Story number two.  A German officer finds himself in an inn with a French lady who has wounded his national vanity.  He resolves to humble her by committing a rape upon her.  He announces his purpose.  She remonstrates, implores, flies to the doors and finds them locked, calls for help and finds none at hand, runs screaming from side to side, and, after a harrowing scene, is overpowered and faints.  Nothing further being possible on the stage without actual felony, the officer then relents and leaves her.  When she recovers, she believes that he has carried out his threat; and during the rest of the play she is represented as vainly vowing vengeance upon him, whilst she is really falling in love with him under the influence of his imaginary crime against her.  Finally she consents to marry him; and the curtain falls on their happiness.

This story was certified by the present King’s Reader, acting for the Lord Chamberlain, as void in its general tendency of “anything immoral or otherwise improper for the stage.”  But let nobody conclude therefore that Mr Redford is a monster, whose policy it is to deprave the theatre.  As a matter of fact, both the above stories are strictly in order from the official point of view.  The incidents of sex which they contain, though carried in both to the extreme point at which another step would be dealt with, not by the King’s Reader, but by the police, do not involve adultery, nor any allusion to Mrs Warren’s profession, nor to the fact that the children of any polyandrous group will, when they grow up, inevitably be confronted, as those of Mrs Warren’s group are in my play, with the insoluble problem of their own possible consanguinity.  In short, by depending wholly on the coarse humors and the physical fascination of sex, they comply with all the formulable requirements of the Censorship, whereas plays in which these humors and fascinations are discarded, and the social problems created by sex seriously faced and dealt with, inevitably ignore the official formula and are suppressed.  If the old rule against the exhibition of illicit sex relations on stage were revived, and the subject absolutely barred, the only result would be that Antony and Cleopatra, Othello (because of the Bianca episode), Troilus and Cressida, Henry IV, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, La Dame aux Camellias, The Profligate, The Second Mrs Tanqueray, The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith, The Gay Lord Quex, Mrs Dane’s Defence, and Iris would be swept from the stage, and placed under the same ban as Tolstoy’s Dominion of Darkness and Mrs Warren’s Profession, whilst such plays as the two described above would have a monopoly of the theatre as far as sexual interest is concerned.