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

The only cases where the acknowledgement is more discursive are a few adaptations of native plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Wycherley, such as Colman's version of Philaster (Dramatic Works 3: 3-11); a few renditions of French and German plays into English, such as Inchbald's immensely popular Lovers' Vows taken from Kotzebue;10 and the infrequent attempts to transplant Greek drama to England, such as William Mason's turgid Elfrida, A Dramatic Poem. Written on the Model of The Antient Greek Tragedy.11 By and large, however, the extensive prefatory justification disappears. Playwrights usually admit borrowing directly but make little or no effort to justify it. One reason for-and manifestation of-this state of affairs is the reduction of claims to authorship and literary stature made by contemporary dramatists.

Where Restoration playwrights asserted authorship in their plays based on novels, romances, and history, as well as their adaptations of foreign and native drama, their eighteenth-century successors are a lot more cautious and modest. In their advertisements, they repeatedly style themselves editors and alterers rather than authors. Possibly the earliest instance of the reviser describing himself as editor occurs in Lewis Theobald's preface to The Double Falsehood (1728), his redaction of a supposed Shakespearean original.12 Theobald previously had publicized his ambition (and qualifications) to supply a new edition of Shakespeare's works by mounting a fierce attack on Pope's edition of 1723-5 in Shakespeare restored: or, A Specimen of the Many Errors, As well Committed, as Unamended, by Mr. Pope In his Late Edition of this Poet. Designed Not only to correct the said Edition, but to restore the True Reading of Shakespeare in all the Editions ever yet publish'd (1726). The preliminaries to The Double Falsehood entail a notion of editorial procedure strikingly different from that implicit in Theobald's arraignment of Pope. In Shakespeare restored, Theobald's chief aim is to reconstruct Shakespeare's "True Reading."13 By contrast, though he claims to have approached the managers of Drury Lane with a copy of The Double Falsehood "as an Editor, not an Author," Theobald professes to have "with great Labour and Pains, Revised, and Adapted the [Manuscript Copy of an Original Play of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE] to the Stage.14

That double sense of editing-as judicious restoration and as more or less radical adaptation-was to persist throughout the eighteenth century. Successive editions of Shakespeare attest to the former strain;15 Colman the Elder's playwriting illustrates the latter. Colman reworked plays by Jonson, Fletcher, and Shakespeare, and his versions found their way into the collected edition of his plays of 1777. They were included in "Volume the Third; containing Alterations of Philaster King Lear, Epicoene; Or The Silent Woman." Although printed in Colman's Dramatick Works, individual title pages ascribe the plays to the original authors, while in the advertisements such as the one prefixed to Philaster, Colman refers to himself as the editor: "To remove the objections to the performance of this excellent play on the modern stage, has been the chief labour, and sole ambition, of the present editor" (3: 5). "It is impossible," he continues, "for the severest reader to have a meaner opinion of the editor's share in the work than he entertains of it himself ' (11). Garrick, who in any event frequently omitted to bill his revisions as such or to put his name to them if the work were published, employs virtually identical rhetoric in the advertisement to The Country Girl (1766), an adaptation of Wycherley's salacious comedy The Country Wife: