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The Allure of the Archive

Freshwater, Helen.

Poetics Today, Volume 24, Number 4, Winter 2003, pp. 729-758 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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The Allure of the Archive

Helen Freshwater

English, Nottingham

Abstract This article problematizes cultural studies’ recent return to the ‘‘thing,’’

assessing the archive’s position in research work. I draw on my experience of consul-

tation of the surviving records of the Lord Chamberlain’s theater censorship office

in order to demonstrate that the archive’s seductive charms often serve to conceal

its flaws. This archive’s undeniable allure obscures the contingency of its construc-

tion, its destructive powers, and the way in which its contents remain vulnerable tointerpretative violence. These observations are measured against the metaphorical

and theoretical frameworks which continue to condition our approach to the archive,

coming to rest at the place where the procedures and concerns of psychoanalysis

overlap with those of archaeology. I conclude that any study of this archive requires

both a theoretical redefinition of the concept of the archive and the introduction of

a rigorous ethical framework which foregrounds the interpretative investment of the

researcher.

The archive has become an increasingly attractive place to pursue research work in cultural studies.1 The rise of theories that foreground historical con-textualization, such as New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, has nodoubt contributed to this academic fascination with the repositories of thepast, giving the ancient manuscript and original artifact a new allure. The

. Within performance studies—which is the area of cultural studies I contribute to mostregularly—Performance Research provides a good example of this growing preoccupation withthe archive. Since its launch in , this journal has included reviews of archives as well

as articles which explicitly address archive theory and archival material. See Gorman on‘‘Archive Fever’’ (). The special issue ‘‘On Archives and Archiving’’ () demonstratesthe importance of this concept in the field.

Poetics Today : (Winter ) Copyright © by the Porter Institute for Poetics andSemiotics.


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problem with this is certainly not the original theories. Both New Histori-cism and Cultural Materialism represent respectably rigorous and complexconceptual approaches to the use of historical material in the study of litera-

ture and to the role of contextualization in analysis.2

The problem here liesin the similarity that work inspired by these theories may have to researchunderpinned by unreconstructed forms of positivistic authentication andpseudo-scientific legitimization—a similarity that I argue is a result of thenature of the archive as it is commonly conceived in humanistic studies.

Archival research has provided the foundation for research in the hu-manities since the innovations of the French sociologist August Compteand the German historian Leopold von Ranke in the s. Compte’s pre-

scriptions for a positivist methodology centered upon the painstaking accu-mulation of documentary evidence, followed by patient study and detailedcomparative analysis. This slow process of collection, examination, andinterrogation was inspired by the rigorous observation of phenomena privi-leged by the natural sciences. Scientific truth about the past came to beassociated with a similar set of practices in the newly professionalized disci-pline of history. These were summed up by Ranke’s three principles of historical investigation, which emphasized the objectivity of the historian,close analysis of archival material, and the importance of ‘‘Wie es eigent-lich gewesen’’ (as it really was) (quoted in Jenkins : ).3 This modelprevailed in historical research in the social sciences until the s: longenough for the archive to become firmly established as a symbol of truth,plausibility, and authenticity (see Iggers and Powell ; Smith : –; and Appleby et al. : –).

However, the second half of the twentieth century saw a sustained theo-retical off ensive against the empiricist approaches that have upheld thearchive’s symbolic status.4 In response to this development, some historians

have acknowledged the force of these critiques while maintaining their com-mitment to archival research as a method of investigation.5 Nonetheless, itis still possible to find historians who reject what they perceive as the mis-

. Colebrook’s New Literary Histories () contains a comprehensive résumé of bothapproaches.. Appleby et al., Telling the Truth about History (), and Smith, The Gender of History: Men,Women and Historical Practice (), include accounts of these developments. Smith notes that‘‘history’’ lacked a common methodology before the s. She (ibid.: ) describes the diverseforms of its presentation (including epic poetry, historical plays, novels, and journalism) andits various practitioners: ‘‘As the nineteenth century opened, archival research was by nomeans the universally accepted road to historical truth. . . . Between and , male his-torians were most likely to have been trained as jurists and theologians; or they were bankersor bureaucrats who wrote merely as an avocation.’’. Jenkins provides a useful outline of these critiques.. See Howell and Prevener : –.


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leading distortions of ‘‘theory’’ in favor of the recalcitrant, but dependable,‘‘thing’’: archival evidence.6 It seems that the temptation of making a claimto the academic authority conferred by undertaking ‘‘proper research’’ may

prove irresistible for the researcher utilizing archived material. Without acontinual awareness of the long association of archival research with a his-tory of positivism and a thorough understanding of our own investment inthis form of research work, we may find ourselves reproducing discreditedmethodology.

The allure of the archive is perhaps most compelling when the researcheris confronted with the particularity of a unique archival collection.The ten-sions attendant upon archival study are particularly acute in the case of

the Lord Chamberlain’s correspondence files (abbreviated as LC Corr.), which are the topic of this essay. These files, which are currently housed atthe British Library, preserve the textual detritus produced by the quotidianactivity of the British theatrical censorship system. Following the StageLicensing Act of , every public theater production, from local panto-mimes to grandiose performances in the West End, required a license fromthe Lord Chamberlain. Each play had a report written on it by an examiner,

who wrote a synopsis of the script, outlining any off ensive scenes or dubiouslanguage. There is a file for almost every play submitted for licensing dur-ing the twentieth century, and consequently the number of files runs intothe thousands. These files contain memoranda, letters, and reports cover-ing each play submitted to the office between and the abolition of thecensorship in and represent a unique record of the censors’ changingrationale.7

However, any interpretation of this archive necessitates a complex nego-tiation of the space between thing and theory. The contents of this archivemay provide a uniquely tangible record of a period of British theater history,

but we must bear in mind that these documents were preserved as part of aprocess of systematic censorship.The archive may include voices of dissent,

yet these are framed and fragmented by the commentary—and the cata-

. See Lindemann and Evans . Lindemann (: ) notes: ‘‘theory for histori-ans . . . has more often proved an untrustworthy guide than a reliable pilot. Immersion inthe archival evidence seems to me an obvious corrective to theoretical flights of fancy.’’ Inthe face of such retrenchment, critics have launched a renewed attack upon the conceptualblind spots of this ‘‘revised Rankeanism’’ (Jenkins : ).. That these files are available for study is a matter of some fortuity. Following the removal of the Lord Chamberlain’s theater licensing function in and the closure of the censorshipoffice in St. James’s Palace, the accumulated scripts and files were stored for many years in acoal cellar and nearly did not reach the light at all.When they were finally transferred to theBritish Library in , many of the files were suff ering the eff ects of damp and required pres-ervation treatment. Coal dust still clings to many of the files today, making their consultationdirty work. Correspondence files from the pre- period have been lost.


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loging—of the authorities who silenced them. It is important to rememberthat the documentation of this struggle is the result of a series of decisionstaken by these authorities: to adopt pre-performance licensing of scripts as

the vetting system; to demand alteration of a play or, indeed, to refuse ita license altogether; to place particular documents in the archive, under aparticular cataloging procedure. This archive was originally designed as atool and was utilized to silence and suppress as well as to provide a record of official approval. Before exploring this collection, we must begin by ques-tioning our past (and present) commitment to the archive as a researchresource in order to assess its future utility.

1. Archive Theory

One way to explain our fascination with the contents of the archive is the value conferred on the unique document by what Walter Benjamin ([]), in his seminal essay ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction,’’ refers to as the ‘‘aura’’ of the object. Academia thrives on thelure of new material and undiscovered textual territory. One way to ensurethat research achieves the required level of originality is through analysis of previously unexamined material. The unique ‘‘aura’’ of the archival docu-ment is thus bestowed upon its analysis by virtue of the perceived originalityof the analyst’s object of study. This preoccupation with the original docu-ment is reflected in our day-to-day exchanges. In an age of simulacra, whichis rapidly completing its transfer of the production and dissemination of information on to the computer screen, we still privilege the paper docu-ment of authentication. We may rely entirely on the Internet for our con-sumer goods, depend upon e-mail as a form of communication, and entrustour labor to information technology, but every time we are called upon to

prove our nationality, existence, or credentials, we revert to the passport,the driving license, and the birth certificate. The archive performs a similarauthenticating function in the academic realm.

