HOW WE CAME TO BE CENSORED BY THE STATE I. THE THIN END OF THE WEDGE THERE exists in the theatrical profession a law that is sometimes written, but more often unwritten, that players shall not, during the course of a performance, address the audience on their own account apart from the matter set down for them to speak. Under some older-fashioned managements I have seen this law embodied in the printed schedule of rules and regulations at the back of a contract form. More modern managements have dropped this out, together with various other suggestions for good behaviour that are now left to the tact and discretion of the player-in England at least, I will not answer for America, which is a free country, and where republican methods prevail. But the desire to address one's audience is sometimes irresistible, especially when that audience has shown its approval or disapproval very vehemently and unexpectedly. It would make for such a much better understanding, and in these days I may say for such a much more cordial entente with the body of spectators if we might come forward and speak to them. I remember reading an anecdote about a Mrs. Horton, who was playing at Drury Lane in George the First's reign, and appeared in a part that had been originally acted by a great public favourite. Mrs. Horton met with very unkind treatment from the audience on this occasion, according to the evidence of a contemporary. She bore this with patience for some time. At last she advanced to the front of the stage and said to the persons in the pit who were hissing her, 'Gentlemen, what do you mean? What displeases you-my acting or my person?' This proper display of spirit recovered the spectators to good humour, and they cried out with one voice, 'No, no, Mrs. Horton, we are not displeased. Go on, go on!' We have read a great deal latterly among authors, actors, and playgoers that all is not well with the drama here in England. The author says there are no actors and actresses, a thing I deny; the actor says there are no plays, a second thing I equally deny; the playgoer says there is nothing to go and see; that is a thing I cannot deny, but if I may be allowed to put my finger on a weak spot I do most certainly believe that there are players, playwrights, playgoers, but that throughout the length and breadth of the country there are very few with a theatrical taste-a sens du théâtre, as the French call it amongst the spectators. Reviewing in my mind how and why this is, I turn to the history of the British stage, and I find that from the era of the Reformation in England the struggle for existence, or rather for supremacy, between the drama and the public goes on intermittently but continuously down to the Victorian era. There were halcyon days of drama in which Hart, Betterton, Harris, Mrs. Bracegirdle, Mrs. Barry, and Mrs. Oldfield successfully raised its banner. There were glorious eras of the theatre when David Garrick, Barry and Peg Woffington, Mrs. Cibber and Kitty Clive, were the heroes and heroines of the town. There were periods when Edmund Kean and the Kembles and their beautiful sister Siddons lent dignity and majesty to such plays as The Castle Spectre and Pizarro. But every decade almost has its set-back when it is locked in a life-and-death encounter with prejudice, an inherited prejudice among the British against the dramatic art; a prejudice that fastens its teeth into the throat of the drama and wrestles to overthrow it. Why, then, has it survived at all? Because the dramatic art is a natural outlet -a Heaven-given instinct of expression in the human mind. It would be of service to know why audiences will accept to-day what they would not tolerate yesterday, and what perhaps they will dislike to-morrow. It would be instructive to understand in how far the public are dictated to by the Press, or in how far the Press are spurred on to their verdict by the public. For this reason the loss of the old-time prologue and epilogue is, in a way, regrettable. Regrettable because, albeit they were often frivolous and unliterary in flavour, they set up a current of comprehension with the spectator. During the Caroline era, it is true, the epilogue and the prologue were full of personal allusions and intimate details about the private life of the actors and authors couched in terms that would certainly upset the gentlemanlike scruples of our present day. I cannot, for instance, picture to myself any actress of our stage starting up from a bier on which she is being carried away as a corpse and crying out, as did Miss Eleanor Gwynne in the year 1665, 'Hold! are you mad, you damned confounded dog? I am to rise and speak the epilogue.' But then 'pretty, witty Nell,' as the appreciative chronicler Samuel Pepys calls her, was not over-squeamish; she was described by Bishop Burnet as the indiscreetest and wildest character of her time.' But there is this to be said for the epilogue, that it put the spectator in touch with the player before he went home, and so to supper,' as Pepys has it. He went home with something of sympathy with the hearts that were beating and breathing beneath the gold lace and tinsel of the costume, carried away something of a human memento, instead of dismissing it as a thing paid for and done with, to be put away in the pigeon-hole and labelled 'amusements' and not to be taken down again while there were more onerous things under consideration. I was going to say to be kept for Sundays and holidays when I remembered that, though Literature and Music are thought fitting accompaniments for the Sabbath, their poor little step-sister Drama is to stay by the fire in her rags and tatters, bereft of her fine feathers of the workaday week, although in England, up to the days of Charles the First, there were stage plays on Sundays. When Gosson wrote his School of Abuse in 1579, he said, 'The players, because they are allowed to play every Sunday, make four or five Sundays at least in every week.' That would argue that stage plays were only represented on a Sunday. As late as the third year of King Charles the First a contemporary writes: And seldom have they leisure for a play According to some authorities such performances were only abolished after a scaffolding had fallen down in the Paris Garden during a performance on Sunday, the 13th of January 1583, by which eight people were killed, which, as William Prynne said in his Histriomastix, clearly showed the interposition of Heaven.' Let it not be thought that I am desirous of losing my seventh day and day of rest, but I think sometimes with sorrow of the many men and women and even children who toil through the six days without relief or gladness, and to whom a play by William Shakespeare on the seventh day, let us say, would be the means of arriving at the divine through the inspiration of the poet himself, and if I have spoken of the play and Sabbatarian principles it is because I am going to try and show that with the rigid observation of the Sabbath as understood by Puritanism a hatred of the theatre, and everything pertaining