ABSTRACT
The 1737 Theatre Licensing Act changed the nature of the British theatre utterly. A foretaste of what might happen occurred in 1739 when Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa, about the sixteenth-century liberation of Sweden from Danish rule, became the first play to be banned outright. Walpole believed the villain was a portrayal of himself. The action prompted Samuel Johnson’s first published work, a sarcastic Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage in which he suggested that the lives of civil servants would be made easier if the British people were forbidden from expressing any opinions about anything whatsoever and that reading and writing should not be taught to children.
