Abstract
Shakespeare was no stranger to censorship from the Elizabethan and Jacobean police states. Actor and writer
Actor Simon Callow playing the Master of the Revels in the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love
Credit: AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo
After the revolution Rokneddin went back, and tried to ply his trade again: this time he disappeared into prison, never to be seen again. At the time the Shah’s proscription was seen as the act of an exotic tyrant. That is not to say the English monarchy has always celebrated Shakespeare’s entire canon. During the period of George III’s madness in 18th-century Britain, King Lear was banished from the stage because the parallels were too obvious.
Shakespeare has had this unique symbolic significance for a long time. From the end of the 17th century, initially in England, and then increasingly in translation across Europe, his stock began its inexorable rise, until he was acclaimed across the whole of the Western world, to a degree never before or since equalled by any other writer. His work was a mirror in which people of widely diverse cultures could see themselves – in Scandinavia, in the Middle East, in Spain and the Americas.
He was fervently admired in France, despite his barbaric non-conformism to the laws of classical drama. In Germany and Russia, he was clasped to those nations’ bosoms, claimed by them as, respectively, German and Russian. Shakespeare’s perceived universality – which expanded in the 19th and 20th centuries to include Africa, India, China and Japan – inevitably meant that his work would be recruited to embody the positions of various political and philosophical groupings. And with this came, equally inevitably, censorship and suppression.
Not that Shakespeare was a stranger to censorship in his own time, living and working as he did in, first, the Elizabethan, then the Jacobean, police state where people’s actions and their very thoughts were under constant surveillance. The theatre in which he worked was heavily patrolled by the Master of the Revels, who was charged not only with providing entertainment for the monarch, but with averting controversy, particularly in the sphere of foreign relations. Sometimes this meant deleting matters offensive to allies, sometimes it meant suppressing criticism – or perceived criticism – of the crown, sometimes, more rarely, it meant eliminating morally or sexually offensive material. The theatre was a minefield of significance for dramatists and their companies. Even a simple dig at German and Spanish dress had to be cut from Much Ado About Nothing because of contemporary diplomatic sensitivities. But the reach of the censor went well beyond the explicit. The characters and narratives in Shakespeare’s plays were perceived symbolically, as commentaries on current events.
In 1601 Shakespeare and his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, ran into danger on this account: the Earl of Essex and his supporter, the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron and possibly his lover, were planning a rebellion against the ageing Queen. They decided that it would help to rally support if Shakespeare’s old play about a wayward despot, King Richard II, were to be revived. Comparisons between Richard and Elizabeth were common – even the Queen knew about them.
“I am Richard II, know ye not that?” she said to the keeper of records. “This tragedy,” she continued, raging against the players’ apparent impunity, “was played 40 times in open streets and houses.” For the 1601 revival, the company really went out on a limb, adding the famous scene, possibly specially commissioned for the occasion, in which the king abdicates and is deposed. For their pains, the actors, including Shakespeare, found themselves arraigned by the Privy Council. Any one of them, including Shakespeare, could have been imprisoned for life, like Southampton, or, like Essex, beheaded. In the end they got off on the shaky plea that they were just doing their job. The rebellion, of course, had failed abjectly. Had the rebellion succeeded, it might have been a different matter.
After Shakespeare’s death, his plays were subjected to a different, internal, sort of censorship: on moral grounds, or those of taste. Happy endings were imposed, filth extirpated, difficult characters, like the fool in Lear, excised. But by the end of the 19th century, theatrical reformers had begun to establish the wildly controversial idea that Shakespeare might have known what he was doing. Almost immediately after this revelation directors began to use the plays to make points about the modern world. Especially in the wake of World War I, the martial dimension of the plays was subjected to intense scrutiny, and Shakespeare’s patriotism was rarely taken at face value, until World War II, when, in Olivier’s famous film, Henry V again became a rallying cry. But post-war productions have once again used the plays as a retort in which to examine our present preoccupations: Peter Brook’s bleak absurdist King Lear, for example; Peter Hall’s grimly realistic The Wars of the Roses; Jonathan Miller’s Alzheimer’s-stricken King Lear. Devastating truths have been confronted, but subversion has rarely been attempted.