to the theatre, was inoculated in the British people; an inoculation that presently is to make them insensible to the love of the drama, a love which I contend to be instinctive in almost every human being. It follows in logical stages from the destruction of pictures, ikons, figures representing holy characters in the churches, bare places of worship, that from a hatred of make-believe and a detestation of images, there must come a dislike of anything that gives colour, or form, or materialisation to creed or imagination, and from that there is only one step to vehement abhorrence of the stage with its simulated passions and emotions, with its make-believe and travesty, with its many-hued pictures. Respectability in England stands for everything that is unobtrusive and unimpressionable. Yes, we have a profound contempt for anything that deals in feeling and personal experiences and the hundred and one emotions that go to make up the actor's art fall under the lash of an Englishman's contempt and make him apply frivolously, without understanding why he does so, the terms of rogue and vagabond to the actor. As it has long been the habit for the greater delectation of the anti-theatrite to believe that actors and actresses legally come under the heading of 'rogues and vagabonds,' by the Act passed in Queen Elizabeth's reign, I may here perhaps take up a little time in dwelling upon the origin of that belief and the reasons for that Bill-one that was passed as much for the security of the public as of what we might to-day call the legitimate' actor. When Henry the Eighth broke up the monasteries immense masses of vagrants and itinerant paupers of no visible means of subsistence were let loose all over the country that had formerly found food and shelter in the rest-houses of the abbeys, which virtually represented the casual ward of our present day. These, then, had to be legislated for, and we find the first measure for out-door relief or Poor-law Act is passed in 1531. But though we read of provisions inflicting condign punishment on rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars under Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth there is no mention of ' players,' and it is not until we come to Queen Elizabeth's Act of 1572 that we find them included. Now the reason for this is not difficult to understand. In the earlier reigns there was something of chaos all over the country with the breaking up of the old faith with its monkish control and assistance, and in all probability the country was overrun by the shipwrecked mariner pitching his tale of woe, by the man with the dancing bear, the juggler, the ropedancer, the strolling minstrel, and the sturdy beggar of every description plying his nefarious trade in the same way that we are accosted in the present day by the woman with a baby to move us to pity, or a box of matches to sell, or a tray of shoe-laces to hawk, and the people had neither leisure nor pleasure for a dramatic entertainment. By the time Elizabeth and her great statesmen had brought prosperity and security to England the taste for interludes and plays had awakened, and a new calling or a means of making money had produced a fresh crop of strollers and travelling players of interludes, and they set up their stages in inn-yards, granaries, barns, or whatever building was available for the accommodation of an audience. We can readily imagine the nuisance and commotion this would cause in street of town or village, and when we realise that far into the eighteenth century the spectators even pushed their way on to the stage and mingled with the players, we can also see that they would have thronged into inn-yard or building when there were no three-foot gangway L.C.C. regulations, and, blocking up entrances and exits, would likely have extended far into the open. What more easily roused to excitement and sedition than the adherents of the old faith smouldering with a sense of injury, and the adherents of the new faith ready to tear and trample on their enemies in the name of authority. It must be remembered, too, that in those days the greater body of the population never journeyed or travelled out of their counties. Moving from place to place, save among the very rich or the highly born, was not customary, and thus to be overrun and have the public peace destroyed by aliens from another county was a serious affair. In 1572, therefore, an Act is passed which provides thus: Under all fencers, bearwards, common players in interludes, and minstrels not belonging to any baron of this realm or toward any other honourable personage of greater degree which the said fencers, common players in interludes, and minstrels shall wander abroad, and who have not license of two justices of the peace at the least when and in what shire they shall happen to wander, shall be adjudged and deemed rogues and vagabonds and sturdy beggars. All would have been well had it remained at that. But doubtless the actor was beginning to feel self-confident and independent of authority. I daresay it was irksome to find two new magistrates on arriving in a new county, and the easiest thing in the world for the actor was to give out that he was the Earl of Essex's servant, or belonged to my Lord of Leicester's company of players, and thus evade the trouble of applying for a new license. Then out comes the amended Act of 1597, in which this clause is added: 'to be authorised to play under the hand and seal of arms of such baron or personage,' and omits the words and have not license of two justices of the peace at least.' Henceforth the actor must apply to his patron for a patent allowing him to ply his calling, unless he fears not to be punished under the heading of rogue and vagabond. We can hardly imagine that insult was intended to be conveyed to the actor when we find the graceful words with which Elizabeth grants her first royal patent to players as well for the recreation of our loving subjects as for our solace and pleasure when we shall think good to see them,' and when a century later the austere William of Orange admits the actor Betterton to a private audience and grants him a license to erect a theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields: the license is made out to Thomas Betterton, gentleman. One cannot be a gentleman and a rogue and a vagabond at one and the same time. We have it on record that a taste for stage plays began at a very early date in England, and the curious custom of a company of players being attached to the service of a prince or nobleman was originated by Richard the Third when he was Duke of Gloucester. It throws a curious light on this monarch's character, which we are accustomed to regard as saturnine and treacherous, to think that not only was he a patron of the drama, but actually encouraged the taste for it in others by permitting his retainers to go on a provincial tour under the ægis of his name at such time as they were not employed or wanted by himself. This custom led in time to the Act of 1572, of which I have |