Abstract: This chapter focuses on Thomas John Dibdin’s drama, The Two Farmers, written for performance at Covent Garden in October 1800. The Two Farmers exemplifies how the Examiner of Plays exercised complete control in this savagely censoring a drama despite its proposed Royal Theatre venue. Although Dibdin personally remonstrated with Larpent, he had no alternative but to withdraw it. The Two Farmers incorporated a number of critical references to practices of grain hoarding, a crucial political issue during the alleged harvest failure of the autumn of 1800. Dibdin came from an ardently loyalist family (his father, Charles, received a Government pension for composing loyalist songs). The chapter shows how censorship had extensive powers of literary suppression. What we have lost is a key political intervention intended to be staged from Covent Garden, replete with comments on the changing role of the Volunteer militias and the surprising advocacy of black civil rights.

Keywords: censorship, Blackface, forestalling, famine, Dibdin,