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

The most imposing collected edition by a living playwright was The Works of Arthur Murphy, Esq. (1786), in seven volumes, which the author himself saw through the press. It featured not only plays, each one of them subjected to "a careful revisal,"32 but also Murphy's contributions to The Gray's Inn Journal. Neither Murphy's nor Lillo's nor Colman's collection was reprinted before the end of the century. Fielding's Works reappeared in an expanded twelve-volume set in 1783 (with the addition of The Fathers; or, The Good-natured Man) and continued to be reprinted in the nineteenth century, no doubt on account of his novels rather than plays. By far the greatest commercial hit was Hannah More's collection of closet pieces, Sacred Dramas; Chiefly Intended for Young Persons: The Subjects Taken from the Bible (1782), which had gone through eighteen editions by 1815 and which was also reprinted in America.33 Eighteenth-century theater and literary drama went their separate ways.

The energies of editors and textual scholars-from Rowe and Pope through Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, Johnson, Capell, and Steevens to Edmond Malone-were devoted to Shakespeare and, to a lesser extent, to Jonson, Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher.34 Instead of author-centered collections of modern plays, the eighteenth century saw a proliferation of anthologies setting forth the plays as "regulated from theatrical promptbooks," thus emphasizing their connection with the stage.35 The format, layout, and typography of such anthologies evince their lower status with respect to author-based editions of older drama. Their print is very small, dozens of plays being crowded into each volume, and they frequently lack their own individual title pages and engraved illustrations.36

The lowering of plays' literary status as evidenced by altered patterns of publication is paralleled by changes in dramatic criticism. It is evinced, too, by the directions of theater reviewing that developed in the late 1740s and gathered momentum in the 1780s and 90s.37 Eighteenth-century criticism assumed a variety of forms, including book-length treatises, pamphlets, prefatory essays by authors and editors, and newspaper and journal articles. Early in the period, shorter forms prevailed; in the second half of the eighteenth century, serious studies began to proliferate. Yet whereas previously both Renaissance and post-- Restoration plays furnished subject-matter for discussion, now earnest critics focused on old rather than new drama. Newspapers and journals, it is true, published reviews of newly premiered shows as well as revivals; however, those commentaries largely focused on performance, not literary quality. They customarily provided a plan or plot summary of the new offering, a convention that made the repetitive and derivative nature of modern playwriting all the more obvious. Most substantial critical projects concentrated on Shakespeare and other old playwrights. Those that did take the story further dwelt on the "progress" of the English stage from the age of Elizabeth to that of Charles, and on its "decline and fall" in the age of the Georges.38 Why should that have been the case? What curtailed authorial ambitions? Most interestingly, why did the artistic collapse occur at a time when the remuneration for new scripts was actually rising?39