Abstract
In the earliest texts of Richard II, the scene in which the king is formally stripped of his crown does not appear. It might be assumed that it was excised from the text because of the political anxiety about Elizabeth’s succession and this view gains support from the story that Shakespeare’s company was invited – against their better judgement – to perform the play on the eve of the Earl of Essex’s attempted coup. Members of Shakespeare’s company were questioned about that performance but no harm came to them: they were just doing their job and the play was an old one that had been performed before. Within days of Essex’s trial, they were playing at court again and the deposition scene was printed in the 1608 text, as well as in the Folio of Shakespeare’s collected works.
It is impossible to tell whether the “deposition scene” had been performed all along and simply cut from the text by a nervous publisher; whether the Master of the Revels, whose job it was to protect the court from offence and the playwrights from official disapproval, had insisted it be cut; or indeed, whether Shakespeare had second thoughts about the emotional development of the play and wrote one of his most poetically powerful confrontations for the new edition.
We certainly have one very powerful example of Shakespeare’s ability to work with the censor to try to keep a good play on the stage. In the unique censored copy of the play Sir Thomas More, amid the muddle of different contributors to the play and passages marked for cutting, there is a passage by Shakespeare written to rework a censored scene in which Londoners stage an anti-immigration riot. Master of the Revels Edmund Tilney had clearly instructed the authors to “leave out the insurrection” and, to cover the missing material, Shakespeare provided a poetic plea from Sir Thomas More to the rebels. The speech asked them to imagine “the wretched strangers/Their babies at their backs with their poor luggage/ plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation”. His speech insisted that disorder only endorsed further disorder where “men like ravenous fishes/Would feed on one another”.
The case that Shakespeare makes here and elsewhere against violent disorder may not tell us anything about his personal view of the regulation and censorship of drama in Elizabethan England. In the absence of other evidence, however, we might conclude that he was content to write the plays and manage the company with very little sense of how important his works would later be in providing eloquent justifications for the causes of freedom.
The familiar modern pattern of censorship – in which writers and artists bravely find ways to express subversive opinions in the face of dangerous reprisals from the state or religious authorities – cannot really be applied to the ramshackle system of regulation and control of theatre that existed in Shakespeare’s time. Formally, there existed a variety of proscriptions – against writing English history, or dealing with religion, or representing a living monarch – but they were ignored by many playwrights, including Shakespeare.
From time to time, of course, the authorities of crown and church responded with vicious and summary brutality – pamphleteer John Stubbs lost his hand, writer William Prynne lost his ears and the dramatist Ben Jonson was thrown in jail over his controversial play Isle of Dogs. But far more often during the Shakespearian period, from the 1580s to the 1620s, fierce threats to close the theatres once and for all or to call writers to be questioned by the Privy Council of the royal court dwindled into inaction: the offended nobleman was mollified, the period of political anxiety passed on; the delicate balance of support and control, on which courtly entertainment and a growing print and theatre industry depended, remained in place.
On the whole, and unlike some other dramatists, Shakespeare kept clear of controversy. There is scant evidence that his plays caused any official disquiet and concern is only identifiable through odd inconsistencies in the texts of his plays.
The censors cared about sedition, treason, religious and political dissent, but plays were censored more for insulting particular individuals, not so much for big ideas. Shakespeare’s talent was to deal with big ideas in the context of human dilemmas that allows them to be applied to contemporary politics.