Moreover, the academic fascination with the seemingly recoverable pastcontained within the archive may be symptomatic of a more recent societalobsession. Not only does the current popular interest in the importance of realizing one’s ‘‘identity’’ lead us to scour our family inheritance for con-nections to ethnic groups or historical communities, but it also encourages

us to read the development of the subject through reference to past occur-rence, to trace particularities of character to past events.8 In what followsI draw on psychoanalysis and archaeological theory in so far as they can

. See Nora : on the remarkable growth of this phenomenon.


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off er critical models in which the present uses of history are considered tobe as important as an accurate reflection of the past.

In many ways, the archive is an ideal site for research, as it is traditionally

associated with text and writing. Reference to the archive evokes images of a forgotten realm of long-neglected textual territory: mountainous piles of paper bundled together; corridors of cataloged files; dusty, disintegratingletters; musty records, obscure lists. One thing unites this conceptualiza-tion in the common cultural imagination: above all else, the archive existsin and through text, as the written record of another time. This inherenttextuality makes it very attractive to the academic researcher.

Consideration of the archive’s wider functions may also help to explain

why its contents are of such interest to the academic community. JacquesDerrida’s recent Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression () and Michel Fou-cault’s now standard Archaeolo of Knowledge ( []) are only the bestknown of the critical studies of the archive to have commented on the sub-stantive role the archive plays in the construction and realization of thestate.9 This interaction of the state, writing, and the archive not only demon-strates the importance of textual traces for the construction of identity andcollective national memory, it also indicates the state’s methods of main-taining control of its subjects.

More recent publications build upon these theories. For example, Rich-ard Harvey-Brown and Beth Davis-Brown (: ) draw attention to therole the archive plays in the formation of a national self-consciousness as‘‘the storing and ordering place of the collective memory of that nationor people(s).’’ They highlight the importance of the archive in the mod-ern world, claiming that the information preserved in archives, libraries,and museums represents contemporary society’s only constant, enabling asense of ‘‘moral solidarity.’’ Whether or not we agree with their assessment

of the archive’s potential to provide a ‘‘conscience collective,’’ there can beno doubt that archival institutions maintain fixed points of reference to ashared past, thus helping to cement social stability and solidarity, illumi-nating (or creating) collective national memories and consequently a senseof national identity (ibid.: ).

Harvey-Brown and Davis-Brown also observe that early collective mem-

. History of the Human Sciences published two special issues (. []and . []) on thearchive, which contain many discussions of this conjunction. In particular, see Harvey-Brown

and Davis-Brown , Kemp , and Lynch . Burke’s Research and the Manuscript Tra-dition () also contains an account of the construction and management of archives. Forearlier work, see Spivak and Echevvaria . Currently, Derrida’s Archive Fever () isbeing applied in fields as diverse as medieval and performance studies in publications such asEchard and Gorman .The growing interest in the intersection of thing and theoryis evidenced by this broad application of Derrida’s work.


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ory resided in oral recitation: performances in which the voice of the individual was always associated with the reiteration of historical narrative.They note that the advent of writing uncoupled this intimate relationship,

enabling the realization of ‘‘the textual embodiment of a shared memoryexterior to particular minds and performances’’ (ibid.: ). The collectionand storage of text in an archive means that curators of facts and informa-tion now authorize and oversee what was once a performance of individualrecitation. It might be expected that there is a high price to pay for thisguardianship.10

The price, I would argue, is the very promise of the archive itself: themyth of the fixed historical record. Once removed from the world of recita-

tion—enunciation—the voices of the past preserved in the archive will bemediated by the decisions of a series of archivists, experts, and academics.These ‘‘curators’’ control which voices are given the opportunity to speakagain to a wider audience. As these archival researchers frequently serveas conduits between the past and the contemporary public, their attitudetoward the material they study ought to be a central concern for archivetheory.

2. Seductions: The Allure of the Lost and Innocent

The attitude of the archival researcher toward the archive, and the laborundertaken within it, has always been ambivalent. Researchers’ work isreported as being demanding and exhausting yet also compelling and plea-surable. Indeed, this attraction has been described in terms of sexual desireor addiction since Ranke first asserted his three principles of historicalresearch in the early nineteenth century.11 It seems that the archive can bea dangerously seductive place. Instead of becoming lost in its dusty, forbid-

ding, textual corridors, it is all too easy to become enchanted.Before we fall under the archive’s spell, it would be prudent to examine

the nature of its appeal.The pleasures proff ered by this archival allure maylook innocent enough, but the archaeological theorist Michael Shanks sug-

. Nora (: –) observes that this ‘‘materialisation of memory’’ constitutes a form of ‘‘terrorism’’ and that the information conserved in archives is ‘‘no longer living memory’smore or less intended remainder’’ but ‘‘comes to us from the outside.’’ He concludes that itis merely a ‘‘prosthesis-memory,’’ secondary to ‘‘true memory’’ (ibid).

. Ranke, in a letter of , refers to a morning’s work in an Italian repository as an exhaust-ing bout of sexual congress: ‘‘Yesterday I had a sweet, magnificent fling with the object of mylove, a beautiful Italian, and I hope that we produce a beautiful Roman-German prodigy. Irose at noon, completely exhausted’’ (cited in Smith : ). More recently, Lindemanndescribed her relationship with the archive as an addiction in ‘‘Confessions of an Archive

Junkie’’ ().


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gests that we should treat the subtle arousal experienced upon immersionin the archive with some suspicion. He distinguishes between the attitudeof the archaeologist and the antiquarian fascinated with the archive:

Here is a passion a little too intimate with the past, a fetishism. Fetishism: here

is a desire to hold, look, touch; captivation by the consecrated object. . . . The wholeness of the past is lost in the melancholic holding of the [object]. (Shanks

: )

According to Shanks, the archival fragment operates as a literal substitutefor the lost object, the unrecoverable past.12 However, he surmises that thisultimately unsatisfying intimacy is an uninvited familiarity, an intrusion onthe part of the antiquarian. For him, this relation to the past is a voyeuristic

violation, a pornography.13

Shanks’s anxiety would surely only be heightened by the terms used byFrank G. Burke in his introduction to Research and the Manuscript Tradition(). Burke (: x) unselfconsciously celebrates the compelling qualityof the archive in wishing to ‘‘convey the joy of working with these materi-als . . . the excitement of the chase for facts, the vicarious participation inthe lives of the great, near great, and no-account, and the recognition thathistory is a seamless encounter of human beings acting very humanly as

they go about expressing and living their hopes, joys, fears, frustrations andsorrows.’’ Burke thus casually acknowledges that this gratification is ‘‘vicari-ous.’’ He recalls the pleasure of working in the archive and contemplates hiscaptivation by the essential innocence of most texts preserved in the archive.What is appealing to Burke is the text’s unselfconsciousness and ignoranceof its future position as source of investigation.

One might well conclude that these qualities—and their allure—are anintrinsic part of the character of every archive. There, one is always in the

position of the uninvited reader, the intruder into another’s private commu-nications: notes, marginalia, private letters, and so forth. In commentingon the allure of the private letter, literary critics such as Terry Eagleton havemixed metaphors of rape and readership:

Nothing could be at once more intimate and more alienable. . . . The letter ispart of the body which is detachable: torn from the very depths of the subject,

. Both Catherine Brown and Dominick LaCapra comment on this quality, albeit from radi-

cally diff erent perspectives. For Brown’s celebration, see ‘‘In the Middle’’ (: ), whileLaCapra’s skeptical critique can be found in History and Criticism (: ).. Writing on ‘‘The Erotics of the Museum,’’ Shanks notes: ‘‘The relation with the pastbased on the look of objects is an amorous one. It is a voyeuristic appreciation and a simul-taneous violation of the body of the past. It is a pornography. Artefacts are . . . prostitutedfor possession and consumption’’ (Shanks and Tilley : ).


