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

a great many Indecencies ... which, when I began my Part of the Work for the Press, I had actually struck off, as far as I could do without injuring the Connection of the Context; but the Booksellers press'd, and indeed insisted upon their Restoration: They very sensibly urged the last-mentioned Plea, and thought that the bare Notion of a curtail'd Edition would greatly prejudice the Sale of it. (1: liii, lvi)

In such a case, the publishers' commercial interests stood in the way of the editor's righteous zeal. The theater managers' commercial interests, by contrast, positively required censorship of sexual impropriety at the level of both plot and language. As Garrick phrased it in the Prologue to Sheridan's redaction of Vanbrugh's The Relapse,

Those writers well and wisely use their pens,

Who turn our Wantons into Magdalens;

And howsoever wicked wits revile 'em,

We hope to find in you, their Stage Asylum.23

Yet turning "Wantons into Magdalens" was hardly an inspired or inspiriting task. Where late seventeenth-century adapters occasionally held up their versions as less vulgar than the originals or insisted-as did Tate when he restored Lear to the throne and had Cordelia wed Edgar (1-2)-that they fulfilled the ideal of poetic justice by rewarding the good and punishing the bad, for the most part the arguments in favor of adaptation were aesthetic rather than moral. Indeed, many Restoration adaptations were far more licentious than their sources, the cause celebre being the Dryden-Davenant Tempest. By contrast, mid- and late-eighteenth-century adapters proclaim themselves guardians of the nation's morals, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) conceding the inferiority of their versions, as did Colman in his revision of Philaster and Garrick in his bowdlerization of The Country Wife. They hold up their works as more decorous and proper than their sources: "There seems indeed an absolute Necessity for reforming many Plays of our most eminent Writers," wrote Garrick, "For no kind of Wit ought to be received as an Excuse for Immorality, nay it becomes still more dangerous in proportion as it is more witty."24 The upshot of such repeated bowdlerization was to beget the impression that modern plays, even if exhibiting greater propriety, were simply less good than older ones.

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