Life — July 30, 1925 — page 8: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# "The Two Wills of the Show Business" This cartoon compares Shakespeare and Will Hays, likely the film industry's censorship chief. Shakespeare is depicted as a skeletal anatomical figure—suggesting his classical, enduring importance but also his "death" or irrelevance. Hays appears as a small, demonic figure operating a movie camera, implying he controls modern entertainment. The satire suggests that Hays's censorship standards now govern American culture more powerfully than Shakespeare's literary legacy. The contrast in size emphasizes how a bureaucratic censor has replaced traditional artistic authority. This reflects 1920s anxieties about corporate control of entertainment and the loss of cultural autonomy to industry gatekeepers.