Today I was reading an article about the censorship of Verdi's operas in Victorian London. I came across the most interesting factoid. Did you know that you were not allowed to "represent on the stage in an invidious manner a living person, or a person recently dead"? There goes half of the opera repertoire! I mean, isn't it the quintessential ending to have the soprano die after singing some high note?
(Why anyone would put a "person recently dead" on the stage is beyond me. That's gross.)
For the random fact file, here are the seven prohibitions on the Victorian stage, as set forth in the Report of the 1909 Joint Select Parliamentary Committee on Stage Plays :
The Lord Chamberlain . . . should license any play submitted to him unless he considers that it may reasonably be held
a) To be indecent;
b) To contain offensive personalities;
c) To represent on the stage in an invidious manner a living person, or a person recently dead;
d) To do violence to the sentiment of religious reverence;
e) To be calculated to conduce to crime or vice;
f) To be calculated to impair friendly relations with any Foreign Power; or
g) To be calculated to cause a breach of the peace
"I'm sorry. Your play is prohibited because you have a living person behaving in an invidious manner. We only allow living persons behaving vidiously on our stage."
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1 comment:
haha, I think representing a person who died recently is a bit different to actually putting a dead person on the stage. :) Maybe it's a way to avoid slander. So you can have invidious characters as long as they're fictitious.
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