"The law we passed this morning says anything approved by a censorship board was fine, right, it just also said it wasn't making a censorship board? Could we pass a new law that adds a censorship board without getting rid of the other parts of the law that mean you don't always need to go past a censorship board?"

"The problem is that Cheliax is very large and to have a censorship board with enough literate men - let alone decent men with reasonable judgment - to staff it would take money, and as much as I would like us to be able to have one that can approve so quickly that even pamphlets could get published in a week if they were reasonable, I think orphanages, administering justice, whatever we do for education, and an army that both could stand up to invasion and can be brought into cities in case of riots without doing more damage than the riots, are places we need to spend a great deal of money we do not really have. So I don't think we can fairly devote, to a board of censors, the gold they'd need to do their job well, or anything close to it. Not this year or next, and my guess is not much better than yours on how many years it will be."

Thoughtful frown. "What if there were a censorship board but only for theater and things like that? So it wouldn't need to spend all its time reading the pamphlets, and you wouldn't need to pay as many people, and you could maybe do it city by city so the costs are more spread out — how much would that cost? —Sorry if that's a stupid idea, I'm not trying to have stupid ideas, I just... don't know how much it costs to have a government."

"It's hard to have precise numbers; it was the Crown and the Rack that paid for it before, which is to say, Hell paid for it. I considered local censors before I talked with the Archduke, because you're right, it would divide the work and the cost and put it in those places benefiting most from it, but he convinced me it would be an ugly confusing patchwork in practice. It might work better for performances, but it would make it very difficult to have a play or opera tour - for something very significant or heavily favored by the Queen or the Archmages might be approved statewide, like Wraxton's new play from Pezzack, but anyone else would need to send an agent ahead to each city by months to negotiate and be sure they'd be allowed to perform. I'm not sure, Songbird, would that be easier than I think?"

"It sounds difficult but not insurmountable at least in my region."

"I think the case for performances being licensed on a city-by-city basis is stronger than for books, because performances are not, as books are, copied out by the dozen and transported at the bottom of a cart, but far more individual, but it would make touring companies' business near-impossible and have a dreadfully disunifying effect on the nation. But, as the Archduchess says, we have a great shortage of literate, wise men with experience in lands beyond Cheliax who could be trusted to staff a censorship board, and most of them are urgently needed for other work. I'd want to talk to friends of mine outside the committee and outside the convention about the censorship bill, to see what clever ideas they have to protect the theater."

Enric doesn’t care much about this himself. Never been to a theater, wasn’t around that one time a traveling show was in town. But he sees one important part.

”To me, looks better to have the censorship board, by crown or by city, even if they only have a few people and take a long time to approve shows. If something is being put in front of a crowd, better to have someone working for the law to look at it and say if it’s legal and won’t cause trouble.”

”Because of what Laia said, how it isn’t fair to the theater people to never be sure if they made a mistake and are about to get arrested. Especially with new laws that haven’t been tested yet.”

Enric doesn’t mention that, as far as he’s heard, a few specific people read the law about what’s legal to say and still got it wrong. He doesn’t say things about specific people.

”But it also because having someone who is the law checking will work better to stop trouble. Especially if it’s by city. People know their homes best, someone from a city will know what kind of things could start a riot, better than someone who’s never been there. 

She nods at Enric's comment about it being unfair if the actors can never be sure if they're going to be arrested. "In Pezzack the Asmodeans tried to kill a bunch of actors for putting on a play that the censors had already approved, when we write the law we should definitely make sure that people can't be executed for putting on a play that the censors said was okay if they don't break any other laws doing it."

"We might say the smaller censor jurisdictions are by duchy, and the dukes can give people in their cities authority to be a censor board, but it still covers the whole duchy. That still has some disunifying effect and restriction on touring, but much less, and it could put a duchy at the mercy of whichever city is most permissive, but the duke doesn't have to trust all of them. I certainly wouldn't let anyone set a censor board up in Vyre, for example. Other perspectives would be helpful, though; I'm inclined to be quick, but mostly because I feel I promised, on the floor, to handle correcting the oversight promptly; a few days or a week would do little harm in the bigger picture."

"Perhaps more relevantly, Songbird Solandra, what are the most important things to explicitly protect? We want to be sure we cover prose and poetry, speech and song. Sheet music for instruments is likely on safe ground. But what should be thinking about around that? Modifying scripts, you mentioned. Is distributing them tricky? What else are important steps from buying a foreign script to putting it on?"

"We almost always get them via Absalom if we don't have them already or write them in-house. We could start getting them from somewhere else but we'd have to figure out how and haven't yet, and I don't know how long it would take. The cast needs copies, and the crew and orchestra needs versions marked up for their own cues. We usually want to be able to sell programs but losing that wouldn't be as awful."