Much academic research is in thrall to the allure of the archive. There is an undeniable pleasure in exploring untouched textual territory, and evidence retrieved from long hours among dusty documents has long played a central role in authenticating the authority, plausibility, and validity of new research work. The allure of the archive is particularly strong in the case of the Lord Chamberlain's Plays and Correspondence files: the collection mined by The Lord Chamberlain Regrets. These files, which are currently housed at the British Library, preserve the textual detritus produced by the quotidian activity of the British theatrical censorship system. Until its abolition in 1968, this system required that the Lord Chamberlain license every public theater production: from local pantomimes to grandiose performances in the West End. Scripts were submitted before performance for consideration by the Lord Chamberlain's examiners, and the scripts, memoranda, letters, and reports contained within this extraordinary archive contain a unique record of the changing rationale behind the censorship system, as well as preserving the material that it suppressed.

The pleasures of access to this exceptional research resource are undoubtedly heightened by the secrecy that surrounded the machinations of the system. As the Lord Chamberlain was operating under the auspices of the royal prerogative, he was under no obligation to explain his staff's decisions. Moreover, playwrights who were denied the right to present their work upon the public stage had no opportunity to appeal against his decisions. The Lord Chamberlain's staff worked hard to avoid unnecessary publicity and public scrutiny: fear of providing the press with controversial—and irrefutable—written statements led to the practice of keeping negotiations with theater managers over licenses verbal. The system was not bound by a set of firm guidelines, and consequently confusion and ignorance surrounded the principles and powers of the censorship. This history lends a particular frisson to the exposure of the debate and disagreements that went on behind the scenes at the Lord Chamberlain's office at St. James's Palace.

This publication aims to provide a taste of the pleasures of direct access to this material by reproducing many memoranda and letters in full and including several images of documents from the archive. It presents a detailed engagement with the censorship's treatment of a limited number of plays produced in Britain between 1824 and 1968. Responsibility for the discussion and analysis of this material is divided between the three contributors: Miriam Handley covers the 1824–1901 period, Steve Nicholson discusses 1902–1944, and Dominic Shellard addresses the final years of the censorship system.

There is certainly a need for serious academic analysis of this material. Unsurprisingly, the issue of censorship has been explored most often by those who feel strongly about its effects, and earlier publications in the field are unapologetically partisan. Richard Findlater's Banned! (1967) presents an entertaining intervention to what was a live debate over the legitimacy of the Lord Chamberlain's powers; John Johnston's The Lord Chamberlain's Blue Pencil (1990) is a fascinating, if unscholarly, defense of the Lord Chamberlain's position; while journalist Nicholas De Jongh's distaste for the Lord Chamberlain and his staff is undisguised in Politics, Prudery and Perversions: The Censoring of the English Stage, 1900– 1968 (2000). Handley explicitly distances this publication from this polemical tradition, foregrounding the authors’ examination of the acts of interpretation that informed the licensing decisions taken at the Lord Chamberlain's office.

This publication's engagement with the detail of the censorship system reveals that the office's decisions were not the product of rigid adherence to fixed principles or a consistent ideology. Instead, they were often driven by expedience, as the staff struggled to maintain the position and authority of the Lord Chamberlain as censor. Decisions were often informed by a strategy of repressive tolerance and a pragmatic attitude toward the system's numerous inconsistencies: private theater clubs, which could perform unlicensed plays, were tolerated as the system's “safety valve,” and outright refusal of a license was a last resort. The contributors also make it clear that the system was anything but watertight. The archive bears witness to performance's effective evasion of the authority of the text, revealing that the examiners found their dependence upon the system of licensing scripts undone by theater's inherent ephemerality. The Lord Chamberlain's attempts to tie performance to a licensed script appear to have been frequently defeated by impromptu improvisation, innuendo, and the infinite expansion of stage business.

The Lord Chamberlain Regrets presents fascinating information about the practice of censorship and insightful analysis of the detail of the system in order to reveal its complexity and inconsistency. It is surprising, however, that the three contributors have chosen to focus the publication primarily upon the censorious response to canonical plays (including work by Luigi Pirandello, Noel Coward, George Bernard Shaw, August Strindberg, John Osborne, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter, and Edward Bond), especially given that Nicholson opens his outstanding multivolume work, The Censorship of British Drama, 1900–1968 (2003–), with a strong argument for attending to the treatment of obscure plays: many of the most significant discussions took place over plays that no longer command critical attention. Shellard rightly acknowledges the value of Nicholson's research work in this publication's preface, but the project itself ignores one of the central tenets of Nicholson's methodology.

Indeed, the claim—made prominently on the publication's dust jacket—that the book provides its readers with “direct access to original, unpublished and unedited archive material” effectively elides the numerous editorial decisions taken over the selection of plays for discussion and documents for reproduction. While some of the images provide extremely useful information about the popular representation of the Lord Chamberlain's role, the value of other reproductions (such as the image of the ticket for A Patriot For Me, retained by a member of the Lord Chamberlain's office who visited the play in 1965) is less immediately apparent. One cannot help but wonder if the contributors have been partially seduced by the allure of the archive: the promise of unmediated contact with the past. The Lord Chamberlain Regrets proves a first-class advertisement for the archive held by its publishers, the British Library, and a selection of valuable academic analysis, but it is worth remembering, I think, that the authority of the Lord Chamberlain's censorship system rested upon the concealment of acts of interpretation. While Handley, Nicholson, and Shellard do an excellent job of exposing the system's acts of interpretation, the publication might have benefited from greater reflection upon the principles underlying their own acts of exclusion and selection.