Ask Shakespeare #5
Were You Ever Censored?
The Master of the Revels oversaw what plays we enacted. Presenting a play first required his approval, lest it be indecent or perhaps seem to make reference to current intrigues.
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The Question
Were there people who censored what you wrote? Were you ever forbidden to put on a play?
Shakespeare Answers
The Master of the Revels oversaw what plays we enacted. Presenting a play first required his approval, lest it be indecent or perhaps seem to make reference to current intrigues. To use your modern term, he censored every play. Only if the Master of the Revels licensed what was written could we legally play it in our theatre.
My father’s king, Henry VIII, took measures in the 1530s to suppress any dispraise of the king or his policies, or his choice of wives. In 1557 his firstborn daughter, Queen Mary I, censored all printing by creating the Stationers’ Register, the root of your custom of copyrights. There might be a hundred new books in a year, but the Privy Council read every one of them. (That would be impossible in your time, when every year sees hundreds of thousands of new books in English.) My queen, Elizabeth I, Henry VIII’s second daughter, punished both the author and the stationer of a tract against her possible marriage by having their right hands chopped off.
At all times, both we players and those who came to our plays were very aware of the fast-shifting sands of power. Being true to historical fact did not protect us. On the contrary! Richard II, one of what you call the history plays, was censored because the followers of the Earl of Essex came to hear the play just before they revolted against the Queen. Anyone knew it true that, two hundred years earlier, rebels forced Richard II off the throne, but we were compelled to strike that scene from our play thenceforward.
Our audiences were both common folk and the nobility. At our theatres it cost a penny more to sit in each gallery than in the one below. Five pence paid for the costliest seats. Noble and wealthy people sat there. The groundlings paid one penny to stand around the stage. Often we slyly mocked the nobility and the wealthy in general. Disparaging people of high rank entertained the groundlings, and the galleries enjoyed how cunningly we did it.
A play like The Merry Wives of Windsor was safe because all the roles are commoners. Despite happening in the England of our day, it was too lowly to disquiet the Master of the Revels. We could also protect ourselves by setting plays in foreign lands, or in a time far enough from the English court. Julius Caesar and Coriolanus show many intrigues and the death of a ruler, but their scene is ancient Rome. Cymbeline and King Lear are tales of England but set long ago, in times of legend. Or we might fill a play with fantastical creatures such as Puck and the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Caliban and Ariel in The Tempest. That too protected our plays from censorship.
You must not think we were unusual to disguise our plays like this. The theatres of antiquity were not free of it, and in your time stories of fantastical creatures in strange unknown lands disguise many an opinion too dangerous to speak.