no discussion of particular plays, much as if a committee on
temperance were to rule that drunkenness was not a proper subject
of conversation among gentlemen.


A BAD BEGINNING

This was a bad beginning. Everybody knew that in England the
censorship would not be crushed by the weight of the
constitutional argument against it, heavy as that was, unless it
were also brought home to the Committee and to the public that it
had sanctioned and protected the very worst practicable examples
of the kind of play it professed to extirpate. For it must be
remembered that the other half of the practical side of the case,
dealing with the merits of the plays it had suppressed, could
never secure a unanimous assent. If the Censor had suppressed
Hamlet, as he most certainly would have done had it been
submitted to him as a new play, he would have been supported by a
large body of people to whom incest is a tabooed subject which
must not be mentioned on the stage or anywhere else outside a
criminal court. Hamlet, Oedipus, and The Cenci, Mrs Warren's
Profession, Brieux's Maternite, and Les Avaries, Maeterlinck's
Monna Vanna and Mr. Granville Barker's Waste may or may not be
great poems, or edifying sermons, or important documents, or
charming romances: our tribal citizens know nothing about that
and do not want to know anything: all that they do know is that
incest, prostitution, abortion, contagious diseases, and nudity
are improper, and that all conversations, or books, or plays in
which they are discussed are improper conversations, improper
books, improper plays, and should not be allowed. The Censor may