In contrast to the ancient Greek theatre, the foundation of drama as we know it, theatre in the west has from the later middle ages always been involved with, threatened by, and in need of protection from, the law. Once theatre was, to be crude about it, expelled from the Roman Catholic church within which it was reborn in the tenth century A.D. (A. M. Nagler, A source book in theatrical history (New York, 1952), p. 39), the need for public supervision and control manifested itself. Professional actors were regarded as ‘rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars’ as they wandered the medieval English market towns with their farces and interludes, after the last days of the miracle and morality plays had set in. Once playwrights emerged as professionals in the Tudor period, they were under pressure to ally their work with education and moral doctrine, as the Renaissance got under way and classical notions of art and eloquence began to jostle with the medieval legacy of didacticism. Transgression was not to be allowed. Law and order governed public holidays and public theatres alike. Revelry was all very well, literally in its place, but it had to be, and was, officially governed. It was all very well for Shakespeare’s Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth night to cry down the puritanical Malvolio with the outburst, ‘Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’ (ibid., pp 123–4), but history was to show that the Malvolios of England were in the ascendant, and Oliver Cromwell was to order the closing of all theatres in 1642. This ban stretched to the newly established theatre in Werburgh Street, Dublin, the first professional theatre in Ireland.

In London, from the 1570s on, designated theatres could be built only outside of the city walls, whether north or south. But even as designated spaces they were under constant suspicion from the lord mayor and/or the privy council, and forced by law only to employ companies of players licensed and regulated by some member of the aristocracy. The only way playwrights and actors could hope to thrive was when bound in to such a regime. If compliant they could do very well, if not, if on occasion they were riotous or blasphemous, for example, or, bless the mark, showed disrespect to crown or mitre, they ran the risk of branding or imprisonment. And yet they were honoured in their time. Hamlet warns Polonius that he must treat the strolling players well at Elsinore, ‘for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live’ (ibid., pp 514–17). Fear and regard continued jointly to drive the reception of theatre and theatre people across the centuries. After 1660, when Charles II restored public theatres as well as himself to London, women took to the stage for the first time, and new buildings, indoor and in the best French style, were erected, equipped with a royal patent granting monopoly, protection seemed at last to be guaranteed, but as this is where the book under review begins it is clear that, in true theatrical parlance, what appears may well be illusion. For law and lawyers began a whole new relationship with established theatre and its right to amuse.

Professor Osborough’s study must be welcomed as an unusual intervention in the field of theatre history. Yet it is not quite a surprise. The book appears as number twenty-four in the Irish Legal History series, the first seven of which were published by Irish Academic Press, to which Niall Osborough contributed three volumes. In his preface to the volume under review he shows that he is well aware of theatre as a need to humankind and to society. He describes his book as ‘an attempt to explore the legal dimensions to entertainments that members of the public have over the years paid good money to come and see’ (p. ix). Beginning with the Irish master of the revels, instituted in Ireland in 1638 – a year after the opening of the Werburgh Street Theatre – by Thomas Wentworth, a public office along the same lines as was established in England in the Tudor period, Osborough indicates the colonialist nature of Irish theatre, about which there is no argument nowadays. His concern is to indicate with carefully detailed source materials the complexity of the pattern that evolved as Irish laws followed English and yet accommodated to conditions obtaining in Irish society. The office of Irish master of the revels was a sinecure, the donkey work of regulation falling to a deputy. The benefit to either master or deputy lay in the holding of a royal patent to build a theatre, which the first holder, John Ogilby, duly did when granted the sole Irish patent after the Restoration for what became known as Theatre Royal, Smock Alley, which endured until the 1780s as one of only three such theatres in these islands. (In recent times, Smock Alley has reappeared on the same site, in Dublin’s Temple Bar.) What concerns Osborough is not the success as theatre of Smock Alley and its would-be rivals in Dublin but the disputes which arose over rights and transgressions, in relation to those acts of English parliament, the 1737 Licensing Act (which also contained regulations amounting to censorship) and the 1843 act which broadened the rights of theatres other than patent ones and at the same time extended regulation to other forms of entertainment and paved the way towards a more modern democratic, middle-class theatre. In between came the only native Irish act, known as the Dublin Stage Regulation Act, 1786. This latter remained the legal touchstone for over 100 years, and was actually invoked when the Abbey Theatre sought its patent from the lord lieutenant in 1904. Even though English law slowly liberalised, so that in 1968 the lord chamberlain’s office was abolished, doing away with official censorship, Irish law post-1922 seemed to find it impossible to abandon the 1786 act and the need for patents until 1997.

