"[A] play, which I presume to call original": Appropriation, creative genius, and eighteenth-century playwriting

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The reasons, let me suggest, were partly economic. The disappearance of genuine theatrical competition following the Licensing Act of 1737 and the ensuing collusion between the two patent houses, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, led to the rapid fall in the number of new plays as both companies relied heavily on revivals. To keep their repertories up-to-date, they regularly had old plays retouched. For the playwright, such a commission would have been more than welcome: the market for the product was guaranteed, and the financial risk involved in writing an original play was eliminated.40 Admittedly, script revision was not as profitable as a successful new show, but it required less work and provided insurance against failure.

With the expansion of the star system, theatrical scripts came increasingly to be seen as vehicles for leading performers. It was no longer the play that mattered but the player. The theater's commercialization likewise manifested itself early in the eighteenth century in the popularity of entr'acte entertainments and later in the introduction of afterpieces-short playlets usually of comic or farcical character, pantomimes, and musical shows-which followed the play proper. The increasing number of actor-benefit afterpieces concocted especially for the occasion and later abandoned suggests that managers were prepared to countenance such shows for variety even as they remained conservative in their preference for tried mainpieces. The resulting fragmentation of the theatrical experience could not but have affected the audience's perception of the play. Seeing Othello or Hamlet on its own is a very different proposition from seeing it followed by a farce or a burlesque.41 Besides exploding the unity of the night's entertainment, the popularity of and demand for afterpieces led to playwrights cobbling such pieces fast by reusing all manner of materials, including earlier mainpieces. The very existence of the afterpiece contributed to the erosion of the status of the drama.

But another reason, one that accounts for the intense self-consciousness and often self-denigration of playwrights, was the growing valorization of creative originality. Subjectivity, uniqueness, and inspiration were certainly easier to achieve-and their lack more difficult to detect-in poetry, perhaps even in prose fiction, than in the drama. It was one thing for a Dryden or a Behn to profess to have improved the source text and assert ownership of the resulting playscript by detailing their alterations; it was quite another for a Colman or a Cumberland to claim originality in a play that he felt bound to acknowledge was based on another. Colman playfully canvassed the current theories of literary creativity in the prologue and epilogue to his comedy The Man of Business (1774). The Prologue is spoken by a disappointed "Author, with a manuscript" railing against the manager-Colman-who has rejected his play in order to stage his own derivative piece:

See here, good folks, how genius is abus'd!