Playwrights selling plays? Well, whoa, there.

With such talk of (er, reading related to) the 18th-century print industry and its increasing mass of paper-paper-PAPER, I’ve been drawn toward a bit of poking around at the publication of play scripts during the 18th Century. How did scripts fit into this flurry of available works? How were scripts presented to the public, in what fashion offered and to what presumed purpose? How closely were the scripts tied to the theatres that presented the original production, and how closely to the authors? While all of these questions continue to roil and multiply in mind, it is toward the last-mentioned—that of scripts and authors—that I now turn.

A look into Paulina Kewes’s Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710* offered some intriguing matter for mulling. Kewes discourses at length on the matter of originality** in theatrical writing, particularly as it played into consideration during the 17th and 18th Centuries. As a part of this, Kewes draws attention to the playwright’s role, suggesting that playwrights rose toward greater prominence—or perhaps independence—as they received the power to sell their own scripts to publishers. Prior to the Restoration, theatre companies had held tight reins on and rights to the scripts of their productions (ownership being thus identified with performance, with those who used the script rather than the one who composed it). And as Kewes notes, “[c]ompanies tended to withhold their scripts from the press, especially the most popular ones” (20); whatever the author might have wished, a script could easily be denied distribution, never to see the light of day or reach the hands of public readers.

The situation shifted, it seems, with the disruption of the Civil War; in the England that emerged after the war, theatres were obliged to re-situate themselves somewhat. Kewes suggests one change when she offers the following observation:

After the Restoration, playwrights were at liberty to sell their copies to publishers. In the absence of statuary authorial copyright, the transaction of sale confirmed the playwright as owner, that is, as the party de facto entitled to dispose of the copy. (24)

Able to enact publication (that is, to sell the rights of their plays to publishers), authors set their works into the market, to be purchased and so owned in a lasting form. Although the playwright typically made little money in this manner (once the publisher purchased the rights to a script, the work fell once again out of the author’s hands), publication may well have promoted a more readily apparent connection between author and text, and may have caused the play itself to linger longer in the public mind. The material form of a play script binds the author’s name (displayed on the title page, offering a sort of ownership claim) with the work itself even as it keeps the work from becoming a mere memory of some transitory performance. Certainly, this material script seems to lend a greater weight to the playwright’s name than would a brief reference to the author made during a play’s production, where the name might easily become overwhelmed by the presentation and its actors. The script offered physical proof of a playwright’s oft-unperceived labors; once dramatic authors held the ability to sell their plays, they could be more certain of seeing their work distributed and their names in print.

This is not to say that dramatic authors suddenly strode into some spotlight with the dawn of the 18th Century, or that the 18th-century public held its drama in particularly high esteem. It seems more a step along the route toward recognition, toward the ownership of a play—whether in terms of its intellectual or material content—that would eventually allow playwrights to close-guard their work, down to the most stringent rules regarding stage directions (I may or may not be looking at you, Samuel Beckett... or Beckett-legacy, hrm). As with authors of all stripes, playwrights during the 17th and 18th Centuries seemed to move slowly toward recognition, and a closer identified with their works.

*The book is an intriguing one, though at times Kewes’s claims seem a bit hasty (or at least hastily presented). Though reviews seem to turn in a positive direction, I remain somewhat wary of her quicker conclusions.

**A topic of interest both here and in another class. And considering the matter of originality in dramatic writing, I’d like to give a glance toward Alexander Pope. Along with offering a cheery example of the potentially contentious bookseller-author relationships (a bit of poison, Curll?), he inveighs against Colley Cibber as a dramatist prone to pirating other works. Hence, in The Dunciad, an early glimpse of “Bays” (that is, Cibber):

Next, o’er his books his eyes began to roll,

In pleasing memory of all he stole,

How here he sipped, how there he plundered snug

And sucked all o’er, like a industrious bug. (Book One, ll. 127-30)

Pope moves off to note Fletcher, Molière, and Shakespeare as victims of Cibber’s/Bays’s theft. While Cibber did try his hand at adaptations, the effort was not always without acknowledgment (Kewes indicates that in his adaptation of Richard III, Cibber took care to designate which lines were his, and which Shakespeare’s (93); not to say that Cibber was so up front in all instances), and he was hardly alone in lifting from the work of others.

WORKS REFERENCED

Kewes, Paulina. Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710. New York: Clarendon Press, 1998. Print.

Loewenstein, Joseph. “The Script in the Marketplace.” Representation 12 (Autumn 1985): 101-114. JSTOR. Web. 10 Oct. 2010.

Maruca, Lisa. The Work of Print: Authorship and English Text Trades, 1660-1760. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. Print.

Pope, Alexander. “The Dunciad.” Alexander Pope: The Major Works. Ed. Pat Rogers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. 411-553. Print.

Rosenthal, Laura J. “Introduction: Drama and Cultural Location.” Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. 1-12. Print.