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

In a lengthy preface to the printed edition of Albina, Cowley voices a strong concern about the public perception of her status as an original writer:

... I now present to the world a Play, which I presume to call original, though I know that the principal circumstances of the plot, and the leading traits of character, have appeared in other Plays, previous to the representation of this. (i)

She feels obliged to explain why, if her tragedy is indeed "original," it should exhibit "these repeated resemblances" (vii) to as many as three plays that preceded it on the stage, notably Hannah More's Percy and Fatal Falsehood and Robert Jephson's The Law of Lombardy.64 Cowley implies that Harris, one of the managers who had read her script, advised More and, possibly, Jephson to incorporate some motifs and plot-turns from Albina into their scripts in the process of revision. This they promptly did so as to ensure the manager's approval. That Cowley is exaggerating the extent of More's and Jephson's textual debts is not in question: injured authors almost always do. Yet she is surely accurate in her assessment of the theatrical environment in which bits of dialogue, dramatic characters, and situations circulate freely courtesy of managers keen to safeguard the success of the shows they choose to mount by recommending adjustments that often originate in pieces they have read and discarded:

I know that Managers are continually employed in giving advice, and in suggesting alterations to Authors; and I have frequently heard, before I had any experience in this anxious warfare, of the danger, when once an idea is afloat in the Theatrical Hemisphere, of its getting into other plays. Amidst the croud of Plots, and Stage Contrivances, in which a Manager is involv'd, recollection is too frequently mistaken for the suggestions of imagination. (vii)

Needless to say, those in charge of repertory decisions expected compliance and cooperation from authors, not laments about the loss of authority over their creations. From their point of view, scripts were not finished products; rather, they were malleable, flexible, and open-ended entities, requiring amendments not only prior to acceptance and during rehearsal but also after the premiere.65 In the context in which managers, actors, even prompters felt licensed to make changes to the author's script, the claims to artistic independence were hard to reconcile with the basic need to earn a living. Hence, if faithfully reported, Sheridan's response to Cowley's reluctance to follow his suggestions for alteration was wholly disingenuous:

... on my attempting a timorous defence, he added, "Don't alter this, or any other passage, unless it strikes you as it does me; you ought to be tenacious: every original Writer must give up passages with difficulty: it is only Translators, and Borrowers, who are so ready to comply with every hint that is proposed." (iv)

For, as we have seen, it was such spineless translators and borrowers who had a much easier time getting their wares accepted and who were the likely recipients of commissions. In the preface to Albina, Cowley strives to counteract the loss of reputation attendant on the publication of a play that by now shows few marks of novelty; she also complains bitterly about the loss of profit, "hav[ing] been deprived of a reasonable prospect of several hundred pounds" by "the conduct of the Winter Managers" (ix). Cowley recognizes that to raise the issue of financial reward for works of the imagination "may appear a vulgar topic," yet she insists that the "pursuit of applause ... though so ostentatiously held out as the motive for productions in the Poetic line, has seldom, in any age or country, produced works of any considerable reputation" (viii-ix). William Duff's exclusion of profit-seekers from amongst potential literary geniuses is a clear sign of the critical prejudice against the professionalization of imaginative writing: "the painful, patient pursuit of Gain ... occasions an intire depression of the powers of Imagination.... Indeed it scarce ever happens, that a high degree of this quality [Genius] is allied to Avarice: it seldom stoops to the drudgery of laborious business for the sake of wealth" (An Essay 293).