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it can equally be torn from her physical possession. . . . The letter comes to sig-

nify nothing quite so much as sexuality itself, that folded secret place which is

always open to violent intrusion. . . . There is always within the letter’s deco-

rously covered body that crevice or fissured place where the stirrings of desirecan be felt. (Quoted in Steedman : )

Though Eagleton is referring to the function of the letter in eighteenth-century epistolary fiction, it stands to reason that the reader in the archivealso feels this gratification. Surely the reader of the unedited, nonfictional,original manuscript must feel a much greater thrill in invading the privaterealm of the writer.

Certainly, a close reading of Ranke’s letters—such as that carried out

by Bonnie Smith—reveals that he thought of the archives he consulted as women requiring rescue or deflowering. He alludes to them as beautiful women, either as princesses, ‘‘all under a curse and needing to be saved’’(letter to Bettina von Arnim, February ; cited in Smith : ) or, if they were obscure, as virgins. Remarking upon one little-known collection,he noted: ‘‘I long for the moment I have access to her’’ (letter to FerdinandRanke, November ; cited in ibid.: ).

This quality of unselfconsciousness, or ‘‘innocence,’’ certainly plays asubstantial role in enhancing the textual charms of the Lord Chamberlain’scorrespondence files. This bureaucratic detritus was produced and com-piled by men who had no apprehension of its future use. They were notaware that their notes, memos, and reports would one day come under pub-lic scrutiny and no doubt would have been very surprised to learn that they

would be of academic interest.14

Nonetheless, this archive does not simply lay the secrets of the censor-ship bare. It holds many dry, formal letters, which indicate that their writers

were well aware of their possible participation in the public sphere.15 It

also contains correspondence that bears the exclusive stamp: ‘‘confiden-tial.’’ The censorship office was particularly concerned to maintain the illu-

. By contrast, theater critic Kenneth Tynan was acutely aware of the attention the writtenrefuse of his life might attract—a fact recorded by his wife, Kathleen Tynan, in The Life of Kenneth Tynan (). His papers, which she used in her construction of this biography and

which are now held at the British Library, include much material which has yet to be properlycataloged. Consulting this material presents diff erent challenges and advantages from thosepresented by the Lord Chamberlain’s archive: the difficulty of wading through numerous

jumbled originals and photocopies of varying quality; the privilege of assessing their value

for oneself.. For example, the Lord Chamberlain’s files on Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour reveal that the reader, Norman Gwatkin, and the well-known producer Hugh ‘‘Binkie’’ Beau-mont, liaised to produce an inoff ensive letter to the playwright, informing her that her play

was to be refused a license (see Norman Gwatkin, ‘‘The Children’s Hour’’ [letter], LC Corr.,LR , March ).


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sion of its autonomy, and in consequence, letters to and from other branchesof government (including the Home Office, the Foreign Office, and theWar Office) parade their insignia upon the head of the letter but command

silence. However, informal notes and memoranda circulated among thestaff of the censorship office do reveal private obsessions and prejudices.Unguarded and intimate, they expose their writers’ predispositions and per-sonal feelings, as they record the details of their authors’ everyday lives.16

Immersion in this material leads to familiarity with the characters andpersonalities of the examiners, as with their (often distinctive) handwrit-ing. Never staff ed by more than a handful of men, the office employedthem for many years at a stretch.17 Through an examination of the archive’s

contents, one perceives the ebb and flow of daily life in the office: work-ing relationships develop and shift, and the balance of power changes overtime; readers move from apprenticeship, through positions of influenceand seniority, to eventual antiquation and obsolescence; concern over eachother’s opinions reveals the strict hierarchy in operation, as some judgmentsare held up as precedential reference points, while others are casually dis-missed. This archive is, indeed, constructed around what Burke describesas ‘‘human beings acting very humanly.’’

My acquaintance with the day-to-day work of these men, carried outover many years, produced an unexpected side eff ect. I began to feel asif I knew them, as I felt sympathy for their troubles, involvement in theirlives, and respect for their diligence and sense of duty. Such a sense of famil-iarity with the voices of the past must surely compromise the objectivity of my research. However, this empathy for the guardians and creators of thearchive is surely one of the more innocuous charms of the archive.The illu-sory pleasure of recovered memory appears to be much more insidious. Inthe archive, the dream of the historian seems close to realization: it seems

possible to make the past live and suppressed voices speak.This desire is thesubject of Derrida’s Archive Fever . Noting Freud’s fascination with archaeo-logical digs, he observes that Freud wishes ‘‘to let the stones talk,’’ to allowthe contents of the archive to express themselves without mediation. This

would be

a moment and not a process, [. . . which] does not belong to the laborious

deciphering of the archive. It is the nearly ecstatic instant Freud dreams of, when

the very success of the dig must sign the eff acement of the archivist: the origin

. Passing comments range from the serious (off ers of condolence for bereavements,inquiries after health) to the lighthearted (reports on holidays) and the mundane (the state of the author’s garden). These kinds of aside appear in correspondence in much the same wayas personal information permeates professional e-mail exchanges today.. For example, George Street worked as an examiner of plays for sixteen years and was theonly examiner in the office from to .


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then speaks by itself . The arkhe appears in the nude, without archive. (Derrida

: )

We are surely all vulnerable to this beguiling fantasy of self-eff acement, which seems to promise the recovery of lost time, the possibility of beingreunited with the lost past, and the fulfilment of our deepest desires for

wholeness and completion. This, then, is the attraction of the archivalobject. It becomes a substitute for a lost object: a temporary satiation of thequest for full identity and narcissistic unity.

Here the archive’s inherently textual nature must interrupt our bliss-ful encounter with its contents. During our investigation, we cannot avoidexperiencing the familiar problem of all literary analysis: the indetermi-

nacy of interpretation that haunts every text. This difficulty seems par-ticularly acute in the case of the Lord Chamberlain’s correspondence files.

After Roland Barthes and Foucault, all authors may be dead, but those who contributed to the archive are more dead than most: any control theymay have wished to exercise over their statements was relinquished themoment their missives arrived at the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. The play-

wrights, producers, and examiners who contributed to the contents of theLord Chamberlain’s correspondence files could not have anticipated the

public exposure of their words or their future analysis. Only a handful of the playwrights who negotiated with the Lord Chamberlain’s Office couldhave expected the treatment of their work to be of wider interest. Most of them would have been accustomed to obscurity. Moreover, the constructionof the archive fragments and scatters the contribution of each individual,as it is cataloged by play title.

Of course, these problems are present, to some degree, in all archivalresearch. When digging up the details of the past hidden in the archive,

we must remember that we are dealing with the dead. As Derrida (ibid.:) notes, ‘‘the structure of the archive is spectral . It is spectral a priori :neither present nor absent ‘in the flesh,’ neither visible nor invisible, a tracealways referring to another whose eyes can never be met.’’ Any figures weencounter in the archive are ghosts, mere shadows of the past. Their actionsare complete, and their original significance will remain undetermined,open to interpretation.

As the archive cannot off er direct access to the past, any reading of itscontents will necessarily be a reinterpretation. It is for this reason that the

archival researcher must foreground his or her own role in the process of the production of the past; responsibility to the dead requires a recognitionthat the reanimation of ghostly traces—in the process of writing the his-tory of the dead—is a potentially violent act. In order to guard against such

violations, the researcher should foreground the agency of the interpreter


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and acknowledge that this is a recontexualization of the past rather than areconstruction. Shanks outlines just such an approach in his recent interdis-ciplinary collaboration with Mike Pearson, Theatre/Archaeolo (). Here

he articulates the basic tenets of ‘‘interpretative archaeology’’: ‘‘Gone is thenotion of a singular material record bequeathed to us from the past andfrom which meaning can be ‘read off .’ Instead archaeology is to regard itself as a practice of cultural production’’ (Pearson and Shanks : ).

