Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment

Reginald McGinnis, Reginald McGinnis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135024611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Are legal concepts of intellectual property and copyright related to artistic notions of invention and originality? Do literary and legal scholars have anything to learn from each other, or should the legal debate be viewed as separate from questions of aesthetics? Bridging what are usually perceived as two distinct areas of inquiry, this interdisciplinary volume begins with a reflection on the "origins" of literary and legal questions in the Enlightenment to consider their ramifications in the post-Enlightenment and contemporary world. Tying in to the growing scholarly interest in connections between law and literature, on the one hand, and to the contemporary interrogation of "originality" and "authorship, " on the other hand, the present volume furthers research in the field by providing a dense study of the legal and historical context to re-examine our current assumptions about supposed earlier Enlightenment and Romantic ideals of individual authorship and originality.

1 Plagiarism and Paternity in Dryden’s Adaptations

Robert W. McHenry, Jr.

John Dryden thought a great deal about literary paternity during his career as a successful playwright especially because he spent a great deal of his time during the 1670s and 1680s writing appropriations and adaptations of Shakespeare and other writers. While he did so, he also wrote extensively about the proper relationship between contemporary writers like himself and the literary ancestors with whom they competed and simultaneously honored as paternal figures. One of the main elements defining this issue was that of plagiarism because Dryden faced accusations that he both stole from his predecessors and showed them no respect. When Gerard Langbaine published his attacks on plagiarism in English drama, concentrating especially on Dryden, he seemed particularly offended that Dryden took elements from the very authors he disparaged. Not that Langbaine was the first to adopt this line of attack, but his criticisms provided a more specific and sweeping set of arguments. Ironically, these allowed Dryden to defend his approach to the appropriation of earlier writings, but they also exposed areas of the discussion that he avoided. The result is a debate that helps to formulate definitions of originality and plagiarism for the Restoration. In addition, the controversy over plagiarism and the idea of literary filiations help to reveal Dryden’s sense of his place as an heir of the great earlier figures in the emerging history of English drama.

By Dryden’s time, distinguishing the proper imitation of a writer’s sources versus slavish copying was already a well-explored topic, as shown by Harold Ogden White, who declared in his groundbreaking 1935 book that “English writers from Sidney to Jonson [argued] that originality of real worth is to be achieved only through creative imitation.”¹ These sixteenthand seventeenth-century poets insisted on their right to appropriate materials from their predecessors. Even earlier, Petrarch, in 1366, sought to make a clear distinction between acceptable imitation and plagiarism when he declared that the “proper imitator should take care that what he writes resembles the original without reproducing it,” and he introduced the influential idea of literary paternity into the discussion when he insisted that the resemblance should be like “a son to his father”:

Therein is often a great divergence in particular features, but there is a certain suggestion, what our painters call an “air,” most noticeable in the face and eyes, which makes the resemblance. As soon as we see the son, he recalls the father to us, although if we should measure every feature we should find them all different. But there is a mysterious something there that has this power.²

His application of this distinction is as simple as it is revealing:

Thus we may use another man’s conceptions and the colour of his style, but not use his words. In the first case the resemblance is hidden deep; in the second it is glaring. The first procedure makes poets, the second makes apes.

Jonathan Bate, who quotes elements of this letter in his brilliant study of Shakespeare’s relationship to Ovid, goes on to argue that Shakespeare’s imitation of Ovid is of the kind approved by this tradition, an affiliation, as Petrarch described it, “often more easily felt than defined” and “planted so deep that it can only be extricated by quiet meditation.”³ The connection between writers of different eras was important to early criticism, as it remains today, and in many ways the polar alternatives for describing that relationship, from the perspective of the imitating younger writers, is well expressed in Petrarch’s “son” and “ape.” The resemblance of a son to his father endows the newcomer with an honorable heritage and may confer the benefits of having a nurturing and protecting family. The appellation of “ape” suggests not only mindless mimicry, but also banishment from the human and literary families. Because both terms recur explicitly in Dryden’s discussions of plagiarism and imitation, and because in the Restoration the issues addressed by Petrarch and others in the Renaissance received a higher degree of often acrimonious airing in the public press, it seems useful to explore the question of the value of those terms for describing the relationship between Dryden and other writers, particularly Shakespeare. Can Petrarch’s quiet meditation yield an understanding of Dryden’s imitations of Shakespeare and other great writers that can be considered filial? Or would his injunction against using another writer’s words properly condemn Dryden’s appropriations, at least for those applying Petrarch’s values?

