London Crime: Executioners, Murderers, Detectives

Abstract

Under the mandate of the Licensing Act, the Lord Chamberlain and his appointed Examiner of Plays had the power to approve or censor any play before it was staged. The Act contained no instructions on how that authority ought to address the political, religious, or moral trespasses that it was designed to prevent. The Licensing Act, with the censorial power to amend or ban works intended for the stage, remained in effect until 1968. With no consistent standard for exercising that power, a play that had once been deemed harmless entertainment might subsequently be judged volatile and dangerous—and vice versa. This was true, for example, of the popular enactments of Jack Sheppard.¹ By adding a comic burletta or a farce to the evening program, the theaters tempered the potentially rabble-rousing excitement of scene after scene of defiant brutality. The rationale for offering the melodrama of murder and mayhem was that these plays served a moral purpose in showing villainy punished and justice triumphant. However, the moment of justice, seldom more than a brief concluding scene, offered no relief from violence; it appropriated violence as the means of punishment and retribution. Public execution was conducted as a theatrical event, as Michael Foucault has argued, so that audiences readily cheered the on-stage hanging as the appropriate finale.²