Britain's 1737 Licensing Act and the Political Stage

• In Event: Staging the Political: Theater, Politics, and Representation

Abstract

Theater metaphors including “stage” “actor” and “audience” have served as mechanisms in the Western tradition for thinking through fundamental elements of democratic governance, including politics based on speech, wherein political actors must garner support through persuasion, representative government, and publicity and the public sphere. This paper considers one of the earliest recorded usages of the phrase “political stage,” which appeared in Lord Chesterfield’s 1737 British parliamentary speech opposing state censorship and control of London’s burgeoning theater industry. In the speech, Chesterfield describes and defends the theater in terms of two liberal goods that he is confident his audience will value: private property and public criticism. With the theater thus construed, he aims to startle his audience by rhetorically merging two spheres of activity that are increasingly believed to require separation for their proper function. I treat Chesterfield's novel formulation is an invitation to consider the historicity of “political stage,” insofar as this linguistic configuration emerges in a period of social and political transformation when describing the theater’s stage as political now signifies an incursion, and when citizens and subjects are situated as spectators in a “non-political” space, separated from (if also with a claim over) the actors on the figurative political stage, watching as the drama unfolds. Whereas the Habermasian public sphere emerges in 18th century England with the lapse of the print licensing act and proliferation of print media, my account centers the introduction and successful passage of the 1737 stage licensing act, which sought to control popular audiences, dramatic critique, and democratic assembly, and did so effectively until the mid- 20th century. I conclude my historical reconstruction with the suggestion that the theater, as a historical site of assembly and as an ongoing possibility, exceeds the vision of a public sphere constituted by private property and a free press. I treat the strain and elisions of Chesterfield’s rendering of the theater as invitation to clarify an alternative, theatrical public, a public that was uniquely threatening to political elites in 1737 and which the passage of the stage Licensing Act registered.

Author

• Ella Street, University of Toronto