Petrarch’s notion of a literary “son” would certainly not be surprising to Dryden, for whom the idea that there were lineal relationships among poets of different eras was important to his sense of himself as an artist. In the retrospective Preface to The Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), he observes that the major English poets of the Renaissance eagerly placed themselves with their literary genealogies. Having praised Spenser and Edward Fairfax, the translator of Tasso, as great Elizabethan “Masters [of] our Language . . . who saw much farther into the Beauties of our Numbers, than those who immediately followed them” (7:25),⁴ he records as their true descendents—not those who “immediately followed them,” but those who understood their styles and adapted them for their own:

Milton was the Poetical Son of Spencer, and Mr. Waller of Fairfax; for we have our Lineal Descents and Clans, as well as other Families: Spencer [sic.] more than once insinuates, that the Soul of Chaucer was transfus’d into his Body; and that he was begotten by him Two hundred years after his Decease; Milton has acknowledg’d to me, that Spencer was his Original; and many besides my self have heard our famous Waller own, that he deriv’d the Harmony of his Numbers from the Godfrey of Bul- loign, which was turn’d into English by Mr. Fairfax.

(7:25)

Clearly, these descendents are proud of their literary progenitors and wished to acknowledge them because they regarded such lineal descents as wholly honorable. As Laura Rosenthal points out, images of descent are even important in satires, when the implications were dishonorable. The most famous example is in Dryden’s own MacFlecknoe (1682), where Dryden’s ironic coronation of Thomas Shadwell as king of dullness includes a hyperbolic account of his descent from the odious poet Richard Flecknoe. “MacFlecknoe” means “son of Flecknoe.” There it is an important means of defining his lineal right to reign and be acknowledged throughout the literary world as the absolute monarch of nonsense.⁵

That sense of literary forbears seems always to have been important to Dryden, and he often invoked this traditional image of Shakespeare as a literary father. Yet in his earliest criticism, his attitude is complex because it is not uniformly deferential. Indeed it is sometimes openly rebellious. Being a literary son did not for Dryden always lead to expressions of respect or admiration. In the “Essay of Dramatic Poesy” (1667), for example, his witty image for the Shakespeare and his Elizabethan contemporaries is surprising because his spokesman Neander paints these “honour’d and almost ador’d” ancestors as wastrels:

We acknowledge them our Fathers in wit, but they have ruin’d their Estates themselves before they came to their childrens hands. There is scarce an Humour, a Character, or any kind of Plot which they have not us’d. All comes sullied or wasted to us: and were they to entertain this age, they could not now make so plenteous treatments out of such decay’d Fortunes. This therefore will be a good Argument to us either not to write at all, or to attempt some other way. There is no bayes to be expected in their Walks.

(Works, 17:73)

Dryden transforms the plentitude of his predecessors into a liberating fault: since they’ve used up everything, those of his generation must begin anew. This witty complaint forms the basis for an important argument against imitating the masters of the previous age, yet it also suggests that imitation, if not plagiarism, is almost inevitable because the “fathers” have seemingly already been everywhere or—perhaps more accurately— the lands they have explored now seem to be all that can be conquered. His main concern here is that respect for literary fathers not result in a generation of “apes” who copy too much from such powerful fathers. That fear justifies his emphasis on the rebellious side of the filial relationship.

