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

A play of mine, the manager refus'd!

And why?-I knew the reason well enough--

Only to introduce his own damn'd stuff.

....

His play to-night, like all he ever wrote,

Is pie-ball'd, piec'd, and patch'd, like Joseph's coat;

Made up of shreds from Plautus and Corneille,

Terence, Moliere, Voltaire, and Marmontel;

With rags of fifty others I might mention,

Which proves him dull and barren of invention:

But shall his nonsense hold the place of sense?

No, damn him! damn him, in your own defence!"

The Epilogue has two speakers: a critic and a lady. The critic high-handedly condemns appropriative playwriting and clamors for originality:

What are the riff-raff of our modern plays?

Their native dullness all in books intrench:

Mere scavengers of Latin, Greek, and French,

Sweep up the learned rubbish, dirt, and dust,

Or from old iron try to file the rust.

Give me the bard whose fiery disposition

Quickens at once, and learns by intuition;

Lifts up his head to think, and, in a minute,

Ideas make a hurly-burly in it;

Struggling for passage, there ferment and bubble,

And thence run over without further trouble;

'Till out comes play or poem, as they feign

Minerva issued from her father's brain!

Be all original! struck out at once;

Who borrows, toils, or labours, is a dunce:

Genius, alas! is at the lowest ebb;

And none, like spiders, spin their own fine web.

...

Old books, old plays, old thoughts, will never do:

Originals for me, and something new! (220-21)

He is immediately answered by the female spectator who is obviously up-to-date with recent critical developments and the Lockean notion of tabula rasa:

`New? (cries the lady) Prithee, man, have done!

We know there's nothing new beneath the sun.

Weave, like the spider, from your proper brains,

And take at last a cobweb for your pains!

What is invention? 'Tis not thoughts innate;

Each head at first is but an empty pate.

'Tis but retailing from a wealthy hoard

The thoughts which observation long has stor'd,

Combining images with lucky hit,

Which sense and education first admit;

Who, borrowing little from the common store,

Mends what he takes, and from his own adds more,

He is original; or inspiration

Never fill'd bard of this, or other nation,

And Shakespeare's art is merely imitation.

For 'tis a truth long prov'd beyond all doubt,

Where nothing's in, there's nothing can come out. (221)

However facetious, Colman's prologue and epilogue illustrate the incompatibility of concepts such as solitary genius, inspiration, and originality with the commercial demands of the contemporary theater.

The clash between critical ideas and commercial realities underlies the contradictory rhetoric of Richard Cumberland's preface to Joanna of Montfaucon (1800). The printed title page advertises it as "A Dramatic Romance of the Fourteenth Century ... Formed upon the Plan of the German Drama of Kotzebue: and Adapted to the English Stage by Richard Cumberland." Despite the acknowledged reliance on the foreign source, Cumberland fervently insists on his own offering's originality in the preface: