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

22 See the individual title pages in The Dramatick Works of David Garrick (1768). For discussion of Garrick's alterations, see chapter four of Pedicord's The Theatrical Public.

23 A Trip to Scarborough, in Plays, ed. Price, lines 39-46.

24 The Country Girl, Advertisement, sig. A2v. Benjamin Victor warmly commended the zeal with which [Garrick] has ever aimed to banish from the stage all those plays which carry with them an immoral tendency, and to prune from those, who do not absolutely on the whole promote the interests of vice, such scenes of licentiousness and liberty, as a redundancy of wit and too great liveliness of imagination, has induced some of our comic writers, to indulge themselves in, and which the sympathetic disposition of the age of gallantry and intrigue had given a sanction to. (Dramatick Works of 1768 1: xi)

Cf. Bickerstaffe's preface to The Plain Dealer, which asserts that the original had been excluded from the repertory "because it was immoral and indecent." Bickerstaffe justifies his own undertaking in terms that automatically devalue it: "I thought I Had the right of other quacks, to try experiments upon it.... There is but one thing I am afraid of, That in endeavouring to correct these, perhaps imag

inary faults of the poet, I may have substituted real blemishes of my own." Accordingly, he distinguishes typographically between his contribution and Wycherley's "more valuable materials" (v-vii).

25 For a list of authors whose plays appeared in collected editions between 1700 and 1720, see Appendix B of my Authorship and Appropriation.

26 Some collections-for example, Colman the Elder's Dramatick Works of 1777-featured no general prefatory matter, which itself is a sign that what follows is of no great consequence.

27 See "A Short Sketch of the Character and Writings of Mr. Garrick: Being an Extract from Mr. Victor's elegant Account of the Dramatic Writers of Great-Britain" prefixed to volume one of Garrick's The Dramatick Works: "Nothwithstanding the numberless and laborious advocations attending on his profession as an actor, and his station as a manager, yet still his active genius has been perpetually bursting forth in various little productions both in the dramatic and poetical way, whose merit cannot but make us regret his want of time for the pursuance of more extensive and important works" (xii). Cf. a similar assessment put forward in The Playhouse Pocket-Companion: "As a dramatic author, his rank is but low" (36).

28 See The Dramatic Works (1798): "Notwithstanding his constant employ as both actor and manager, he was perpetually producing various little things in the dramatic way; some of which are originals; others translations or alterations from other authors, adopted to the state of the present times; besides which, he wrote innumerable prologues, epilogues, songs, &c" (ii).

29 "An Essay on the Life and Genius," Works 1: 11. A nonce collection of The Dramatic Works of Henry Fielding, Esq. In Three Volumes (1755 [-1761?]) had been issued by Andrew Millar, the publisher of the Works of 1762. It has no prefatory matter, and the plays included in it bear different imprints, though each volume has a spurious general title page.