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

14 See copyright notice, dedication, and preface of the Editor in Double Falsehood 26-30.

15 Of course, some of the procedures adopted by eighteenth-century editors of Shakespeare-such as Pope's decision to demote what he considered to be inferior passages to the bottom of the page and to asterisk the ones he admired-would strike the modern reader as more akin to adaptation than editing.

16 The Waterman vi. Cf. Bickerstaffe's preface to The Maid of the Mill, a "little piece" of which "not only the general subject is drawn from Pamela, but almost every circumstance in it" (v).

17 See, for example, Fielding's versions of Moliere in the 1730s, The Mock Doctor and The Miser, and the competing translations of a farce by Bourlin in the 1780s. Having joined "the jostling race our dramatic translators run in importing successful pieces from Paris," the anonymous supplier of The Midnight Hour was prevented from having it staged, for Covent Garden had earlier commissioned Elizabeth Inchbald to produce an English version. Chagrined at having missed out on theatrical representation, the translator admitted that his version "is not wholly calculated for the closet of criticism" (preface 3). Inchbald's rendition appeared in print as The Midnight Hour. A Comedy in Three Acts. From the French of M. Damaniant, Called Guerre Ouverte; ou, Ruse Contreruse. Cf. other pieces by Inchbald, such as The Child of Nature, Lovers' Vows, and The Married Man.

18 Edward and Eleonora, A Tragedy, iii. What is more, the adapter acknowledges that "The Lines marked with inverted Commas are taken from the original Prologue to the Play."

19 Susan Ward, "The Greatest Play on Words: The Amazing History of Theatre Posters and Playbills," Art and Antiques, 9 June 1973, 31-5, at p. 32, reproduced in Gowen, "Studies in the History and Function of the British Theatre Playbill and Programme, 1564-1914," Fig. 59.

20 In the preface to the play, Bickerstaffe explains that:

Cibber's Non-Juror (borrowed from the Tartuffe of Moliere) has ever been reckoned an excellent comedy; but being written to expose a party, it was no longer interesting, because the folly and roguery it design'd to ridicule, no longer existed: It was thought, that it might be render'd agreeable to the present times, by once more having recourse to Moliere; and, with that view, I have endeavour'd to substitute his celebrated character of Tartuffe, in the room of Doctor Wolf.

The "hints for the alteration," he adds, came from David Garrick. See The Hypocrite sig. A2r.

21 Bickerstaffe was basically a concocter of "books" for musical pieces, and, as with modem scripts for musicals and television shows, literary authorship was hardly an issue. Yet even so free an appropriator as Bickerstaffe would, on occasion, congratulate himself on independent composition. As James Lynch notes, he "was particularly proud" of Lionel and Clarissa "because, he asserted, he had not borrowed for it `an expression, a sentiment, or a character, from any dramatic writer extant.' (Box, Pit, and Gallery 192).