No! He had not leisure to consider what might be separately inoffensive!" So, too, some eight years before the passing of the Licensing Act, Gay's ballad opera of "Polly," designed as a sequel to "The Beggar's Opera," incurred the displeasure of the Chamberlain, and was denied the honours of representation.
Nor was it only on political grounds that the Lord Chamberlain or the Master of the Revels exercised his power.

The "View of the Stage," published by the nonjuring clergyman, Jeremy Collier, in 1697, first drew public attention to the immorality and profanity of the dramatic writers of that period.

The diatribes and rebukes of Collier, if here and there a trifle overstrained, were certainly, for the most part, provoked by the nature of the case, and were justified by the result.
Even Cibber, who had been cited as one of the offenders, admits that "his calling our dramatic writers to this strict account had a very wholesome effect upon those who wrote after this time.

They were now a great deal more upon their guard ...

and, by degrees, the fair sex came again to fill the boxes on the first day of a new comedy, without fear of censure." For some time, it seems, the ladies had been afraid of venturing "bare-faced" to a new comedy, till they had been assured that they could do it without risk of affront; "or if," as Cibber says, "their curiosity was too strong for their patience, they took care, at least, to save appearances, and rarely came upon the first days of acting but in masks, then daily worn and admitted in the pit, the side-boxes, and gallery." This reform of the drama, it is to be observed, was really effected, not by the agency of the Chamberlain or any other court official, but by force of the just criticism, strenuously delivered, of a private individual.