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

The Waterman proved a taking afterpiece, and its concocter went on to cobble together many more shows like it and to compose music for them, being content to reap profits from the theater without staking claims to literary stature.

The decline in assertions of authorship further manifests itself in the wording of contemporary title pages and in the content and typography of theatrical playbills. Where Dryden, Shadwell, D'Urfey, and others had proudly placed their names on the title pages of their appropriative plays (thus Troilus and Cressida; or, Truth Found too Late was printed as "Written by Mr. Dryden," and The History of Timon of Athens, the Man-Hater was touted as having been "Made into a Play. By Tho. Shadwell"), Garrick, Colman, Bickerstaffe, and other eighteenthcentury playwrights either refrained from doing so or conspicuously cited the name of the original author alongside their own, thereby reinforcing the impression that theirs was merely a cut-and-paste job." A good illustration is the adaptation of an unacted play by James Thomson, Edward and Eleonora. It was acknowledged as such not only on the title page of the printed edition: Edward and Eleonora, A Tragedy ... Altered from James Thomson. And new adapted to the Stage by Thomas Hull (1775) and in the prologue spoken in the theater ("T'onight your Favour and your Praise we claim, / For lo! the Page, bears Thomson's honour'd Name")," but also in a playbill for a touring production:

By His MAJESTY'S SERVANTS.

At the NEW THEATRE in LANCASTER,

On MONDAY the 11th of AUGUST, 1777,

Will be performed a new Piece, (written originally by Thompson, Author of the Seasons, altered and properly adapted to the Stage by Mr. Hull)

called

Edward and Eleonora.

(As performed at the Theatre-Royal in Covent-Garden last Winter with universal Applause.)19

The success of this adaptation on the London stage explains not only why it was taken on tour but also why the names of both the original author and the reviser were touted on the playbill. Over the course of the eighteenth century, playbills grew in size, yet, as David Gowen has pointed out, "[e]ven with the extra room, bills announcing new plays customarily omitted the playwright's name." Gowen speculates that the omission may have been "a precaution against undesirable recognition in the event of a poor reception" (150). Whatever the reason, the absence of the author's name from an elaborately decorated playbill that advertised a premiere performance of his or her work (and that supplied plentiful information about the venue, the company, the actors, the prices, etc.) is itself a sign of a deepening depreciation of authorial stature.

The pedantic nature of the acknowledgements of sources, especially those included in the paraphernalia of printed playtexts, created the sense that modern playwrights' productions were slight and inconsequential. For what is one to make of the authorial credentials of Isaac Bickerstaffe on the basis of the following title page: "The Hypocrite: A Comedy ... Taken from Moliere and Cibber, By the Author Of the Alterations of the Plain-Dealer"?20 Bickerstaffe's claim to fame is to have adapted Wycherley's The Plain Dealer, which qualifies him for the task of altering Cibber and Moliere!21 Among other examples are new versions of old plays by Garrick and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Garrick was responsible for Isabella: or, The Fatal Marriage. A Play. Alter'd from Southern, The Gamesters: A Comedy. Altered from Shirley, and Every Man in his Humour A Comedy. Altered from Ben. Johnson;" Sheridan for A Trip to Scarborough ... Altered from Vanbrugh's Relapse; or, Virtue in Danger (1781). On the evidence of such title pages, eighteenth-century readers could not have felt but that theirs was entertainment based essentially on recycled wares.