Plays, protests and the censor’s pencil

23 Mar 2022 | News, United Kingdom

When I was at drama school in the early 1970s, there was a middle-aged Iranian on the directors’ course called Rokneddin. He’d been ejected from the Shah’s Iran for staging subversive productions. Rokneddin was no political firebrand: he had simply tried to put on Shakespeare’s history plays, which, like all plays in which a king died, were banned in Iran under the Pahlavi dynasty. The plays reminded people all too vividly that the divine right of kings had severe limits.

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 19^th 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.