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"[A] play, which I presume to call original": Appropriation, creative genius, and eighteenth-century playwriting
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 2001 by Kewes, Paulina
That invention is the first great leading talent of a poet has been a point long since determined, because it is principally owing to that faculty of the mind that he is able to create, and be as it were a MAKER.... But surely there are many other powers of the mind as fully essential to constitute a fine poet, and therefore, in order to give the true character of any author's abilities, it should seem necessary to come to a right understanding of what is meant by GENIUS, and to analyze and arrange its several qualities. This once adjusted, it might prove no unpleasing task to examine what are the specific qualities of any poet in particular, to point out the talents of which he seems to have the freest command, or in the use of which he seems, as it were, to be left-handed. In this plain fair-dealing way the true and real value of an author will be easily ascertained; whereas in the more confined method of investigation, which establishes, at the outset, one giant-quality, and finding the object of the enquiry deficient in that, immediately proceeds to undervalue him in the whole, there seems to be danger of not trying his cause upon a full and equitable hearing.
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-Arthur Murphy, An Essay on the Life and Genius of Henry Fielding, Esq; (1762)1
Arthur Murphy's sensible exposition of the grounds for assessing literary merit, among which invention is an important but by no means the determining factor, found few candid adherents in late eighteenth-century England. Though most practicing playwrights, like Murphy himself, would have no doubt agreed with the proposition that invention is merely one of several qualities that make a good playwright, they felt compelled outwardly to endorse the doctrine of original genius that was rapidly gaining the status of critical orthodoxy and to reproduce the rhetoric that came with it. "By the 1750's," as Walter Jackson Bate has noted, "some of the least original minds of the time were beginning to prate constantly of `originality'" (105). What were the consequences of the near-universal acceptance of originality as a criterion of literary value for the status of plays and playwriting? How did the imperative to produce new and original literary artifacts that could aspire to match the compositions of that quintessential British genius, Shakespeare, tally with the commercial demands of the theatrical marketplace?
Modern scholars look upon the mid- to late eighteenth century as a period of an almost unrelieved dramatic decline.2 They attribute the erosion of dramatic standards to the long-term effects of the Licensing Act of 1737, which confirmed the monopoly of the two London patent companies and for decades stifled the production of new plays. The repertories at Drury Lane and Covent Garden consisted largely of old favorites, both companies catering to the steady increase in audiences by periodically expanding the capacity of their playhouses? Scholars further blame the mediocrity of theatrical offerings upon the widespread adoption of French-derived ideas of correctness and dramatic decorum that led to the appearance of numerous stodgy tragedies,4 and they castigate the playwrights' determination to supply performance vehicles for star actors to the detriment of the plays' structural unity.' The manifestations and causes of the decay of drama as a literary form have been amply documented; what has received far less attention is how authors of all those "bad" plays conceived of themselves and of their work. Did their authorial self-fashionings mimic those of Restoration and early eighteenth-century playwrights, or did they depart from their predecessors' views and rhetoric of playwriting?
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The half-century following the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 witnessed a significant shift in conceptions of dramatic authorship. The key manifestation of that shift was the emergence of the notion of literary property.6 Playwrights were increasingly seen as "owners" of their scripts, while indebtedness to earlier texts, particularly plays, was condemned as theft. Charges of plagiarism multiplied as the demand for creative independence and solo composition grew stronger. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the drama was established as a literary form with serious artistic claims; its cultural stature had solidified. That process led to, and was assisted by, first, the development of dramatic criticism; second, the publication of collected editions of both Renaissance and post-- Restoration plays; and, third, the improvement in the economic situation of playwrights, whose literary ambitions found expression in substantial prefatory epistles and accounts of whose lives and works were being written and disseminated with increasing frequency.7 Although Shakespeare was beginning to be accorded an esteem higher than that of Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher, he was by no means seen as superior to later playwrights such as Dryden, Wycherley, or Congreve. The dramatic canon in the first two decades of the eighteenth century was principally a modern one, with works by post-Restoration playwrights enjoying greater popularity on the stage and on the page than those by their Elizabethan and Jacobean predecessors.
