The Censorship of Eighteenth-Century Theatre

David O'Shaughnessy is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Galway. He is co-editor of The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith (Cambridge University Press, 2018), a general editor of The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith (2024-), and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council funded project 'Theatronomics: the business of theatres, 1732–1809'. His website 'The Censorship of British Theatre, 1737–1843' won the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Prize for Digital Resources (2022).

Introduction: theatre censorship and Georgian cultural history David O'Shaughnessy; Part I. Gender: 1. Censorship as cultural production: the 1752 public entertainments act and Christopher Smart's Old Woman's Oratory Kristina Straub; 2. Damned women, or the disclosures of censorship Daniel O'Quinn; 3. Women writers and censorship in the early nineteenth century Katherine Newey; Part II. Politics: 4. Theatrical censorship and empire Bridget Orr; 5. Adapting Caleb Williams for the stage: the theatrical pale of censorship in Colman's The Iron Chest Lisa A. Freeman; 6. Knave or not? Censoring Thomas Holcroft Julie A. Carlson; Part III. Performance: 7. The censorship of personal satire on the eighteenth-century stage Matthew J. Kinservik; 8. Censoring the unseen: revolution and the aesthetics of theatrical space David Francis Taylor; 9. Evading censorship through comedy, improvisation and non-verbal performance in the early nineteenth century Jim Davis; 10. Censoring regency flash: the melodrama of the Weare-Thurtell murder case, 1823–24 Gillian Russell.