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

One might have expected these trends-which so powerfully enhanced the position of drama and playwriting by the end of the seventeenth century-to develop and continue. Yet, when we look at the situation a century later, in the 1780s and 90s, we find a very different picture. Many, if not most, of the new and successful plays were now adaptations and translations, not independent compositions. Playwriting no longer possessed the cultural centrality it had attained in the first decade or so of the eighteenth century; its literary pretensions had been virtually abandoned. This regression is surprising. Why did the stature of drama decline so drastically? More specifically, how was that process affected by the changing practice and rhetoric of appropriation?

To understand eighteenth-century conceptions of playwriting, we need to reconstruct the conventions governing the use of sources. We have to investigate the modes of acknowledgement of plays' textual foundations and to assess the corresponding justifications of literary borrowing, adaptation, and translation. In the Restoration, although occasionally the original author's name was mentioned in the prologue or epilogue spoken in the theater, the most common form of source acknowledgement was an extended preface outlining the reasons for the revision of the borrowed materials. In the mid-eighteenth century, that convention is altered. The lengthy preface is replaced by a brief, non-descriptive "advertisement," which offers a bare list of sources without elaborating on their transformation. Such advertisements are prefixed both to singly printed plays as well as to plays included in collections. For example, the text of George Colman the Elder's comedy The Jealous Wife (1761) in his Dramatick Works of 1777 is preceded by the following Advertisement:

The use that has been made in this comedy of Fielding's admirable novel of Tom Jones, must be obvious to the most ordinary reader. Some hints have also been taken from the account of Mr. and Mrs. Freeman, in No. 212, and No. 216, of the Spectator; and the short scene of Charles's intoxication, at the end of the third act, is partly an imitation of the behaviour of Syrus, much in the same circumstances, in the Adelphi of Terence. There are also some traces of the character of The Jealous Wife, in one of the latter papers of the Connoisseur....8

Colman scrupulously documents the hints and sources behind textual minutiae. Similar advertisements are prefixed to plays by David Garrick, Isaac Bickerstaffe, Hannah More, Elizabeth Griffith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Frederick Reynolds, and many others. To illustrate: Garrick confesses that "the hint of Miss in her Teens is taken from ... La Parisienne of D'Ancourt";9 Bickerstaffe admits that his farce The Sultan, or A Peep into the Seraglio "is taken from Marmontel" (3); More acknowledges that her tragedy Percy derives from "The French Drama, founded on the famous old Story of Raoul de Coucy" (sig. A4v); Griffith specifies that "[t]he hint of [The School for Rakes] was taken from a much admired performance of Monsieur Beaumarchais, soled Eugen" (iii); Inchbald declares that in The Widow's Vow she "is indebted for the Plot of her Piece, and for the Plot only, to L'Heureuse Erreur, a French Comedy of one Act, by M. PATRAT" (sig. A4r); Reynolds states that his operatic drama The Virgin of the Sun "is founded on Marmontel's Incas, and Kotzebue's Rolla, or Virgin of the Sun, and forms the first part of the Tragedy called Pizarro" (4).