That the attitudes of actual sons might include a range of emotions beyond love and reverence should come as no surprise in our post-Freudian age, in which the Oedipus complex is a well-known tenet of psychoanalysis. As a common dictionary definition has it, the “libidinal feelings in a child, especially a male child, for the parent of the opposite sex [is] usually accompanied by hostility to the parent of the same sex.”⁶ Generational conflict, especially between fathers and sons, is surely a frequent pattern in human behavior. Indeed, the great authority exercised by fathers in the seventeenth century could easily result in sons having negative feelings about their fathers. About the period in which Dryden was a child, Lawrence Stone observes that, “from 1540 to 1660 there is a great deal of evidence, especially from Puritans, of a fierce determination to break the will of the child, and to enforce his utter subjection to the authority of his elders and superiors, and most especially of his parents.”⁷ During this time, it was commonly expected that children would “kneel before their parents to ask their blessing every morning, and even as adults on arrival at or departure from the home.”⁸ Not surprisingly, some parents’ demands or punishments were so excessive that they resulted in abhorrence and fear as well as outward deference. Stone cites the example of Bishop Gilbert Burnet—born in 1630, a year before Dryden—whose childhood memories included “much severe correction; the fear of that brought me under too great an uneasiness, and sometimes even to a hatred of my father.”⁹ Clearly, what Stone calls “this pattern of extreme deference to parents in the home”¹⁰ could also result in antagonism, however suppressed or regretted. Although we have no evidence that Dryden’s puritan upbringing led to fear or hatred of his father, it is important to recall that in a period in which parental authority was enforced with severity, the idea of “paternity” could represent an ambiguous claim on loyalty or affection.

In just the same way, the claims of paternal literary masters result in a coiled nest of conflicting motives that include admiration and distaste, submission, and competitive pride. This combination of emotions can result in considerable complexity when applied to literary relations between generations because the acknowledgment of paternal authority might take the form of imitation and of what some would call plagiarism, whereas rebellion might encompass both a rejection of early models and a inclination to fall short of adequate acknowledgments of the influence of past masters on new works. In fact, Dryden was judged by some to be guilty on both counts, but he steadily denied the charges.

Some insight into Dryden’s complex feelings about the paternal figures of the English dramatic tradition may be gained indirectly from examining his comedy, Sir Martin Mar-all (1667), written in collaboration with the Duke of Newcastle (1592–1676) during the same period that saw the publication of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy. After collaborating with the elderly Newcastle, known for his earlier patronage of Ben Jonson, Dryden may well have imagined the play’s final conflict between old Moody, the heroine’s father, and the amorous Sir Martin as representative of the clash of old and new theatrical styles. Even the play’s two authors may be implicated in this satirical theme. Moody has the blunt, inelegant style of one “bred up in the old Elizabeth way of plainness” (3.1.33–34; 9:237) while the heedless Sir Martin enrages him with his modish language usually based on French words. Moody demands that he speak in plain English: “If thou wilt have a foolish word to lard thy lean discourse with, take an English one when thou speakest English” (3.1.83–85; 9:239). While Moody is otherwise a standard blocking figure whose efforts to marry off his daughter to a man she dislikes are clearly doomed, he is not such a fool as Sir Martin. Moody easily sees through Sir Martin’s inept plotting, even having Sir Martin beaten for pretending, ineptly enough, to be Moody’s long-lost son. Moody as a father seems close to Dryden’s sense of the older writers he admired, once powerful and still upright, but now unfashionably plain, blunt, and inelegant. In the same way, Sir Martin is a parody of the faults of the new style because he is full of French elegance, but senseless and ineffective.

However, Moody does have a true son in this play. He is Warner, who, in the end, marries Moody’s daughter Millisent and reveals himself to be a nobleman. Once that fact has been established, Moody quickly accepts Warner as a son-in-law and offers to pay off the mortgage to his estate (5.2.126–127; 9:289). This turn of events is not in the play’s sources; there the tit...