"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 Isger if we don't have them already or write them in-house or get them from elsewhere in Cheliax, though sometimes they got them from somewhere else so they've already been through a pass of edits. 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 will take though I'd hope in a perfect world to go through my church. 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."

"Isger is fine, I was just trying to draw the net broadly to avoid missing anything. So, let's see:

Reusing scripts; seems fine as we have it.

Writing new scripts; has the same problems as any other publication but not any more immediately.

Passing on modified scripts to another cast and crew; not currently covered. Might be tricky.

Importation from elsewhere; not an immediate problem, and while I would personally love to give the Church of Shelyn an easier path to approval I don't think the floor would.

Copies for the cast; does need to be included in the rights granted.

Marking up scripts; likewise, and I would guess we need to stay quite generous in how many different versions are allowed.

Programs; probably ought to go through normal publishing rules, and if they're handbills or posters for advertising I think definitely must, but for within the theater only we might work an exception.

Does that sound about right?"

"The thing that most concerns me is - scripts often have very sparse stage directions. There's a deep layer of interpretation on top of the written dialogue - am I smirking, do I sob, do I pause dramatically, are all the other characters hanging on my every word or ignoring me while I monologue and make a fool of myself? - and that's the main thing I expect will give a petty-censor pause. He'll say, I can't just stamp this approved and then be safe, if one of the actors rolls his eyes I'll be liable for every stupid thing the audience does. And the old censor boards would tell us where to be careful but the new publishing houses won't have that experience."

“They said the convention was private even if it’s more than eight people, could we do that for a theater? Let them pass papers around so long as no copy gets to anyone outside?”

"I don't think so; the problem, after all, is that a theatrical performance can start a riot, and any bill that passes the floor will be one that tries to approve only those that won't and not those that will."

nod “That’s all I have.”

Though now he wonders if they could get a bigger group declared private in another way. Let a nobles staff count as private, let a church use internal documents without having to publish, then eventually it gets to theaters and… lawyer nests? Enric isn’t sure on the details, he’ll have to ask his friends who actually know writing. 

If the problem is that theater causes riots and nobody knows how to prevent it from doing so, that seems like a reason not to prioritize having theater performances. Given that, you know, Chelish theater sucks. 

This would probably be impolitic to observe.

"I think saying that the passing of the theater's bills within its bounds is private might be achievable even if it can't be considered private in any more general way, which I agree it definitely can't. It's probably not worth it, though."

"People want to bring their programs home, but again not being able to sell programs won't cripple the industry as much as not being able to perform."

"Indeed. And I think if this means that programs become relatively dull and not worth making for shorter runs or in smaller towns, then they will, in places which are not already very tense, be publishable by ordinary publishing licenses. I think we can pass on from that topic."

"So there's the matters of copies and emendments for the cast and crew, selling onward marked-up scripts, assuring those who publish scripts in the first place that they won't be responsible for performances which are inflammatory, and assuring those who perform that the law won't suddenly call them inflammatory despite keeping the performance stable. I think the first two are matters of wording properly, now that we know to consider them, and the latter two are much more difficult."

"...Probably it's not wise to include in whatever we write that any exceptions we make don't apply to blood opera or anything else like it. It's mostly symbolic anyway, those ought to be illegal for the ordinary reasons."

"What's, uh, blood opera? I'm not from the cities." 

"We didn't do it in my company, but it's an opera where you enlist a convict as a character who's to be killed and then actually kill them. I'm not positive you couldn't do it in a beneficial way, giving someone a redemption arc to play their way through and try to believe in - if they're going to be killed anyway, I mean - but this is neither the time nor place to get into that."

"Wow, what the fuck."

He isn't going to say it but he really thinks "actually you could do blood opera if you fixed a few things" is an idea that ought to disqualify you from the convention and also all Good alignments.

"It is an Asmodean perversion," he agrees.

Enric has heard of this one. Mostly as one of the many, many, many, stories about young men or women who believe a stranger who promises a good life in the city. The man says he’ll make her an opera star, and then he does… for one night.

If Shelyn renounces her on the spot for her notion then she doesn't indicate this in any way!