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

42 Dramatick Works, 2: 114-15. Colman's self-mockery is predictably a defense mechanism, for the comedy is indeed patched up from a variety of sources. The dedication acknowledges that:

Three of the great writers, enumerated in the Prologue, Plautus, Terence, and Marmontel, have contributed to enrich it. A play lately exhibited on the French stage, the Deux Amis of M. Beaumarchais, also suggested some hints of the fable; but the traces of them in this Comedy are so little apparent, that if I did not thus acknowledge the sources from which I have drawn, I question if the ingenious author himself would be able to claim his own property. (111)

43 See The London Stage 1: 2242-8. Pizarro opened at Drury Lane on 24 May 1799. It was published as Pizarro; A Tragedy, in Five Acts ... Taken from the German Drama of Kotzebue; and Adapted to the English Stage by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London, 1799).

44 See More Kotzebue! The Origin of My Own Pizarro. Sheridan was also upbraided for mangling the original by Thomas Dutton, the supplier of a literal translation of Kotzebue's Die Spanier in Peru. See Dutton's "General Remarks" appended to Pizarro in Peru 117-20.

45 Preface to "The Rivals" in Sheridan: Plays 6. The preface was printed only in the first and second editions.

46 See Hurd, A Letter to Mr. Mason; On the Marks of Imitation; Young, Conjectures; Duff, An Essay on Original Genius and Critical Observations; and Gerard, An Essay on Genius.

47 See Advertisement to Alzuma, A Tragedy. As Performed at the Theatre Royal in Covent-Garden (London, 1773) sigs. A2r-A3v, and preface to The Rival Sisters in Murphy's Works 7: 247.

48 Lennox's compilation was supplemented by Farmer's An Essay, which argues against Shakespeare's knowledge of Latin and Greek. Farmer demonstrates that many cases of allusion and/or citation from the classics, which previous critics and editors had adduced as evidence of Shakespeare's first-hand knowledge of the originals, derive from contemporary translations such as North's Plutarch based on the French of Amyot. For the earliest lists of Shakespeare's sources, see Langbaine's Momus Triumphans and his An Account of the English Dramatick Poets; Gildon's The Lives and Characters; Rowe's "Some Account of the Life," in volume one of The Works of Mr. William Shakespear; and Gildon's "Essay on the Art, Rise and Progress of the Stage in Greece, Rome and England"; and "Remarks on the Plays of Shakespear" in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. For discussion, see Anderson, "The Study of Shakespeare's Sources from Langbaine to Malone."

49 See Wanton, The History of English Poetry 3: 484.

50 A Letter to Mr Mason 3. Cf. Gerard, An Essay on Genius: "He who possesseth a fertile imagination ... will at least preserve the full spirit of the original, not contented with merely transmitting its form ... and frequently he will give farther proof of genius, by improving on the borrowed hint, by adding new beauties, or delivering a known truth with greater elegance and justness" (45-6). The distinction between appropriation of ideas and verbatim copying was not new. It had been at the root of Gerard Langbaine's theory of plagiarism. See chapter three of my Authorship and Appropriation.