This self-consciousness complicates our perception of the archive’s tra-ditional relationship to the disciplines it often serves to legitimate. Theproblems presented by the use of the archive may be generated by thecharacter of these disciplines. Indeed, critics such as Thomas Osborne

have indicated that the academic subjects that are associated with archival research exhibit a fundamental incompatibility with the scientific ratio-nalism emulated by its first practitioners, Compte and Ranke. Osborneobserves that these ‘‘conjectural sciences’’ legitimize themselves throughevidential detail which demands expert interpretation. Their conclusions,Osborne (: ) states, are ‘‘produced only through the labours of anaesthetic of perception; a fine, discriminating gaze that is able to isolate, onthe basis of experience and example, items of significance out of a mass of detail.’’

It is certainly true that, when faced with a huge body of textual material,much research work is informed by an instinctive response as the researcherfollows traces and searches for clues. However, it would appear that thisdeparture from the tenets of scientific rationalism is in no way a consciousmove on the part of the humanities researcher. Indeed, the way in whichaesthetic discrimination is presented as objective enquiry is a function of the continual, if unconscious, refusal to remember that the archive doesnot contain the complete record of the past that it promises. Such a refusal

persists despite our awareness that, during its construction, the archive willhave been formed by many instances of radical contingency. Every archivehas undergone a process of selection, during which recorded informationmay have been excluded and discarded as well as preserved. Carolyn Steed-man (: ) comments on the haphazard nature of the record and the

way this reflects on the institutions which bring the archive into being:

The Archive is made from the selected and consciously chosen documentation

from the past and from the mad fragmentations that no-one intended to preserve

and that just ended up there. . . . In the Archive, you cannot be shocked at itsexclusions, its emptinesses, at what is not catalogued . . . . Its condition of beingdeflects outrage: in its quiet folders and bundles is the neatest demonstration of

how state power has operated, through ledgers and lists and indictments, and

through what is missing from them.


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This duality of random inclusion and considered exclusion marks the con-struction of every archive: Steedman’s description need not be limited tothe functioning of state power. The original decisions as to which materials

are to be preserved and which are to be discarded, prior to public access,are often unavailable to the researcher. But the archive’s very existence indi-cates an a priori value judgment concerning the worth of the documents orartifacts it contains.

These judgments continue after the initial establishment of the archive.Once preserved, the material is subject to systems, schemata, and structuresof ordering and classification. Even cataloging, which is designed to enableaccess, inevitably serves to foreground and highlight the existence of some

of the archive’s contents, resulting in the eff ective marginalization or exclu-sion of the rest.These decisions are often presented as being simply a mat-ter of pragmatic financial considerations, imposed by pressures of space ortime. However, these rationalizations may mask other agendas.18 While wemay be accustomed to dealing with the vagaries of subjective textual inter-pretation, we do not often choose to dwell on the existence of similar forces

which aff ect the availability of text in the first place. As Harvey-Brown andDavis-Brown (: ) aver, ‘‘It is not that archivists do not tell the wholetruth about reality. It is that they cannot tell it.’’

3. Archive Fever (or, the Death Drive) and the Structure of Memory

Despite this conclusion, archival researchers continue to return to archivesin search of some partial and provisional truths, if not the ‘‘whole truthabout reality.’’ The distorting, destructive pressures of ‘‘Archive Fever’’ callfor a careful account of the constraints and limitations that inform our

. Much of the value of the Lord Chamberlain’s correspondence archive rests on its repu-tation as an unselfconscious record of the administrative procedures of theater licensing andcensorship. Indeed, the British Library’s introductory pamphlet to the archive is at pains topoint out that they have not been tampered with and not been ‘‘weeded’’ in any way (BritishLibrary ). However, a file on Rolf Hochhuth’s play Soldiers contains a clipping whichbrings the character of the whole archive into question. This reports the successful prosecu-tion of the producer of the play for libel following its presentation at the New Theatre. Theappearance of this clipping in the Lord Chamberlain’s correspondence files is remarkablebecause it dates from , two years after the files were made redundant. After the aboli-tion of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship function, the files were purportedly closed andleft untouched until John Johnston began his research on The Lord Chamberlain’s Blue Pencil

(), prior to their preservation at the British Library. The inclusion of this clipping in thefile seems to serve a self-justificatory function, and its presence raises all sorts of questionsand indicates the need for a still greater level of caution in the interpretation of the materialthe archive contains. This is not to suggest that the value of this particular archive is com-promised by this discovery. The clipping is merely a reminder of the procedures of selectionand judgment which create every such collection.


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interpretation of the contents of the archive rather than for rejection or withdrawal.

Thus, the Lord Chamberlain’s correspondence files present considerable

challenges to the archivist.The British Library’s (: ) ‘‘Manuscript Col-lections Reference Guide’’ to the play collections warns that ‘‘before thetransfer of the collection to the department in the files suff ered con-siderable disarrangement.’’ The difficulties of locating files are indicated bythe constraints on consultation. Advance notice is required, and requestsare limited to six files a day. Furthermore, the only catalog of the corre-spondence files is the handwritten card index originally used by the LordChamberlain’s Office.The reference guide cautions: ‘‘As this was the work-

ing index of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office in its function as the licensor of plays over a period of nearly seventy years, users should bear in mind thatit was compiled by many hands, and may be inaccurate and inconsistent inplaces’’ (ibid.: ).

Despite these practical difficulties, this archive is of great value for itsembodiment of the linkage between the state, its law, and its textual records.The focus of the British theatrical censorship procedure upon textuality,combined with its bureaucratic production of paperwork, has produced anexceptional research resource.The simultaneous silencing and preservationof censored plays has ensured their place in a history that will inevitablybe reconstructed from the remains deposited in the archive. While theserecords are undoubtedly of great value, we must address their contradic-tory nature, their paradoxical enactment of destruction and preservation. Itseems that this is not just characteristic of the processes of governmentallylegitimated censorship, but is at the heart of the experience of archivization,described by Derrida (: , ) as ‘‘archive fever’’:

The archive always works, and a priori , against itself. . . . There would indeed be

no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forget-fulness which does not limit itself to repression. Above all, and this is the most

serious, beyond or within this simple limit called finiteness or finitude, there is no

archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destruc-

tion drive.

This archive fever can be seen in the fragmentation of the material held inthe Lord Chamberlain’s correspondence files. As I have already noted, thedissenting voices of playwrights and producers may have been preserved

by this archive, but they are contained by its disciplinary boundaries. Priorto our encounter with these voices, they were subjected to a double dose of the archive’s destructive, suppressive impulses: first during the contact withthe censorship office and then during the process of archivization.

The censorship office’s response to John Osborne’s play A Patriot for Me,


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which was refused a license in , demonstrates the malign eff ect of con-tainment within the archive. The reader of this script appears to have beenmore concerned with the character of the author than that of the play.19 He

notes in his report: ‘‘Mr Osborne’s overweening conceit and blatant anti-authoritarianism causes him to write in a deliberately provocative way. Healmostnevermissesachancetobeoff ensive’’ (LC Corr., LR , August). Having been exposed to this judgment, one finds it difficult to shakeoff the suspicion that the play is written in just such a rebellious spirit andimpossible to approach Osborne’s work without an awareness of its relationto the values of the censorship.

This example illustrates the difficulty of responding to the voices of

silenced playwrights once they have passed through this process of censo-rious distortion and displacement. Perhaps we can only begin to completean adequate assessment of the archive, which responds appropriately to itstextual nature, by developing a psychoanalytic sensitivity to metaphor andfigural language as they appear both in the texts of the archive and in archi-

val research. However, no assessment of this research could be complete without an exploration of how the metaphor of memory conditions ourapproach to the archive itself.

