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

It has so rarely been my habit to write upon any plot but of my own fabrication and invention, that what I assert in the Prologue is most strictly true; viz.

"All, who cou'd judge my labour, wou'd confess

"Originality had made it less." (iv)

Yet his assertion of originality is undermined by the very wording of his title page acknowledgement. Cumberland, of course, had been ridiculed as Sir Fretful Plagiary in Sheridan's The Critick (1779); but, given Sheridan's own wideranging use of textual materials-both native and foreign-we may feel that the pot was calling the kettle black. Indeed, during the first run of Cumberland's Joanna in January, 1800, daily receipts at Covent Garden were lower by half than those at Drury Lane where Sheridan's Pizarro (a version of Kotzebue's Die Spanier in Peru) was enjoying a hugely successful revival.43 The rage for adaptations of the German's work drew fire from a number of commentators. Sheridan, whose position as author-manager made him a particularly convenient target, was singled out for attack in a satirical skit More Kotzebue!44 To be upbraided for plagiaristic proclivities must have been acutely galling to a dramatist who had asserted in the preface to his debut-piece, The Rivals, that his "first wish in attempting a Play, was to avoid every appearance of plagiary."45 How the mighty had fallen.

As we have seen, the theatrical milieu characterized by a strong demand for script revision and adaptation, foreign novelties, and effective afterpieces was hardly congenial to original playwriting. We have noted, too, that those writers who were connected with the playhouse mainly in their capacity as actors, managers, or prompters as a rule refrained from making serious claims about the artistic merit of their self-confessedly derivative scripts, preferring, instead, to emphasize their theatrical potential. By contrast, those few writers-some professionals, some amateurs-who strove to assert the literary value of their plays felt constrained to adopt the critical vocabulary of originality, invention, imagination, and genius made current by treatises such as Hurd's, Young's, Duff's, and Gerard's.46 We may scoff at Cumberland's confused justification of Joanna or Murphy's meandering apologies for Alzuma and The Rival Sisters,47 but what about those plays for which no immediate textual source can be identified? After all, not every late eighteenth-century play was a translation or an adaptation. Which dramatic form-comedy or tragedy-provided greater scope for originality, and what were the strategies adopted by writers to achieve it?

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