“With a trembling hand, lest I destroy the Body”: Censorship in 18th Century Britain, the Political Stage, and Theatrical Publics

Abstract: While the theater has served as a literal and figurative site for politics and political thought since antiquity, the phrase “political stage” does not appear until the long eighteenth century. I argue that “political stage” gains rhetorical force with the emergence of the liberal subject, the modern state, and commercial capitalism. One of its earliest recorded uses appears in Lord Chesterfield’s 1737 parliamentary speech opposing a censorship law targeting London’s theaters. Chesterfield’s speech is a window into emergent forms of social discipline and contestation over who belongs to “the public” and the public’s relationship to the state. Whereas the Habermasian public sphere takes its ideal form after the lapse of the print licensing act and the proliferation of print media, my account of this period centers the introduction and successful passage of the 1737 stage Licensing Act, which sought to control popular audiences, dramatic critique, and popular assembly, and did so effectively until the mid-twentieth century.