Elsewhere, however, the plays have been keenly probed for political endorsement, or denounced for its absence. In 1941, Joseph Stalin banned Hamlet. The historian Arthur Mendel wrote: “The very idea of showing on the stage a thoughtful, reflective hero who took nothing on faith, who intently scrutinized the life around him in an effort to discover for himself, without outside ‘prompting,’ the reasons for its defects, separating truth from falsehood, the very idea seemed almost ‘criminal’.” Having Hamlet suppressed must have been a nasty shock for Russians: at least since the times of novelist and short story writer Ivan Turgenev, the Danish Prince had been identified with the Russian soul. Ten years earlier, Adolf Hitler, had claimed the play as quintessentially Aryan, and described Nazi Germany as resembling Elizabethan England, in its youthfulness and vitality (unlike the allegedly decadent and moribund British Empire). In his Germany, Hamlet was reimagined as a proto-German warrior. Only weeks after Hitler took power in 1933 an official party publication appeared titled Shakespeare – A Germanic Writer.
A production of Richard II ran into controversy in 1601. Here Nigel Lindsay (Bolingbroke) and David Tennant (Richard) star in a Royal Shakespeare Company production from 2013
Credit: Geraint Lewis/RexShutterstock
As the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer asserted: “If the courtier Laertes is drawn to Paris and the humanist Horatio seems more Roman than Danish, it is surely no accident that Hamlet’s alma mater should be Wittenberg.” A leading magazine of the time interpreted Hamlet’s being denied his inheritance as a prefiguring of the Treaty of Versailles, and compared Gertrude’s behaviour to that of Weimar’s spineless politicians. When Britain declared war on Germany, Shakespeare was exempt from the ban on foreign playwrights because he was considered a German, even classic, author. In 1937, a production of Richard III was staged with a club-footed Richard, unmistakeably modelled on Joseph Goebbels. Soldiers were attired in Nazi uniforms, and the ghosts who haunt Richard the night before Bosworth Field were openly compared to Hitler’s victims in the Night of the Long Knives.
The comedies remained very popular. The Merchant of Venice was broadcast shortly after Kristallnacht and then given a splendid stage production in Vienna in 1943 to celebrate the city’s being officially rid of Jews. Werner Krauss as Shylock made the audience shudder, “with a crash and a weird train of shadows, something revoltingly alien and startlingly repulsive crawled across the stage.”
It is a measure of the extraordinary potency of the plays that such different regimes feel obliged to remake Shakespeare in their own image, to force the plays to toe the party line. Shakespeare cannot be ignored, so he must be made to conform. But it is equally a tribute to Shakespeare’s own lack of censoriousness that the transformation is so easily effected. As with The Bible, you can prove almost anything from Shakespeare. His job was to capture life, not to judge it, and he succeeded triumphantly, but what must it have cost him? He endured enormous pressure from the censors, which seems to be reflected in a line from the great Sonnet 66 of which the first line is: “Tired with all these, for restful death I cry”. In it, among the oppressions Shakespeare lists, he speaks in a great resonant line of: “art, made tongue-tied by authority”.
All Shakespeare’s working life the Master of the Revels, responsible for licensing every play performed in England, was Edmund Tilney. Early in Shakespeare’s career, Tilney was involved in rewriting and censoring a highly contentious play. It was on the subject of Sir Thomas More, beheaded, of course, by Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, and therefore a hot potato politically. We have one of the speeches it is believed that Shakespeare wrote for the play, the only surviving manuscript in his own hand. It is one of the finest things he ever wrote. More’s plea on behalf of the migrants was written against a background of anti-immigrant riots in London. Its astonishing timeliness reminds one of why Shakespeare endures eternally, speaking to all of mankind. This is Thomas More’s speech, first demanding order be restored: Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise Hath chid down all the majesty of England
And then to the rioters themselves: Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, Their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation, And that you sit as kings in your desires, Authority quite silenced by your brawl And you in ruff of your opinions clothed. What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught How insolence and strong hand should prevail, How order should be quelled, and by this pattern Not one of you should live an agèd man, For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought With selfsame hand, self reasons and self right, Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes Would feed on one another.
The speech was never spoken, the play never heard: Tilney banned it. Art once again tongue-tied by authority.