British licensing act 1737

Although many plays and playwrights including Henry Fielding have been suggested as the cause of the act, debates on the Act mentioned the play "A Vision of the Golden Rump," a raucous attack on the current Parliament whose author is unknown. Samuel Johnson wrote an attack on the Licensing Act entitled "A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the British Stage" that was a parody of the position for censorship. Brooke's "Gustavus Vasa" was not particularly savage or dark, and it took relatively few liberties.

However, his previous "The Earl of Essex" had been perceived as highly political, and therefore "Gustavus Vasa" was banned. The effects of the Licensing Act were profound. Veuillez activer JavaScript. Por favor, active JavaScript. In time, an Examiner of Plays took up the role of awarding or refusing a license. When the Select Committee on Theatre and the subsequent Theatres Act brought about a significant relaxation of the licensing laws, it brought an end to a fascinating period of strict state surveillance of the stage: it was the only form of pre-publication censorship in the period.

This project will produce a digital archive of play manuscripts from the period which will contain a selection of plays that will reveal how the culture of state censorship evolved over the period in response to societal and historial change. Through high resolution digital scans of the manuscripts, scholars and students will be able to see precisely what allusions, themes, and even words were deemed to dangerous to public morality to be uttered on stage.

Through the accompanying transcriptions and full editorial apparatus, they will also be able to understand how the Examiners of Plays, representing the State, responded to political events such as the French Revolution of or the Irish Rebellion of Moreover, the editorial apparatus to include brief introductory essays and other primary sources will assess the degree to which playwrights, theatre managers, and audiences internalized a mentality of self-regulation in the wake of the Stage Licensing Act.

Last update: 27 August Record number: Veuillez activer JavaScript. Por favor, active JavaScript. Bitte aktivieren Sie JavaScript. Thus, the urbane satire of The Beggar's Opera was replaced by the much more mocking satire of Tom Thumb, the salaciousness of Chrononhotonthologos, and the bitterness of The Dragon of Wantley. In the year of the Act, Henry Fielding's Pasquin again attacked Walpole, although its attack was, by that time, a continuation of complaints.

However, A Vision of the Golden Rump was a continuation of this war of words and an upping of the stakes, and Walpole's Whig Party response was to cite that play and its scatology as a rationale for shutting down all plays that might be possibly read as critical of the crown or Parliament.

The Act closed all non- patent theatres and required all plays to be passed before performance. Although many plays and playwrights including Henry Fielding have been suggested as the cause of the act, debates on the Act mentioned the play A Vision of the Golden Rump, a raucous attack on the current Parliament whose author is unknown.

Samuel Johnson wrote an attack on the Licensing Act entitled A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the British Stage that was a parody of the position for censorship.

However, his previous The Earl of Essex had been perceived as highly political, and therefore Gustavus Vasa was banned. The effects of the Licensing Act were profound. The public mistrusted plays that passed the censors.

One effect was that the plays that were passed were more domestically oriented, more sentimental, and, aside from Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith , who both wrote old-style plays, authors of melodrama enjoyed greatest success. Arguably, the Licensing Act created an immediate vacuum of new plays to perform, and this left theatres with little option but to stage revivals.

The number of productions of Shakespeare plays staged in the s was far higher than previously a quarter of all plays performed in the decade. Additionally, the Licensing Act diverted politically interested authors away from the stage and into writing novels.

Fielding and Brooke are only two of the authors who turned their energies to novel writing. Many other novelists, such as Tobias Smollett and Laurence Sterne , never approached the stage.

Prior to the Licensing Act, theatre was the first choice for most wits. After it, the novel was. The Act was not solely responsible for the transformation of the British stage in the 18th century away from satire and toward lofty and "sentimental" subject matter, but it was responsible for stopping one of the theatrical movements away from sentiment and domestic tragedy.

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