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

As we have seen, eighteenth-century appropriators made claims less ambitious and less grand than those of their late seventeenth-century predecessors. Now, I wish to turn to two other indicators of the diminution in the literary standing of plays: the pattern of dramatic publication and the subject matter of dramatic criticism. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, the contrast between old and new drama was not easy to perceive on the stage since most of the indecent favorites had slipped from the repertory or been supplanted by expurgated versions, but the printed page afforded ample opportunities for comparison-above all, with Shakespeare. Here again, in the realm of printed drama, we can notice the reversal of trends that had characterized the earlier period. The proliferation of handsome collected editions of plays in the first two decades of the eighteenth century had contributed to the elevation of plays' literary status and enhanced their authors' reputations." It is thus surprising to note that, in the mid- to late eighteenth century, there were so few collected editions of plays by modern playwrights. Only Garrick, Lillo, Fielding, More, Colman the Elder, and Murphy could boast a collection. Theirs were as a rule less typographically ambitious or lavish collections than the impressive folio of Dryden's brought out in 1701 or the elegant octavo volumes Congreve saw through the press in 1710. Moreover, the prefatory statements, whether authorial or editorial, to be found in those collected editions were often less than complimentary about the contents.26 Thus, the prefaces to Garrick's collections of 1768 and 1798, respectively, displayed a condescending attitude to his dramatic exertions-the former describing them as "little productions,"27 the latter as "little things."28 Arthur Murphy's introductory essay to the four-volume edition of Fielding's Works (1762), which contained plays, novels, and other pieces, judged Fielding's playwriting considerably inferior to his comic fiction: "he confessedly did not attain to pre-eminence in this branch of writing."29 Thomas Davies's enthusiastic assessment of George Lillo's dramatic output in the preliminaries to the two-volume Works of 1775 was therefore quite exceptional in being accorded to a near-contemporary (Lillo died in 1739). Davies goes so far as to rate Lillo's Fatal Curiosity-"this master piece of fine writing"-alongside Shakespearean tragedy:

... in all Dramatic Poetry, there are few scenes where the passions are so highly wrought up, as in the third Act of the FATAL CURIOSITY ... LILLO need not be ashamed to yield to Shakespeare, who is superior to all other writers; but excepting the celebrated scenes of murder in Macbeth, these in the FATAL CURIOSITY, for just representation of anguish, remorse, despair, and horror, bear away the palm.30

But there was more to Lillo's playwriting than his magisterial portrayal of passions in The Fatal Curiosity and The London Merchant. Davies was impressed by the generic novelty of Lillo's tragedies, which, in contrast to most serious drama of his day, focused on the private sphere and dramatized the predicament of lower-class figures, moving beyond the earlier attempts at domestic tragedy by Otway and Rowe. "The World is indebted to this writer," Davies observes, "for the invention of a new species of dramatic poetry, which may properly be termed the inferior or lesser tragedy."31