[A Book of the Play by Dutton Cook]@TWC D-Link book
A Book of the Play

CHAPTER IV
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"Alasco" was published, and those who read it--they were not many--found it certainly harmless; but not less certainly pompous and wearisome.
However, that Shee was furnished with a legitimate grievance was generally agreed, although in "Blackwood's Magazine," then very intense in its Toryism, it was hinted that the dramatist, his religion and his nationality being considered, might be in league with the author of "Captain Rock," and engaged in seditious designs against the peace and Protestantism of Ireland! Some five years later, it may be noted, "Alasco" was played at the Surrey Theatre, without the slightest regard for the opinion of the Examiner of Plays, or with any change in the passages he had ordered to be expunged.

Westminster was not then very well informed as to what happened in Lambeth, and probably it was not generally known that "Alasco," with all its supposed seditious utterances unsilenced, could be witnessed upon the Surrey stage.

Nor is there any record that anybody was at all the worse, or the treasury of the theatre any the better, for the representation of the forbidden tragedy.
The Examiner of Plays at this time was George Colman the younger, who was appointed to the office, less on account of the distinction he enjoyed as a dramatist, than because he was a favourite and a sort of boon companion of George IV.

Colman had succeeded a Mr.Larpent, who had filled the post for some twenty years, and who, notwithstanding that, as a strict Methodist, he scarcely seemed a very fit person to pronounce judgment upon stage plays, had exercised the powers entrusted to him with moderation.

It was generally agreed that he was a considerate and benignant ruler, and that his career as Examiner offered few occasions for remark, although upon its close some surprise was excited at the exposure for sale by public auction of the many manuscripts of plays, &c., which were found in his possession, and which should certainly have been preserved among the archives of the Chamberlain's office.


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