The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet A Sermon in Crude Melodrama. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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      Published by Good Press, 2020

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      EAN 4064066427726

      Table of Contents

       The Censorship

       A readable bluebook

       How not to do it

       The story of the Joint Select Committee

       Why the managers love the censorship

       A two guinea insurance policy

       Why the government interfered

       The peers on the Joint Select Committee

       The Committee's attitude toward the theatre

       A bad beginning

       A comic interlude

       An anti-shavian panic

       A rare and curious first edition

       The Times to the rescue

       The Council of Ten

       The sentence

       The execution

       The rejected statement

       Mr. George Alexander's protest

       Eliza and her bath

       A King's proctor

       Counsel's opinion

       Wanted: A New Magna Charta

       Proposed: A new star chamber

       Possibilities of the proposal

       Star chamber sentimentality

       Anything for a quiet life

       Shall the examiner of plays starve?

       Lord Gorell's awakening

       Judges: Their professional limitations

       Conclusion

      In 1909 Shaw jousted with governmental censorship, as personified by The Examiner Of Plays, an agency acting under the auspices of the Lord Chamberlain. The outcome, unsatisfactory to Shaw, is reviewed minutely in the Preface to this play, which had been refused a license to perform because it dealt openly with prostitution.

      Shaw describes the play as a religious tract in dramatic form. Blanco Posnet, the protagonist is wrongfully accused of horse-theft and sentenced to be hanged. By great good-fortune he is rescued by the testimony of a female witness, Feemy—the local harlot—for whom he has uncharacteristically performed an act of charity. His exoneration is spiritually transforming: His status changes abruptly from pariah to pillar of the community. He does not marry Feemy, but shakes hands with her before they part.