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

To fill the scene, to night our Author brings

Originals at least,-warriors and kings--

Heroes, who like their gems, unpolish'd shine,

The mighty fathers of the Tartar line;

Greater than those, whom Classic pages boast,

If those are greatest, who have conquer'd most. (sig. A3r)

Bensley's Prologue to Murphy's Alzuma is written in the same formula: "While GREECE and ROME swell'd our theatric state ... only classic heroes could be great. / This night our author, an advent'er grown, / Dares trace the virtues of the Torrid Zone" (sig. A4r).

The exoticism of later eighteenth-century historical drama, a genre predicated on the assumption that "the intermixture of recorded facts tends to augment the interest of works of imagination,"60 provoked a reaction in favor of English themes. Joseph Warton's wish "that our writers would more frequently search for subjects, in the annals of England, which afford many striking and pathetic events, proper for the stage,"61 did not go unheeded. Indeed, as James Lynch has pointed out, "more plays using themes and characters drawn from English history reached the stage during the eighteenth century than ever before or since" (2). In the last quarter of the century, this quasi-antiquarian preoccupation with the native past, especially with the medieval period, received a strong boost from the rising tide of gothic romance, resulting in a proliferation of fake histories permeated by an atmosphere of doom, gloom, and foreboding. The historical inauthenticity of gothic plays was in large measure a function of their obsessive concentration on the highly wrought personal relationships among a small cast of characters. In this respect, gothic drama looks back to domestic tragedies of Rowe and Lillo rather than to historical plays of Shakespeare.62

As a new form, gothic drama might have afforded late eighteenth-century playwrights greater scope for the exercise of invention and originality than the established genres, however formulaic its conventions may seem to us.63 Yet, as the production history of Hannah Cowley's Albina, Countess Raimond demonstrates, the author's "original" ideas could be, as it were, intercepted and put into circulation in others' scripts even before the play from which they were taken reached the stage. Albina's theatrical misfortunes are quickly told. Cowley showed her script-then called Edwina-to Garrick before his retirement and later attempted to secure production first at Covent Garden then at Drury Lane. After a protracted wait, Cowley had her play rejected in turn by the colluding managers of both winter houses, Harris and Sheridan. Albina was finally produced in July, 1779, by George Colman the Younger at the Haymarket Theater where it proved a moderate success. There is nothing extraordinary in an author's failing to get a script accepted by either of the patent houses and having to settle for a showing at the Haymarket, many would-be playwrights despairing of performance even at that venue. The case of Cowley's Albina is of special interest, for it throws into sharp relief the conflict between the playwright's aspirations to individuality and originality and the material conditions of theater production-- the process of script acceptance, revision, and rehearsal-which fostered conformity, collaboration, and ultimately the surrender of authority on the part of the playwright.