I am old enough to remember very well the extent to which censorship was a big issue in this country in the 1960s. It affected not only publications such as, famously, DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but also films and even theatrical performances.
During the 16th century, the Master of Revels, who oversaw entertainment in the royal court, could also exercise state censorship over the content of stage plays. From 1739 until 1968, the Lord Chamberlain – who was always an unelected official – had the power to ban the performance of any play on any British stage. All scripts had to be submitted to his “Examiner of the Stage” for approval and were judged on the morals and politics portrayed in it. This meant that he (and it was always a man) had the power to censor theatre in this country entirely as he personally saw fit.
Stage plays which were censored or banned by the Lord Chamberlain during that period included George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893), Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1892), Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1925), and Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).
During the 1960s, there was also a notable self-appointed pro-censorship figure in British society, the devoutly Christian schoolteacher Mrs Mary Whitehouse. She founded the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, through which she campaigned against, in particular, the BBC, specifically against the use of foul language and depictions of sex and violence in its programmes. While social liberals deemed her a reactionary, her motivation derived from her religious beliefs combined with her opposition to what became known as “the permissive society”.
For those of us who opposed censorship in those days, it is encouraging to notice that we only rather rarely come across the word censored today. It would be good, of course, if this was simply because the practice of censorship was disappearing, but I would hazard a guess that this is not the main or sole explanation. Censorship itself has probably not decreased much as such – we still have a British Board of Film Classification, the Obscene Publications Act, certain restrictions of freedom of expression, general requirements of “taste and decency” in broadcasts, etc.
A graph in the most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary shows that the word redacted has experienced a fourfold increase in frequency of occurrence in printed English-language texts during the five decades since 1970, from 0.04 per million words to 0.16 per million in 2010. This word mainly refers to the process of blanking out or removing (thus censoring) sensitive, perhaps political or military, information from a document to make it suitable for a broader audience.
Suggested Reading
The strange story of how ‘model’ turned to ‘mould’
Tennessee
The American state of Tennessee derives its name from the Iroquoian Cherokee-language name Tanasi, which may have meant “meeting place”. Tennessee Williams was the pen-name of the famous Mississippi-born playwright whose real name was Thomas Lanier Williams (1911-1983); other works by him include A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie.