In a series of well-ordered chapters, Osborough goes on to explore in a comparative mode the struggle for rights, the incidence and regulation of riots and disturbances in Irish and English theatres, the vexed question of censorship, and the long fight to establish copyright and the payment of authors’ royalties. The thoroughness of this survey is very impressive. What it shows is the evolution of the freedom of the stage, the conflicts which really did result in the survival of the fittest. The memorable fighters include Thomas Sheridan actor, manager and patent-holder at Smock Alley, who, insisting on introducing reforms in audience behaviour to make theatre more respectful of actors’ dignity and social position, found himself embroiled in what became known as the Kelly riots in 1747, when a young T.C.D. man challenged his claim to be as good a gentleman as he, in proof of which Kelly and his backers wrecked the theatre. As, Sheridan’s biographer puts it, ‘This Dublin theatrical riot was shared by all of Dublin.’ A principle was at stake whether theatre was to be a centre of respectable entertainment or a mere cockpit. ‘The epilogue was proclaimed in the law courts. Sheridan, by this time, had been indicted by Kelly, so both sides were tried by the same jury.’ (Esther Sheldon, Thomas Sheridan of Smock Alley (Princeton, 1967), p. 94). Sheridan won a famous victory for theatre and for Dublin in this case. As Osborough shows over and over, the running of a theatre, with enemies all around, was a litigious business in Ireland. He gives a whole chapter to ‘Disruption and riot’ which extends down to the Abbey Theatre in the twentieth century. He also gives a chapter to censorship, and this, too, covers a significant struggle in the establishment of rights that broadly affect culture and society as well as individual practitioners. It is astonishing to consider that, as late as 1957, in a controversial case, the lessee of a Dublin theatre could be hauled into court on a charge of ‘showing for gain an indecent and profane performance’, namely The rose tattoo by Tennessee Williams. Such was the fate of Alan Simpson of the Pike Theatre, and Osborough gives an expert account of the details.

The Irish stage: a legal history adds a useful resource to the field of Irish theatre and drama. Its focus is steadily on a crucial feature of Irish theatre history long acknowledged by scholars but on which this is the first specialised study. Osborough synthesises in masterly fashion disputes and controversies that gave rise to changes in law and regulation in England and Ireland in ways that clarify significant differences between the two countries, and thereby he casts fresh light on some unique aspects of theatre-making, culture and society. He is not critical in this regard, however. He neither approves nor disapproves of the ways in which this Irish theatre developed. He stays aloof from the politics of post-colonial theory and he chooses to ignore Irish theatres dedicated to the Irish language. And he passes over the Act of Union without qualm, though it surely delayed the development of a nationalist Irish theatre by 100 years.

The bibliography is useful, as it includes sources not generally familiar to the student of theatre history. A major omission, however, is John C. Greene’s monumental Theatre in Dublin, 1743–1820 (8 vols, Bethlehem, PA, 2011), an essential source for Irish theatre history. (See Christopher Murray, ‘Encore “what ish my nation”: Irish theatre and drama in the eighteenth century’ in Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an dá chultúr, xxvii (2012), pp 185–91.) On the other hand, the index of legislation supplied should be useful, and the appendix supplying in Irish and English the text of the letters patent for the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in 1959 is a real surprise and a delight to read. It is signed by Taoiseach Seán Lemass, who probably never darkened the Gate in his life.