Abominable, Impious, Prophane, Lewd, Immoral': Prosecuting the Actors in Early Eighteenth-Century London‪.‬

When the London theatres were re-established in 1660 the actors were sworn in as royal servants, and thus enjoyed immunity from prosecution, unless the Lord Chamberlain gave permission. Occasionally performers were threatened with arrest for presenting satirical material resented by a court individual or party-political faction. Much more regularly, they were arrested and prosecuted for matters unrelated to the theatre, such as highway robbery, murder or debt. However, in the early 1700s there was a rash of arrests and prosecutions of actors for their performance in popular comedies on the London stage. The change in the legal position of these performers symbolised the changing status of the theatrical institution, and was part of a tussle between local government and the royal court in early eighteenth-century England. As Judith Milhous and Robert Hume discovered in their trawl of the Lord Chamberlain's papers, the years 1660-1700 were full of petitions to sue, allowing individual actors to be pursued in civil suit, predominantly for debt. (2) The players' immunity under the law lasted until the end of the century, and even the actors at the Lincoln's Inn Fields playhouse, who were performing under a licence not a patent, were still able to claim some royal protection. Indeed, as late as August 1696 John Freeman of Lincoln's Inn Fields had the bailiffs who had arrested him without the Lord Chamberlain's approval taken into custody. However, in the period 1700-1702 there are four prosecutions brought against actors that do not appear to have passed through the Lord Chamberlain or his office. These signal a radical change in the protection of the actors as household servants in the closing years of William III's reign. (3) In the absence of any management of the theatre from either the Master of the Revels or the Lord Chamberlain, indeed the absence of an interested Lord Chamberlain between 1697 and 1699, it was members of the Society for the Reformation of Manners who initiated a variety of indictments against the theatre in general, and the actors in particular. Since individuals had to pay to bring an indictment, it took a well-organised, financially-secure group like the Society to fund such prosecutions. (4)