Shakespeare would have been subject to censorship in his own times
I greatly enjoyed Yuan Yang’s article “ The Bard and Beijing” (Life & Arts, October 6) on how performances of Shakespeare’s plays in present-day China are posing challenging questions to a regime reliant on political and artistic control. It is worth pointing out, however, that Shakespeare’s world had much more in common with the Chinese Communist party’s attitude to literary censorship than to 21st century Britain’s. Shakespeare had to submit his plays to the Revels Office for licensing and authorisation. The “Master of the Revels” — without whose authorisation no play could be (legally) performed — would scrutinise them with the aim of editing out content that might have displeased the authorities, the Church or the monarch.
A 1606 Act of Parliament ordered that “any Person or Persons [who] do or shall in any Stageplay, Enterlude, Show, May-game or Pageant, jestingly or profanely speak or use the holy Name of God …shall forfeit Ten Pounds”. The Chinese official who demanded the removal of a four-letter word from a production of The Tempest, as Ms Yang reports, was seemingly on a similarly moralistic endeavour.
Censorship had just such a political role in Queen Elizabeth’s England as it does in Xi Jinping’s China. The scene in Richard II in which that King is deposed was, for years, forbidden to be printed at all — presumably someone was worried that the staging of violent disruption to the political status quo might encourage real-life attempts to do the same. That play is intimately concerned with ideas of succession and dynastic validity — an anxiety always on display at the CCP’s National Congress.
Shakespeare’s plays present the possibility of a different world order, of a different way of doing things. For censors — whether working for English monarchs or Chinese presidents — that is quite troubling.