Talk:Licensing Act 1737

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Could this be renamed to Theatrical Licensing Act, to avoid confusion with the Licensing Act 2003? --San de Berg 10:11, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

It could, if all the links are corrected. Wikipedia has a lot of examples of first come, first served on terms. However, this particular act is very often referred to simply as "the licensing act" or "the licensing act of 1737" in criticism and literary history. I.e. "licensing act" is the most common name for the thing. I have no particular objection to the renaming, if the links are all fixed to point to the new name. Geogre 11:05, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

I don't think that's accurate--contemporaries often called it the Theatrical Licensing Act (I'm looking at a pro-act letter to The Political State June 1737 as we speak, by happenstance--and procrastinating on a paper by editing wikipedia). Anyway, there are lots of things to be licensed, and so lots of licensing acts. It seems awfully clumsy just to organize them by date. Fearwig 06:41, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

I think the disambiguation article Licensing Act has resolved the issue by both linking to the different Acts and providing a brief explanation of each sphere of influence. Road Wizard 18:44, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Original Research

An anonymous user at User talk:68.39.174.238 has tagged this article as containing "original research or unverified claims", with the edit summary saying "Alot in here sounds suspiscious". Could the editor please clarify here how much of the article they require verifying? Is it limited to a particular sentence or paragraph, or perhaps it is a particular theme within the article? If we can identify which are the problem areas, we can focus our efforts on searching for relevant sources and resolving the issue more quickly. If the problem lies with every aspect of the article, it may take a while to identify all of the necessary sources. Thanks. Road Wizard 18:57, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

• Here is one source. It appears to support the general thrust of this article. Is this adequate verification, or would you prefer something more? Thanks. Road Wizard 20:56, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Most of what made me suspiscious were the last two paragraphs citing the influence of the Act. I may have missed the page on the source cited, but nothing seems to come out in the reading and support many of the statements of those 2. 68.39.174.238 23:51, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

I've changed to a bunch of {{fact}}s to show exactly what is suspiscious sounding (in an OR/nonreferenced way), as opposed to a general tag. 68.39.174.238 21:36, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

The list of references for that is very long. Basically, they're at the point of truisms. Find a discussion of the Act that doesn't talk about how the novel was boosted by it (Martin Battestin's biography of Henry Fielding that I'm reading right now takes it as an assumption) and the effects on Bardolatry. It's easier than finding one that does suggest them. I could have listed CBEL, OCL, about a dozen others, but none of them would have been references for this article, which is merely an overview. Geogre 23:54, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

There was one thing that would have needed a citation, IMO, and I wanted to cite it but couldn't remember the article that first established it (in the 1980's): the number of performances of Shakespeare quadrupled after the Act. Because I couldn't remember the first authors in print to make the point, I didn't include the fact. At this point, it's a fact that is cited by pretty much everyone who writes about Shakespeare, and there is a citation for it at Shakespeare's reputation. Again, this was an overview. What really perturbs me is the dropping of a tag on an article that, essentially, makes every reader think that there is some serious reason to doubt it, when there hadn't been any effort to query the authors. That's very unpleasant and very unhelpful. Geogre 12:41, 23 May 2006 (UTC)