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

These contradictions inherent in the situation of late eighteenth-century playwrights suggest that we need to revise our notion of the relative status of the period's authors. The emergence of the modern concept of authorship predicated on the writer's ownership of his or her literary property has of late attracted much scholarly attention. It is widely recognized that that process was assisted by the development of copyright law, the first piece of legislation to assert authorial entitlement being Queen Anne's Act for the Encouragement of Learning of 1710. A number of scholars-notably David Saunders, Mark Rose, and Alvin Kernan-have argued that the stature of authorship grew in the eighteenth century largely in consequence of the successive reforms of copyright legislation.67 In particular, they have stressed the positive effects of the abolition of perpetual copyright by the Lords in 1774. In the period between the first Copyright Statute of 1710 and the 1774 ruling, so the argument goes, the Lockean discourse of property underlying legal formulations became intertwined with the idiom of originality as propounded by Young, Duff, Gerard, and others. The implications of these developments for literary professionals were uniformly beneficial, the improved financial conditions reinforcing the cultural cachet of authorship. Yet the accounts of authorship such as those by Rose, Saunders, and Kernan rarely focus on playwriting. Their preferred examples are poets (especially Alexander Pope), novelists, and literary omnibuses such as Samuel Johnson. Yet, contrary to the cross-generic generalizations put forward by modern scholars, we have seen that the claims of professional playwrights to cultural authority declined significantly in the eighteenth century even as their economic security increased. The main cause of that decline was the incompatibility between the theories of creative genius and original composition and the commercial realities of the theatrical marketplace.

University of Wales, Aberystwyth

NOTES

The work for this essay was made possible by generous support from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Earlier versions have been delivered at the Annual Conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, St. John's College, Oxford, in January 1999, and at the English Department Postgraduate Research Seminar, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in March 1999. The essay was completed during my tenure of the Fletcher Jones Visiting Fellowship at the Huntington Library in winter 1999-2000. I am grateful to Paul Hammond, Rob Hume, and Blair Worden for comments, advice, and criticism.

1 The Works of Henry Fielding 1: 15-16. And further: "There is reason to believe, that of what we have called PRIMARY, or ORIGINAL INVENTION, there has not been so much in any one poet (not even excepting HOMER) as has been generally imagined" (19). Murphy is responding to Joseph Warton's An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, which condemned Pope on the ground that he derived both his distinctive images and his language from the writings of others.