ELIZA AND HER BATH

The persistent notion that a theatre is an Alsatia where the king’s writ does not run, and where any wickedness is possible in the absence of a special tribunal and a special police, was brought out by an innocent remark made by Sir William Gilbert, who, when giving evidence before the Committee, was asked by Colonel Lockwood whether a law sufficient to restrain impropriety in books would also restrain impropriety in plays.  Sir William replied:  “I should say there is a very wide distinction between what is read and what is seen.  In a novel one may read that ‘Eliza stripped off her dressing-gown and stepped into her bath’ without any harm; but I think if that were presented on the stage it would be shocking.”  All the stupid and inconsiderate people seized eagerly on this illustration as if it were a successful attempt to prove that without a censorship we should be unable to prevent actresses from appearing naked on the stage.  As a matter of fact, if an actress could be persuaded to do such a thing (and it would be about as easy to persuade a bishop’s wife to appear in church in the same condition) the police would simply arrest her on a charge of indecent exposure.  The extent to which this obvious safeguard was overlooked may be taken as a measure of the thoughtlessness and frivolity of the excuses made for the censorship.  It should be added that the artistic representation of a bath, with every suggestion of nakedness that the law as to decency allows, is one of the most familiar subjects of scenic art.  From the Rhine maidens in Wagner’s Trilogy, and the bathers in the second act of Les Huguenots, to the ballets of water nymphs in our Christmas pantomimes and at our variety theatres, the sound hygienic propaganda of the bath, and the charm of the undraped human figure, are exploited without offence on the stage to an extent never dreamt of by any novelist.

A KING’S PROCTOR

Another hare was started by Professor Gilbert Murray and Mr. Laurence Housman, who, in pure kindness to the managers, asked whether it would not be possible to establish for their assistance a sort of King’s Proctor to whom plays might be referred for an official legal opinion as to their compliance with the law before production.  There are several objections to this proposal; and they may as well be stated in case the proposal should be revived.  In the first place, no lawyer with the most elementary knowledge of the law of libel in its various applications to sedition, obscenity, and blasphemy, could answer for the consequences of producing any play whatsoever as to which the smallest question could arise in the mind of any sane person.  I have been a critic and an author in active service for thirty years; and though nothing I have written has ever been prosecuted in England or made the subject of legal proceedings,