The archive is a literal embodiment of the metaphors that surroundmemory, as memory is (in)formed by culturally distinct methods of stor-age, inscription, and access: images of the file, or the snapshot, for example,allow us to grasp how our minds record the information they receive eachday. Responding to Derrida’s bid for an analogy between the archive andthe construction of Freudian thought, Steedman (: ) argues that thecommonplace metaphorical linkup between the archive and memory isflawed:

An Archive is not very much like human memory, and is not at all like the uncon-

scious mind. An Archive may indeed take in stuff , heterogeneous, undiff erenti-ated stuff . . . texts, documents, data . . . and order them by the principles of uni-

fication and classification. This stuff , reordered, remade, then emerges—some

would say like a memory—when someone needs to find it, or just simply needs

it, for new and current purposes. But in actual Archives, though the bundles may

be mountainous, there isn’t in fact very much there. The Archive is not poten-tially made up of everything, as is human memory; and it is not the fathomless

and timeless place in which nothing goes away, as is the unconscious.

. This is a common theme throughout the censorship reports. It often seems as if the psy-chology of the author is on trial as well as the content of the play. Factors taken into consider-ation often include the author’s sincerity, motivation, intentions, and commercial interests,as if the censors wish to examine both the ‘‘conscience’’ of the play and of the individual who

wrote it.


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The Lord Chamberlain’s correspondence files are clearly not ‘‘made up of everything.’’ Indeed, the experience of immersion in these recalcitrant filesoften leads to the frustrated conclusion that ‘‘there isn’t in fact very much

there.’’ The censorship staff were masters at self-censorship and seem tohave been possessed by a paranoiac fear of issuing any statement which

would provide the press with controversial material. The censorship officepreferred to off er no explanation unless absolutely essential, and an author

who proved particularly unhappy or intractable would be invited for aninterview at St. James’s Palace. This ensured that their negotiations neverreached the page. In the long term, this anxiety over potentially detrimentalcirculation of their texts in the public sphere produced an uneven preser-

vation of the voices of authority and resistance.Take the case of Who Made the Iron Grow (an anti-Nazi play by Alan Peterssubmitted for licensing in ). Having consulted the Foreign Office, theEarl of Cromer (the incumbent Lord Chamberlain) decided to ban the playand issued the following memorandum:

Care must be taken in the wording of the reply to give no handle for raising a

controversy in the press over political censorship. The best course really would

be to invite . . . [the author] to take an opportunity of calling at St. James’s. It

could then be explained to him verbally that a propaganda play of this nature,must inevitably be regarded as an attack upon the present system of Government

in Germany. (LC Corr., LR , August )

This memo illustrates the extremely eff ective defense, which denies theresearcher access to the negotiations between censor and censored. Theonly trace of such negotiations resides in the archive, where the memo looksahead to them as a ‘‘verbal’’ procedure.

The censorship office’s careful management of textual evidence supports

Steedman’s critique of the metaphoric connection between archive andmemory. However, the researcher’s utilization of the contents of the archiveestablishes the descriptive value of this metaphor. Freud ( []) main-tains that it is not the storage of memory that presents difficulty for itsretrieval but that access is the problem. Access, he asserts, is complicatedby repression, which serves to relegate difficult or troublesome materialto the unconscious, thus protecting the psyche from the memory of trau-matic experience. The repressed material then appears in distorted or dis-placed form—in dreams or slips of the tongue—inviting interpretation by

the psychoanalyst.20 There is a considerable temptation to align the role of the researcher with that of the Freudian psychoanalyst searching for tracesof the repressed among a mass of displaced and distorted material (see

. For a comprehensive account of Freud’s concept of repression, see Billig .


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Spivak ). In this much, the archive is like memory. The archive surelycontains all the information deposited, but finding a particular documentcan prove an arduous task, as any researcher tackling the Lord Chamber-

lain’s correspondence files will discover.While the archive’s allure may be tarnished by its originary exclusions

and the difficulty of accessing its contents, there are greater challengesfacing the archival researcher. Freud’s hypotheses concerning memory arenot definitive, and later psychoanalysts have focused upon the unreliabilityof memory itself and the way that it is compromised by its encounter withthe forces of repression and the imagination. Laurence Kirmayer (: )points out that Freud underestimates the role imagination has to play in

memory, observing that imaginative reconstruction serves to provide miss-ing details, filling in the gaps and supplying meaning which was not present when the event first occurred:

What is registered is highly selective and thoroughly transformed by inter-

pretation and semantic encoding at the moment of experience. What can be

veridically recalled is limited and routinely reconstructed to fit models of whatmight have—must have—happened.When encouraged to flesh it out, we readily

engage in imaginative elaboration and confabulation and, once we have done

this, the bare bones of memory is lost forever within the animated story we have

constructed.

Thus, memories can be read as fantasies or distortions, like dreams in theircontainment of condensed symbolism and their elaborate masking of latentpreoccupation. Jacques Lacan (: –) takes this point to its logicalconclusion:

The fact that the subject relives, comes to remember, in the intuitive sense of

the word, the formative events of his existence, is not in itself so very important.

What matters is what he reconstructs of it. . . . The stress is always placed moreon the side of reconstruction than on that of reliving, in the sense that we havegrown used to calling aff ective. The precise reliving—that the subject remem-

bers something as truly belonging to him, as having been truly lived through,

with which he communicates, and which he adopts—we have the most explicit

indication in Freud’s writings that that is not what is essential. What is essential

is reconstruction. . . . I would say—when all is said and done, it is less a matterof remembering than of rewriting history.

Applying these conclusions to the practice of recovering collective mem-ory through examination of the archive presents the strongest challenge tothe conventional perception of the archive’s objectivity and value. If we areonly ever reconstructing our own history, what does it matter what material

we use to do so?


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It seems that what we are searching for in the archive, as in psychoanaly-sis, is, in fact, a lost object. Jean Laplanche (: –) observes in Lifeand Death in Psychoanalysis that his experience of psychoanalytic practice has

taught him that any object found in his search will be ‘‘not the lost [one]but a substitute.’’ The narrative of the past event or evidence will have beentransformed by our research in much the same way as the processes of dis-placement and repression alter the lost object. What we recover is as mucha creation of our search for it as anything else. Whether or not memory islinked in any meaningful way to ‘‘the real’’ of originary experience is likelyto remain debatable.

4. The Lord Chamberlain’s Blue Pencil and the Art of Recollection

An exemplary illustration of the role that the archive can play in a creativereconstruction of the past is provided by John Johnston’s book The Lord Chamberlain’s Blue Pencil (), which presents a unique record of the opera-tion of legislative theatrical censorship in Britain. Johnston worked in theLord Chamberlain’s censorship office as an examiner of plays from until its closure in . He is in a unique position to explore its historythrough reference to a combination of firsthand experience and archivalresearch.

Johnston is obviously aware of the potential criticism of bias. His ac-knowledgments highlight the role the surviving members of the censorshipoffice played in contributing to the book and thus serve to authorize hisstory.21 This, he appears to be announcing, is not merely a subjective storyof the censorship but an authoritative history, legitimated by the several dif-ferent memories that verify his tale. Furthermore, he provides evidence of the hard, arduous work performed by his researcher, Mary Fisher (the play

reader’s clerk from to ), who ‘‘spent endless hours in the cellars of St. James’s Palace foraging amongst the records of the Lord Chamberlain’sOffice and invariably surfacing with just the right document’’ (ibid.: ).

Initially, Johnston (ibid.: ) declares his intention to show ‘‘how the sys-tem worked over the years . . . especially when, in the later twentieth cen-tury, attitudes changed, and the problems became larger, more complexand more diverse.’’ However, his fascination with the individual characters

. He comments: ‘‘I have been glad of the help of Sir Eric Penn, my predecessor as AssistantComptroller and then Comptroller, and of Sir John Titman, Secretary, Lord Chamberlain’sOffice, in supplementing my memories of the censorship. Geoff rey Dearmer (aged ninety-six) and Tim Harward, the surviving Examiners of Plays, have been a wonderful source of information, with clear memories of the past, and their eager and willing help I have verymuch appreciated’’ (Johnston : ).


