Censorship and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England by Jan-Melissa Schramm (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Censorship and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England by Jan-Melissa Schramm Christopher Hilliard (bio) Censorship and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England, by Jan-Melissa Schramm; pp. xii + 266. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, £74.00, $99.00. Plays were subject to official censorship in Britain until 1968. The Lord Chamberlain vetoed some plays outright and demanded changes to many others before granting a license. One of the rules of theater censorship, grounded in the traditions of the Lord Chamberlain's office rather than any express provision in the statutes of 1606 and 1737 that still authorized the licensing of plays at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was a prohibition on representations of divinity. This ban spilled over into plays based on biblical stories that did not explicitly feature God or Christ. The Lord Chamberlain was not guided by public opinion, but many nineteenth-century critics without a stake in the licensing system expressed variations on Elizabethan and Jacobean concerns about the sensuous power of drama and countervailing Elizabethan and Jacobean objections that representing the sacred on stage, with all-too-human actors impersonating Christ or scriptural figures, was inescapably trivializing and blasphemous. The Reformation's expulsion of God and the Bible from the English stage persisted through the nineteenth century alongside the profusion of fictional and poetic treatments of biblical subjects, including bestselling novels like Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur (1880), flagrantly subtitled "A Tale of the Christ," and Marie Corelli's Barabbas: A Dream of the World's Tragedy (1893). The novelist Hall Caine told one of the periodic and largely inconsequential inquiries into theater censorship that, in an age of mass literacy, "a delicate scene in a novel is immeasurably more dangerous than it could be on stage. … The novel gets very much closer to the reader than the scene on stage gets to its spectator" (Caine qtd. in Schramm [End Page 327] 196). Jan-Melissa Schramm is interested in "exactly what the Victorians still found provocative about dramatic form" (10). Despite its title, Schramm's Censorship and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England is not primarily about censorship (or self-censorship). Her guiding themes are, first, the larger Protestant cultural complex militating against the theatrical representation of the sacred—or the biblical—and the ways this complex was challenged by the mid-nineteenth-century revival of religious ceremonies by the Tractarians and newly emancipated Catholics; and, second, the ways dramatic conventions and Catholic traditions registered in the Victorian novel. Critics wary of Catholicism, like Anna Jameson in Sacred and Legendary Art (1848), began to consider the recuperation of pre-Reformation Catholic forms of beauty. Playwrights and those who might anachronistically be called cultural historians began to ask whether dramatic representations of Christ could harness some of the resonance of incarnation without falling into idolatry or debasement. At the center of Schramm's book is the recovery of actual pre-Reformation plays—the Chester, Coventry, and Wakefield/Towneley cycles of mystery plays. This revival involved an assortment of antiquarians and scholars as well as the radical William Hone, who followed up his acquittal on charges of blasphemous libel (for publishing political parodies that used liturgical forms) with research into the history of English parody. This got him interested in carnival, and in time he began editing medieval pageants and plays. Schramm traces the mystery plays' rehabilitation as art to the dramatist and scholar Henry Hart Milman, who defended their mixture of the sacred and profane as part of the process of vernacularization. Milman was uneasy about their effect on nineteenth-century audiences that might include nonbelievers; he changed his mind and decided that "even the events of the New Testament could be treated powerfully and respectfully on stage" after seeing the Passionsspiele at Oberammergau in 1860 (77). The Bavarian Passionsspiele was performed once every ten years. Schramm has a chapter on English travelers to each of the performances from 1850 to 1890 (and from Anna Mary Howitt to Jerome K. Jerome) and their reflections on what they witnessed. English discussions of the Oberammergau play and late Victorian initiatives by William Poel, Frederick James Furnivall...