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

... Tho' near half of the following Play is new written, the Alterer claims no Merit, but his Endeavour to clear one of our most celebrated Comedies from Immorality and Obscenity ... and if this Wanton of Charles's Days is now reclaimed, as to become innocent without being insipid, the present Editor will not think his Time ill employed .... (sig. A2r-v)

In the same year, Bickerstaffe calls himself the editor of Doctor Last in his Chariot, a comedy derived from Moliere:

The following piece is a translation of Le Malade Imaginaire, one of Moliere's most celebrated productions in the farcical kind. Some scenes which could not possibly succeed upon the English stage, have been removed, and those substituted, in which the character of Doctor Last is introduced; and, for that character only, the editor has to answer; nothing else in the subsequent scenes, being intirely his. (sig. A3r)

By the latter half of the eighteenth century, then, the appropriative nature of playwriting had come to be widely accepted; but the urgency and passion with which Restoration and early eighteenth-century playwrights had asserted their authorial credentials and repudiated charges of plagiarism were mostly gone. The dramatists' self-esteem and confidence in the artistic value of their productions seem to have been eroded and replaced by self-consciousness, even self-depreciation.

Those negative sentiments are particularly in evidence in the work of professional men of the theater-actors, managers, prompters-who supplied a high proportion of contemporary theatrical offerings, chiefly lightweight pieces including farces, musical comedies, and ballad operas (Lynch 169ff.). Such play-- doctors freely admit that their extensive remodeling of earlier texts is due not only to haste and desire for profit but to plain lack of invention and talent. "That I am indebted to Mr. Ramsay's GENTLE SHEPARD, (a Scotch Pastoral Comedy, wrote Originally in Five Acts) for the greatest Part of the following Piece," says the actor Theophilus Cibber in the preface to Patie and Peggy: or, The Fair Foundling. A Scotch Ballad Opera, "was not owing to my Idleness, but a Doubt of my Abilities to produce any Thing entirely New of this kind, that might plead so much pretence to Favour" (sig. A2r). Charles Dibdin (house-composer at Drury Lane in the 1770s) is equally frank about the origin of his ballad opera The Waterman. He put it together so as to recycle "the different pieces I have composed for Ranelagh and the Theatre ... which have been but little heard." Having cited the source of "the dialogue necessary to work up these materials into a Ballad Farce," Dibdin states:

I am resolved to acknowledge at all times from whence I collect any matter for the trifles I may have an opportunity of presenting to the public. I must be an egregious egotist indeed, and little entitled to the indulgence they have hitherto favoured me with, if I could be so unconscious of my own inability as to suppose I ever can present them with any thing worthy their notice without assistance of this sort ....16