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involved in the administration of the office and the minutiae of its operationoften obscures this aim. Nonetheless, his digression into personal historyand biographical detail is often revealing. For example, the office’s intimate

relation with royalty is revealed by Johnston’s account of the duties of theLord Chamberlain’s Office. As well as censoring the nation’s drama, thisoffice was responsible for organizing all ceremonial occasions, arrangingroyal weddings and funerals, administering the royal palaces and the RoyalCollection, awarding royal warrants, and ‘‘even looking after the Queen’sswans’’ (ibid.: ). Equally illuminating is Johnston’s proud announcementthat ‘‘the Prince of Wales and his Household, who now occupy the premisesthat were once those of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, generously allowed

me the use of a room at St James’s Palace in which I was able to work undis-turbed’’ (ibid.: ). Johnston’s fascination with the former careers of the staff of the office

is similarly informative. His army background meant that he had much incommon with other members of the staff . On his appointment to the post,he comments, ‘‘I was there to succeed Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Penn as the

Assistant Comptroller for he had been appointed Comptroller in place of Brigadier Sir Norman Gwatkin who was retiring’’ (ibid.: ). The roll callof titles and honors indicates each bearer’s authority and status, past andpresent.

The book dwells upon the influence of the individual upon the admin-istration and conduct of the office. Johnston (ibid.: ) notes, ‘‘The Exam-iners of plays were the linchpin of the dramatic censorship and played acentral role in its story.’’ He bears witness to their role in a chapter entitled‘‘The Right Type of Advice,’’ focusing upon Henry Game, who workedas examiner of plays from to . We are informed that Geoff reyDearmer, another examiner, ‘‘regarded Game as a very good and shrewd

Examiner and a man of great charm. He remembers asking him what hispolicy was on double entendres and was told always to give the playwrightthe benefit of any doubt’’ (ibid.: ). Game’s protectiveness toward the the-ater emerges once more in his obituary, which appeared in The mes , writ-ten by Dearmer:

Nobody ever justly questioned his tolerance, good sense and great sense of

humour. . . . He showed in his careful and considered reports a knowledge and

love of the theatre, and his acute mind and ready turn of speech enabled him to

recommend for licence many a ‘‘difficult’’ play which on paper might appear, in whole or in part, unacceptable. (Ibid.)

Naturally, we cannot expect a defensive Johnston to draw attention toexaminers who were unsympathetic toward the theater, short-tempered,intolerant, and prone to passing dubious judgments, but reference to the


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documents in the archive itself adds more detail to his picture of HenryGame. A file on an American play, The Wallflowers , written in , containsa telling memo from Game to another member of the staff . Referring to the

difficulty of arranging a date to discuss possible changes to the play withits authors, Game writes: ‘‘I wish you had choked them off , as I am not atall inclined to help the play to reach the stage over here, and the quickest

way to deal with argumentative Yanks is to be autocratic like my old friend Adolf ’’ (LC Corr., LR , April ).

Johnston also foregrounds the role of individual Lords Chamberlain,dedicating an entire chapter to the Earl of Cromer, who held the post from to .22 Johnston cites Cromer’s love of the theater, his fluency in

French, and his enlightened outlook as evidence of his benevolent influence.Under his management, Johnston states, there was ‘‘comparatively littletrouble’’ with authors and theater management. He draws on the testimonyof Cromer’s son:

Whilst enforcing his duties as Censor [he] wanted to mitigate unnecessary rigidi-

ties and he introduced a custom, which was very much welcomed by the theatri-

cal world, under which authors and producers were invited to come and discuss

with the Lord Chamberlain and his staff passages in plays which off ended againstthe written rules, with a view to seeing whether some compromise or alteration

in wording could be adopted to eliminate the imposition of censorship.The dia-

logue between the Lord Chamberlain and the theatrical world was very much

appreciated and helped greatly to find practical working solutions as problems

arose. (Quoted in Johnston : )

As discussed above, Cromer’s instructions on the appropriate response tothe author of Who Made the Iron Grow provide a very diff erent interpretationof this custom. Johnston is drawn to the personal anecdote and is happyto digress when his subject provides him with a good yarn. He seeks proof of Cromer’s enlightened attitudes, good nature, and healthy working rela-tionship with the theater world through the anecdotal evidence contained

within actor and director Raymond Massey’s autobiography A Hundred Dif- ferent Lives . He (ibid.: ) paraphrases Massey thus:

In the American play Spread Eagle (), by George S. Brooks and Walter Lis-

ter, the final line spoken by Massey was to be, ‘‘You son of a bitch! Stand up!’’Cromer told Massey, ‘‘I cannot allow the word bitch to be spoken on the English

stage except denoting the female of the canine kind.’’ Massey thought he would

have to abandon the play, which needed a strong last line, said so, and preparedto leave. Lord Cromer stopped him: ‘‘I cannot be responsible for preventing the

. Before being appointed Lord Chamberlain, Cromer worked in the diplomatic service,then as aide-de-camp to the viceroy of India, Equerry, and assistant private secretary tothe king.


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production of this play. It’s a fine play. Would ‘god-dammed bastard’ satisfy you,

Massey?’’

This example of frank speech between equals bears witness to the LordChamberlain’s eminent reasonableness and consideration for the theater.

Another example Johnston draws from Massey seeks to demonstrate thatnot only was Cromer able to recognize quality theater, but he was an accom-plished director in the making. Massey recalls that the staging of a daringfarce, The Man in Possession, by H. M. Harwood in , required the comicsuggestion of the seduction of a ‘‘lady of pliable virtue.’’ Massey had chosento hint at this by leaving the audience with the image of himself strugglingto undo his leading lady’s gown at the fall of the curtain at the end of the

first act. Massey observed that the curtain ‘‘rose after the interval with theentrance of the lady’s maid carrying a torn garment which she displayedto a moderate laugh from the audience. I kept wondering why that laugh

wasn’t bigger.’’ The Lord Chamberlain received complaints about the inde-cency of the undergarment and called Massey to book, stating that thescript did not refer to underwear. Lord Cromer suggested a compromise atthe conclusion of their interview, as Massey relates:

Then the man who could control the mode of fashion in the Royal Enclosure at

Ascot gave me a lesson in the direction of risqué farce. Quite deadpan, and in aconfidential tone, he off ered his suggestion: ‘‘What about a maid carrying on a

replica of Miss Jean’s dress which you tried to unhook? It could be . . . oh . . .eh . . . appropriately damaged.’’ That night, and on every subsequent perfor-

mance of a long run, the damaged dress got a shout of laughter. (Quoted in

ibid.: )

Johnston puts Massey’s memories to good use, eff ectively constructing LordCromer as a man with genuine respect for the theater and great sense of

what would be not just proper but theatrically successful upon the stage.Reference to the archive provides more information about Cromer’s atti-

tude toward the British stage. It seems that Cromer’s protectiveness wasinformed by a xenophobic paranoia about the corrupting influence of for-eign imports. His comment on Ferdinand Bruckner’s Les Criminels (which

was refused a license in ) reveals his sense of the degeneracy of for-eign theater as he passed judgment on the play: ‘‘A horrible play of vicioushumanity without a single redeeming feature. In Berlin, Paris and possibly

in New York such a play would be applauded . . . but not in London I hope’’(LC Corr., LR , April ).Cromer’s love of the French language did not extend to French theater,

as his response to The Monte Carlo Scandal demonstrates. Cromer’s instruc-tions to his staff reveal greater concern over the national provenance of this


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society comedy than disapproval of its coverage of the scandalous subject of adultery. His comments show his deep-seated antipathy toward theperformance of French plays on the British stage:

On general grounds I am not disposed to encourage translations or adaptations

from French plays. Their performance are to the detriment of English authorsand at present British Theatre requires all the incentive and encouragement it

can obtain to raise its standard. Further the translation of plays permissible in

French leads to increased difficulty in censorship. . . . I trust this may induce

would-be producers to seek out good English plays instead of necessarily emas-

culated translations from the French. (LC Corr., LR , August )

There are also many examples of Cromer’s anti-American sentiment in the

files. His refusal to license Chicago (submitted by Maurice Watkins in )sums up his attitude toward American culture: ‘‘British standards are higherthan American in all things and it will be a sorry day for this country whenthese standards are not maintained’’ (LC Corr., LR , January ).

Cromer went so far as attempting to expand the scope of the censorshipacross the Atlantic. The file on Cradle-Snatchers (written by R. G. Medcroftand Norma Mitchell in ) includes a letter to Harry Crichton, at theBritish Embassy in Washington, which suggests that Crichton might pro-

vide the censorship office with details of plays which had aroused controversy in America. The Lord Chamberlain’s request is couched in the mostdiplomatic terms:

In every country there is a diff erence in tastes, which creates a diff erence inatmosphere. . . . What may be acceptable in one country is not acceptable in

another. . . . Formerly the bulk of doubtful plays . . . hailed from France, but

latterly it is America that has provided this form of drama, and the problem is

becoming increasingly difficult. (LC Corr., LR , January )

Crichton refused his request, and Cromer’s attitude toward Americanexports did not ameliorate. Cromer’s response to Sailor Beware (written byKenyon Nicholson and Charles Robinson and submitted eight years later,in ) is less tactful and more succinct: ‘‘American Beastliness!’’ (LC Corr.,LR , February ).23

These examples of institutionalized xenophobia draw a rather less-

. In , eighteen plays were refused a license by the Lord Chamberlain. Half of these

were foreign imports, and four were American. Cromer’s objections to these plays may havebeen based upon a real disparity between social values in America and Britain, but they maysimply reflect diff erent understandings of what was suitable for theatrical representation dur-ing this period. In fact, theatrical importations and translations were particularly likely to becensored as they were written without a priori consideration of the British licensing system.Nicholson explores this issue.


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flattering portrait of the censorship than the version painted by Johnston.However, according to Johnston, the censor and the censored enjoyed acordial relationship during Cromer’s administration and after it, until the

abolition of the censorship in the s. Johnston obviously considered thecensorship to be in the upstanding tradition of a gentlemanly game wellplayed, exemplifying good-humored, decent British behavior. He thus usesa somewhat overextended cricketing metaphor to describe the end of thecensorship:

It had been a long innings for the team of censors, lasting over four hundred

years. Some Lord Chamberlains had come up against hostile bowling. The likesof Ibsen and Shaw gave them a few bruises and, later in the innings, Osborne,

Tynan and Bond were eff ective change bowlers, not easy to play. Between them,however, their Lordships had made a lot of runs (in terms of the number of plays

licensed), and I like to think that Lord Cobbold, who ran himself out, was given

a standing ovation as he walked back to the pavilion. (Johnston : )

This assessment of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship is concluded with astatement from Geoff rey Dearmer, which refers to those plays which weresuppressed: ‘‘The fact that now, some twenty years after the passing of thecensor, few, if any, have been thought of sufficient merit to be given a pub-

lic performance, argues strongly, surely, that no harm was ever done to theTheatre’’ (ibid.: ).

Johnston is on safe ground here, as it is impossible to reconstruct an alter-native British theater tradition, free from the intrusive hand of the LordChamberlain’s censorship. How can we calculate the eff ect of the censor-ship’s delay of public performance of the work of playwrights such as Piran-dello, Beckett, Pinter, and Bond and its xenophobic exclusion of many for-eign plays? Theater is the most time-bound of arts, realized in a moment

of transient performance, often addressing issues which are of most con-cern to a contemporary audience. The historical significance and potentialinfluence of censored material is unrecoverable.

Furthermore, it seems that the most pernicious eff ect of the censorshipsystem may have been its encouragement of self-censorship, which can beseen in the widespread anticipation of the Lord Chamberlain’s licensingdecisions. In his examination of the depiction of revolution on the Britishstage during the s, Steve Nicholson cites Dorothy Knowles (: ),

who, writing in , referred to the ‘‘unborn children—the plays that a

generation of intelligent young dramatists might have liked to have writ-ten but had been warned that they must not write.’’ Nicholson (: )recognizes the incalculable impact of the British pre-licensing system andthe theater which went unrealized because of the author’s prior knowledgethat it would not pass the licensing procedure: ‘‘the real power of censor-


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ship is often insidious rather than conspicuous. Writers and managers knewthe constraints within which they were expected to operate.’’

The archive does not, and indeed cannot, record the operation of this

form of censorship. Its work of repression ensures that there cannot be astraightforward refutation of Johnston’s assertion that ‘‘no harm was everdone.’’

5. Revisionism/Rewriting: The Ethics of Indeterminacy

Johnston’s portrayal of the work of the censorship office invokes memoryin a process of legitimization, as he refigures the labor of the censorship

as essential to the preservation of British morality and good taste. Giventhat the Lord Chamberlain no longer controls the British theater, such anaccount might appear innocuous. Nonetheless, Johnston’s treatment of thearchive and its evidence seems unsatisfactory. His lighthearted assertion of the censorship’s benevolence must rankle in some quarters, adding insultto old injuries. However, an interrogation of his imaginative reconstruc-tion of the theatrical past simply illustrates the uncertainty introduced bypsychoanalytic skepticism toward our narration of past events. While thisskepticism can lead to a healthy respect for the cultural and subjective speci-ficity of recollection, it can also provide a theoretical mandate for revision-ist historicism. According to Derrida (: ), this is ‘‘the archive feveror disorder we are experiencing today, concerning its lightest symptoms orthe great holocaustic tragedies of our modern history and historiography:concerning all the detestable revisionisms as well as the most legitimate,necessary and courageous rewritings of history.’’ Some of the playwrightsand producers referred to in Johnston’s monograph might well considerhis book to be an example of just such ‘‘detestable revisionism.’’ Johnston’s

account is unpalatable because it fails to reflect, or acknowledge, the diverse workings of the censorship.

Where do we go from here? We have replaced the archive’s traditionallegitimacy with a site of conflicted signification. But this need not leadtoward the fatalistic conception that there are no facts, only interpretations.Derrida (ibid.:) notes that the contemporary awareness of historical inde-terminacy is at the heart of our desire to return to the archive as a source of knowledge: ‘‘We are en mal d’archive: in need of archives.’’ Despite our reser-

vations concerning the reliability of the archive and its liability to misleadand manipulate, we have to return to the past, or what remains of it, inorder to attempt a cautious, conditional reconstruction.

However, a revalorization of the archive may well involve its redefinition.This redefinition must account for its essential doubleness, as physical col-lection or space and as a concept or idea. This doubleness accounts in turn


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for the archive’s continual oscillation between the poles of thing and theory,the subject of this special issue. Derrida (ibid.: ), for example, foregroundsthe need for place in the operation of the archive:

Even in their guardianship or their hermeneutic tradition, the archives could do

neither without substrate nor without residence. It is thus, in this domiciliation, inthis house arrest, that archives take place.24

A case in point is the formation of the archive containing the textual recordsof the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship office. Their ‘‘domiciliation’’ was of prime importance. The association with the crown and the royal preroga-tive, signaled in the address of St. James’s Palace, placed the Lord Cham-berlain above the law: playwrights who were denied the right to presenttheir work upon the public stage had no opportunity to appeal against hisdecisions.

At the same time, though, the archive can be conceived not as an empiri-cal or material concept at all. Foucault’s ( []: –) well-knowndescription does just this:

[The archive is not] the sum of all the texts that a culture has kept upon its person

as documents attesting to its own past, or as evidence of a continuing identity;nor [is it] the institutions, which, in a given society, make it possible to record

and preserve those discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circula-

tion. [It is rather] the general system of the formation and the transformation of statements .

(Emphasis original.)

