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"[A] play, which I presume to call original": Appropriation, creative genius, and eighteenth-century playwriting
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 2001 by Kewes, Paulina
One could ask, of course, why such revampings were produced and printed. The answer is simple. Most of the originals behind them had been for decades successful repertory pieces, and theaters wanted to keep them there. The acting company's chief concern was profit, not literary value. If a popular play was beginning to show age-whether on account of its outmoded or indecorous language, irregular construction, or lax sexual mores-a modest amount of retouching was all that was needed to ensure its continued stage viability. Having a vast stock of proven scripts at their disposal, the theaters repeatedly issued commissions for revision rather than risking their capital by mounting new shows.
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Concomitant with the decline in the proprietary claims made by eighteenthcentury playwrights was the reduction of their artistic claims. While amateur appropriators such as Sir William Killigrew and Sir Robert Howard in the 1660s, and professional ones such as John Dryden, Elkanah Settle, Aphra Behn, and Thomas D'Urfey in the 1670s and beyond, invariably prided themselves on having improved whatever they took from the scripts they set out to adapt, eighteenth-century revisers such as Garrick, Colman, Bickerstaffe, Inchbald, and many others largely refrained from doing so. The reason for this disparity was the fundamental difference between the motives for appropriation that prevailed in the later seventeenth century and those dominant throughout most of the eighteenth century. Aesthetic justifications of adaptation put forward by Restoration writers were gradually replaced by ethical justifications proposed by Garrick and his contemporaries. However we may judge of their productions, a Dryden or a Vanbrugh believed that both language and manners had become refined since the pre-Civil War era and, that in order to make Shakespeare or Fletcher stageable, the linguistic and stylistic obsolescence of their plays ought to be eliminated. To give Miranda a sister and to add a man who has never seen a woman to the cast of the Shakespearean Tempest, as Davenant and Dryden did in their version performed in 1667, was to create a better play. A new version of a pre-Civil War piece was superior to the original by virtue of the removal of obsolete diction or indecorous and/or improbable action; a new rendition of Corneille or Moliere surpassed the too-scanty original owing to the addition of a subplot, new characters, and new incidents.
Eighteenth-century adapters were not so confident. As the century went on, the belief that earlier drama could be improved was losing its hold. True, both Renaissance and Restoration plays were being substantially revised and altered for stage representation, but the new versions were no longer touted as artistically superior to the originals on which they were based. Rather, they were advertised as morally superior, having been purged of sexually explicit language and action. The decisive change occurred around mid-century, by which time many of the salacious favorites had been subjected to a thorough-going reformation (Lynch 271). Indeed, there were those who believed that not only pieces intended for the stage but also published play texts should be reformed. Thomas Seward, one of the editors of Beaumont and Fletcher's Works of 1750, actually undertook to expunge from their scripts what he called "gross and indecent Expressions" and:
