“His Excellency, after the most careful consideration, has arrived at the conclusion that in its original form the play is not in accordance either with the assurances given by those interested when the Patent was applied for, or with the conditions and restrictions contained in the Patent as granted by the Crown.
“As you are the holder of the Patent in trust for the generous founder of the Theatre, His Excellency feels bound to call your attention, and also the attention of those with whom you are associated, to the terms of the Patent and to the serious consequences which the production of the play in its original form might entail....”
I tell what followed in letters written to Coole:
“Thursday, August 12th. At the Theatre this morning the Secretary told me Whitney & Moore (our solicitors) had telephoned that they had a hint there would be interference with the production of Blanco Posnet by the Castle, and would like to see me.
“I went to see Dr. Moore. He said a Castle Official, whose name he would not give, had called the day before yesterday and said, ‘As a friend of Sir Benjamin Whitney, I have come to tell you that if this play is produced it will be a very expensive thing for Miss Horniman.’ Dr. Moore took this to mean the Patent would be forfeited. I talked the matter over with him and asked if he would get further information from his friend as to what method they meant to adopt, for I would not risk the immediate forfeiture of the Patent, but would not mind a threat of refusal to give a new Patent, as by that time—1910—perhaps neither the present Lord Lieutenant nor the present Censor would be in office.
“Dr. Moore said he would go and see his friend, and at a quarter past two I had a message on the telephone from him that I had better see the Castle Official or that he wished to see me (I didn’t hear very well) before 3 o’clock. I went to the Castle and saw the Official. He said, ‘Well.’ I said, ‘Are you going to cut off our heads?’ He said, ‘This is a very serious business; I think you are very ill-advised to think of putting on this play. May I ask how it came about?’ I said, ‘Mr. Shaw offered it and we accepted it.’ He said, ‘You have put us in a most difficult and disagreeable position by putting on a play to which the English Censor objected.’ I answered, ‘We do not take his view of it, and we think it hypocrisy objecting to a fallen woman in homespun on the stage, when a fallen woman in satin has been the theme of such a great number of plays that have been passed.’ He said, ‘It is not that the Censor objected to; it is the use of certain expressions which may be considered blasphemous. Could not they be left out?’ ‘Then there would be no play. The subject of the play is a man, a horse-thief, shaking his fist at Heaven, and finding afterwards that Heaven is too strong for him. If there were no defiance, there could be no victory. It is the same theme that Milton has taken in Satan’s defiance in Paradise Lost. I consider it a deeply religious play, and one that could hurt no man, woman, or child. If it had been written by some religious leader, or even by a dramatist considered “safe,” nonconformists would admire and approve of it.’ He said, ‘We have nothing to do with that, the fact for us is that the Censor has banned it.’ I said, ‘Yes, and passed The Merry Widow, which is to be performed here the same week, and which I have heard is objectionable, and The Devil, which I saw in London.’ He said, ‘We would not have interfered, but what can we do when we see such paragraphs as these?’ handing me a cutting from the Irish Times headed, ‘Have we a Censor?’ I replied, ‘We have not written or authorised it, as you might see by its being incorrect. I am sole Patentee of the Theatre.’ He said, ‘Dublin society will call out against us if we let it go on.’ ‘Lord Iveagh has taken six places.’ ‘For that play?’ ‘Yes, for that play, and I believe Dublin society is likely to follow Lord Iveagh.’ He went on, ‘And Archbishop Walsh may object.’ I was silent. He said, ‘It is very hard on the Lord Lieutenant. You should have had more consideration for him.’ I replied, ‘We did not know or remember that the power rested with him, but it is hard on him, for he can’t please everybody.’ He said, ‘Will you not give it up?’ ‘What will you do if we go on?’ ‘Either take no notice or take the Patent from you at once.’ I said, ‘If you decide to forfeit our Patent, we will not give a public performance; but if we give no performance to be judged by, we shall rest under the slur of having tried to produce something bad and injurious.’ ‘We must not provoke Public opinion.’ ‘We provoked Nationalist public opinion in The Playboy, and you did not interfere.’ ‘Aye,’ said he, ‘exactly so, that was quite different; that had not been banned by the Censor.’ I said, ‘Time has justified us, for we have since produced The Playboy in Dublin and on tour with success, and it will justify us in the case of this play.’ ‘But Blanco Posnet is very inferior to The Playboy.’ I said, ‘Even so, Bernard Shaw has an intellectual position above that of Mr. Synge, though he is not above him in imaginative power. He is recognised as an intellectual force, and his work cannot be despised.’ ‘Lord Aberdeen will have to decide.’ ‘I should like him to know,’ I said, ‘that from a business point of view the refusal to allow this play, already announced, to be given would do us a serious injury.’ He said, ‘No advertisements have been published.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the posters have been out some days, and there is a good deal of booking already from England as well as here. We are just beginning to pay our way as a Theatre. We should be able to do so if we got about a dozen more stalls regularly. The people who would take stalls will be frightened off by your action. The continuance of our Theatre at all may depend on what you do now. We are giving a great deal of employment, spending in Dublin over £1500 a year, and our Company bears the highest possible character.’ He said, ‘I know that well.’ I said, ‘I know Lord Aberdeen is friendly to our Theatre, though he does not come to it, not liking the colour of our carpets.’ He said ‘He is a supporter of the drama. He was one of Sir Henry Irving’s pall-bearers.’ ‘When shall we know the decision?’ ‘In a day or two, perhaps to-morrow. You can produce it in Cork, Galway, or Waterford. It is only in Dublin the Lord Lieutenant has power.’ He read from time to time a few lines from the Patent or Act of Parliament before him, ‘just to get them into your head.’ The last words he read were, ‘There must be no profane representation of sacred personages’; ‘and that,’ he said, ‘applies to Blanco Posnet’s representations of the Deity.’ I told him of the Censor’s note on The Playboy, ‘The expression “Khaki cut-throats” must be cut out, together with any others that may be considered derogatory to His Majesty’s Forces,’ and he laughed. Then I said, ‘How can we think much of the opinion of a man like that?’ He said, ‘I believe he was a bank manager.’ We then said good-bye.”
“Friday, 5 o’c. Dr. Moore sent for me at 4 o’clock. I went with W. B. Yeats, who had arrived. The Crown Solicitor at the Castle, Sir B. Whitney’s ‘friend,’ had called and told him the Lord Lieutenant was ‘entirely opposed to the play being proceeded with and would use every power the law gave him to stop it,’ and that, ‘it would be much better for us to lay the play aside.’
“We decided to go on with the performance and let the Patent be forfeited, and if we must die, die gloriously. Yeats was for this course, and I agreed. Then I thought it right to let the Permanent Official know my change of intention, and, after some unsuccessful attempts on the telephone, W. B. Y. and I went to see him at the Castle. He was very smiling and amiable this time, and implored us, as we had understood him to do through the telephone, to save the Lord Lieutenant from his delicate position. ‘You defy us, you advertise it under our very nose, at the time everyone is making a fight with the Censor.’ He threatened to take away our Patent before the play came on at all, if we persisted in the intention. I said that would give us a fine case. Yeats said we intended to do Œdipus, that this also was a censored play, although so unobjectionable to religious minds that it had been performed in the Catholic University of Nôtre Dame, and that we should be prevented if we announced it now. He replied, ‘Leave that till the time comes, and you needn’t draw our attention to it.’ We said the Irish Times might again draw his attention to it. He proposed our having a private performance only. I said, ‘I had a letter from Mr. Shaw objecting to that course.’ He moaned, and said, ‘It is very hard upon us. Can you suggest no way out of it?’ We answered, ‘None, except our being left alone.’ ‘Oh, Lady Gregory,’ he said, ‘appeal to your own common sense.’ When I mentioned Shaw’s letter, he said, ‘All Shaw wants is to use the Lord Lieutenant as a whip to lay upon the Censor.’ Yeats said, ‘Shaw would use him in that way whatever happens.’ ‘I know he will,’ said the Official. At last he asked if we could get Mr. Shaw to take out the passages he had already offered to take out for the Censor. We agreed to ask him to do this, as we felt the Castle was beaten, as the play even then would still be the one forbidden in England.”
This is the letter I had received from Mr. Shaw: