Licenser

"Licenser" -- Fillmore's administration passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which enabled the Southern masters to recapture runaway slaves.

Assimilative Memory or, How to Attend and Never Forget

Thence forward he was known as the Licenser of Playhouses and Examiner of Plays.

A Book of the Play Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character Dutton Cook 1856

Ever since the passage of the Licensing Act of 1737, any play offered on the London stages had to be submitted to the government's Licenser of Plays before it could be performed, and the Licenser at the time, John Larpent, tended to ban all political references from the stage.

Theatrical Forms, Ideological Conflicts, and the Staging of Obi 2002

If _The Fringe_, as it at first went in to the Licenser, had to be trimmed, CHARLES our

Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 Various

How little applicable, at all events, to our Commonwealth! though, to be sure (you may say) we possess a relic of it in His Majesty’s Licenser of Plays.

I. Inaugural 1916

Such a law may have been beneficial at times, but during the seventeenth century it was another instrument of tyranny, since no Licenser would allow anything to be printed against his particular church or government.

Outlines of English and American Literature : an Introduction to the Chief Writers of England and America, to the Books They Wrote, and to the Times in Which They Lived William Joseph Long 1909

The Archbishop was the State Licenser for religious books, but of course did not do the work himself.

Obiter Dicta Second Series Augustine Birrell 1891

[282.1] The theatre in Goodman's Fields was opened in October, 1729, by Thomas Odell, who was afterwards Deputy Licenser under the 1737 Act. Odell, having no theatrical experience, entrusted the management to Henry Giffard.

An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Volume I 1889

The whole objection to the Licenser is simply that he is under no regulations whatever.

An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Volume I 1889

It was said, too, That to bring the Stage under the Restraint of a Licenser was leading the way to an Attack upon the Liberty of the Press.

An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Volume I 1889