theatre
is not respected. It is indulged and despised as a department of
what is politely called gaiety. It is therefore not surprising
that the majority of the Committee began by taking its work
uppishly and carelessly. When it discovered that the contemporary
drama, licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, included plays which
could be described only behind closed doors, and in the
discomfort which attends discussions of very nasty subjects
between men of widely different ages, it calmly put its own
convenience before its public duty by ruling that there should be
no discussion of particular plays, much as if a committee on
temperance were to rule that drunkenness was not a proper subject
of conversation among gentlemen.
A BAD BEGINNING
This was a bad beginning. Everybody knew that in England the
censorship would not be crushed by the weight of the
constitutional argument against it, heavy as that was, unless it
were also brought home to the Committee and to the public that it
had sanctioned and protected the very worst practicable examples
of the kind of play it professed to extirpate. For it must be
remembered that the other half of the practical side of the case,
dealing with the merits of the plays it had suppressed, could
never secure a unanimous assent. If the Censor had suppressed
Hamlet, as he most certainly would have done had it been
submitted to him as a new play, he would have been supported by a
large body of people to whom incest is a tabooed subject which
must not be mentioned on the stage or anywhere else outside a
criminal court. Hamlet, Oedipus, and The Cenci, Mrs Warren's
Profession, Brieux's Maternite, and Les Avaries, Maeterlinck's
Monna Vanna and Mr. Granville Barker's Waste may or may not be
great poems, or edifying sermons, or important documents, or
charming romances: our tribal citizens know nothing about that
and do not want to know anything: all that they do know is that
incest, prostitution, abortion, contagious diseases, and nudity
are improper, and that all conversations, or books, or plays in
which they are discussed are improper conversations, improper
books, improper plays, and should not be allowed. The Censor may
prohibit all such plays with complete certainty that there will
be a chorus of "Quite right too" sufficient to drown the protests
of the few who know better. The Achilles heel of the censorship
is therefore not the fine plays it has suppressed, but the
abominable plays it has licensed: plays which the Committee
itself had to turn the public out of the room and close the doors
before it could discuss, and which I myself have found it
impossible to expose in the press because no editor of a paper or
magazine intended for general family reading could admit into his
columns the baldest narration of the stories which the Censor has
not only tolerated but expressly certified as fitting for
presentation on the stage. When the Committee ruled out this part
of the case it shook the confidence of the authors in its
impartiality and its seriousness. Of course it was not able to
enforce its ruling thoroughly. Plays which were merely
lightminded and irresponsible in their viciousness were
repeatedly mentioned by Mr Harcourt and others. But the really
detestable plays, which would have damned the censorship beyond
all apology or salvation, were never referred to; and the moment
Mr Harcourt or anyone else made the Committee uncomfortable by a
move in their direction, the ruling was appealed to at once, and
the censorship saved.
A COMIC INTERLUDE
It was part of this nervous dislike of the unpleasant part of its
business that led to the comic incident of the Committee's sudden
discovery that I had insulted it, and its suspension of its
investigation for the purpose of elaborately insulting me back
again. Comic to the lookers-on, that is; for the majority of the
Committee made no attempt to conceal the fact that they were
wildly angry with me; and I, though my public experience and
skill in acting enabled me to maintain an appearance of
imperturbable good-humor, was equally furious. The friction began
as follows.
The precedents for the conduct of the Committee were to be found
in the proceedings of the Committee of 1892. That Committee, no
doubt recognizing the absurdity of calling on distinguished
artists to give their views before it, and then refusing to allow
them to state their views except in nervous replies to such
questions as it might suit members to put to them, allowed Sir
Henry Irving and Sir John Hare to prepare and read written
statements, and formally invited them to read them to the
Committee before being questioned. I accordingly prepared such a
statement. For the greater convenience of the Committee, I
offered to have this statement printed at my own expense, and to
supply the members with copies. The offer was accepted; and the
copies supplied. I also offered to provide the Committee with
copies of those plays of mine which had been refused a licence by
the Lord Chamberlain. That offer also was accepted; and the books
duly supplied.
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