Negotiating the two poles that the archive variously occupies in the processof historical reconstruction is the challenge for any attempt at a redefini-tion of the archive. Such negotiation ought to prove extremely useful in itsapplication to the history of theatrical censorship. According to the Fou-cauldian definition of the archive, an archival assessment of the censoriouscontrol of the theater cannot be simply delineated by the textual contentsof the Lord Chamberlain’s records. Moreover, it is quite clear that theatri-cal censorship did not simply disappear in Britain following the removal of this responsibility from the Lord Chamberlain in .

. He continues: ‘‘There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of mem-ory. Eff ective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the partici-pation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. A contrario, thebreaches of democracy can be measured by what a recent and in so many ways remarkable

work entitles Forbidden Archives ( Archives Interdites: Les peurs francaises face a l’histoire contempo-raine). Under this title, which we cite as the metonymy of all that is important here, SoniaCombe does not only gather a considerable collection of material, to illuminate and interpretit; she asks numerous essential questions about the writing of history, about the ‘repression’of the archive, about the ‘repressed archive’ as ‘power . . . of the state over the historian’’’(Derrida : n. ).


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Legal constraints on theatrical performance remain today, even if theyare no longer specific to the theater. Individual plays no longer need alicense, but theaters are licensed under the Health and Safety Regulations

Act, and producers are liable under the Obscene Publications Act of .The theater has also been subject to private prosecution, as well as to theimpact of the infamous Section of the British Local Government Act of , which prohibits local authorities from ‘‘promoting’’ homosexuality.Ironically, without the protection of the Lord Chamberlain’s license, thedependence of playwrights and theater companies upon a plethora of otherinstitutions has become more apparent.The following have all taken on therole of censor: corporate sponsors; public pressure groups; administrators

of charitable foundations; functionaries of local government; members of theater boards; and those who distribute public subsidy.25

Of course, this wide dispersal of censorious intervention poses problemsfor the archival researcher interested in the development of the theater inBritain after .The faceless guardians of public propriety listed above donot record their decisions in a centralized database. However, although it isclear that the material archive may no longer exist, the discursive archive,the historical a priori, the system that enables the ‘‘ formation and the transfor-mation of statements ,’’ remains.

The continuing presence of the censorious impulse indicates the impor-tance of a redefinition of the archive. Indeed, any researcher interested incensorious influences upon British theater will have to work on a new defi-nition of the archive, which responds to the particularity of theater as amedium. This definition should attend to the shortcomings of the LordChamberlain’s archive: both as a repository of theater history and as amethod of censorship.

Fortunately, these shortcomings are easily discernible. The Lord Cham-

berlain’s censorship was certainly ineff ective as a method of censorship.The archive reveals that the examiners struggled to reconcile their depen-dence upon the system of prelicensed scripts with theater’s ephemerality,as it bears witness to the performance’s evasion of the authority of the text.Upon occasion, the Lord Chamberlain’s attempts to tie performance to alicensed script were decisively defeated by impromptu improvisation, innu-endo, and the infinite expansion of stage business.26

. Some exemplification of these observations can be found in my article ‘‘British Theatreand the Performance Police: Persecution and Pre-licensing’’ (Freshwater ). Full cover-age is available in my Ph.D. dissertation, ‘‘Shadow Play: The Censorship of the Stage inTwentieth Century Britain’’ (Freshwater b), which is being prepared for publication.. Examples and further exploration of this issue can be found in my article ‘‘Anti-theatricalPrejudice and the Persistence of Performance’’ (Freshwater a).


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Clearly, the Lord Chamberlain could not hope to capture the corporealart of theater through textual regulation once and for all. All theatrical pro-ductions include a mutable relationship between the author’s script and

the resulting performance, just as all theater explores the gap between thetext and the spoken word or physical gesture. This rupture is inherent inall theatrical performance.The main limitation of the Lord Chamberlain’scensorship as a method of control was that it failed to address theater as per-

formance. This, of course, is the same deficiency that its archive presents asa record of theatrical history. Indeed, all archivization of live performanceis problematized by its subject’s time-based nature. No amount of video,documentary recording, or personal testimony can capture the ephemer-

ality of performance. Something will always be lost in translation. Any redefinition of the archive must attend to the singularity of perfor-mance as a medium. Such a redefinition would need to address the the-ater’s realization as a corporeal art, its development through processes of devising and improvisation, and modern performance’s increasing disas-sociation from textuality. This redefinition is plainly beyond the scope of this article. Furthermore, academic analysis of censored or suppressed per-formance has its own set of problems. Much censored material is simplynot available for assessment: the desired object of the researcher’s gaze isirremediably lost to history, aborted before it reached the stage. In otherinstances, the work’s progress, development, and dissemination have beendistorted by its entanglement with the censor’s critical power. However, if

we wish to encounter these lost performances, we must enter the archive,for it is the only place where their traces remain.

If we must enter the archive, then the deployment of a methodology of ethical self-awareness, as well as the adoption of an alternative approachto the archive, may allay anxieties about its use in research. An approach

to the Lord Chamberlain’s archive which enables a careful and nuancedtreatment of its unstable contents may be provided by a return to theFoucauldian methodology of archaeology, outlined in The Archaeolo of Knowledge:

What we are concerned with is not to neutralize discourse, to make it a sign of

something else, and to pierce through its density in order to reach what remainssilently anterior to it, but on the contrary to maintain it in its consistency, to

make it emerge in its own complexity.What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense

with ‘‘things.’’ . . . To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of ‘‘things’’ anterior todiscourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. (Fou-

cault []: )

Foucault’s treatise is now a standard text, and yet it seems that we still haveto fully abandon our attachment to the alluring, fetishized ‘‘‘things’ anterior


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to discourse.’’ As James Knapp and Jeff rey Pence observe in the introduc-tion to this special issue, things have a disturbing tendency to transforminto objects. Our responsibility now is to examine the grounds and basis of

their objectification.This examination should perhaps start with a clarification of the re-

searcher’s own interests. This would mean beginning any assessment, asin archaeology, with the most recent layers of history and working back-

wards in order to understand why we reconstruct the past in the way wedo.27 It should also foreground an awareness that archives are always cre-ated out of a concern for what is yet to come and that they are maintainedand protected with an eye to the future.28 Here the procedures and concerns

of psychoanalysis overlap with those of archaeology. Both fields emphasizethe importance of dialogue between the present and the past. Their investi-gations privilege meaning reached through this process of exchange, as wesearch for signification which will enable a release or for a reinterpretationof the symptoms of the past which will be of future use.

Shanks’s (: ) summation of archaeological ethics eloquently artic-ulates this form of interaction between the past and the present:

The past object exists in its non-identity, a condition which requires me to use

my imagination to come to an understanding of it. . . . But not just anything canbe invented of this thing I have found. A responsibility (to the object, its maker

and its user) requires me . . . to treat it as a correspondent in dialogue—the past

looks back and answers. . . . This responsibility is a demand that the object be

respected. So the rules of my engagement with the past are . . . laid down . . . in

an ethic which maintains that I acknowledge I do not know but can learn from

the past, that the past is ineff able in its diff erence. This is archaeology’s ethic.

This ethical responsibility extends not just to the contents of the archive butto the consequences of its reanimation as well. The performances silencedand distorted through the operation of a state-sponsored censorship can-not be revived. Their moment has gone. However, theatrical censorshipcontinues: I can only hope that the reassessment of past struggles may pro-

vide a useful perspective on our contemporary experiences of suppressionand silencing in the performing arts. So, as I immerse myself once more inthe Lord Chamberlain’s alluring archive, Theodor Adorno and Max Hork-heimer’s exhortation from The Dialectic of Enlightenment seems particularly

. In the case of the Lord Chamberlain’s correspondence files, an analysis of our currentapprehension of theater censorship and the contemporary preoccupations of the theater

world would provide a valuable frame.. The past function of the Lord Chamberlain’s correspondence as a disciplinary mecha-nism and its present role as a privileged site of preservation would be highlighted by such anawareness.


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apt: ‘‘what is needed is not the preservation of the past, but the redemptionof past hopes’’ (quoted in Pearson and Shanks : ).

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