Keeping Out of Court III

Abstract

By the mid-eighteenth century, the courts had largely devised effective procedures for handling verbal evasion and booksellers’ tricks. This final chapter brings together these legal developments to show how increased regulatory pressures accidentally promoted the ‘deverbalization’ of satire. Caricaturists, for example, used words sparingly, and their visual satires were therefore not subject to the same courtroom procedures that had enabled the prosecution of printed satire. In a similar way, the Stage Licensing Act (1737), which mandated the pre-performance regulation of play texts, also promoted deverbalization. Dramatic works from this period, and especially the plays of Samuel Foote, are teeming with non-verbal satire, especially pointed impersonations. However, dramatic regulation also created a loophole: physical and acoustic mimicry never showed up in the playscripts submitted for licensing, and plays could only later be subjected to post-performance censorship. The end result was deverbalized forms of visual and dramatic satire that were often, at least early on, almost impossible to regulate.