Early Modern Authorship and Prose Continuations

Adaptation and Ownership from Sidney to Richardson

N. Simonova

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349501472, 9781137474124
• eBook ISBN: 9781137474131
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The first in-depth account of fictional sequels in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this examines cases of prose fiction works being continued by multiple writers, reading them for evidence of Early Modern attitudes towards authorship, originality, and literary property.

1

Introduction: Works of Another Hand

Alas, Madam! (continued he) how few books are there of which one ever can possibly arrive at the last page! Was there ever yet any thing written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim’s Progress?

– Samuel Johnson (Piozzi 281)

Authorship and prose continuations

Despite Dr Johnson’s pronouncement, the number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books that were ‘wished longer’ by their readers considerably exceeded this list of three. Many of those readers, in fact, went beyond wishing by actually writing continuations to the texts they read, adapting the characters, settings, and plots in order to tie up loose ends or tell further stories. This meant that it was, indeed, occasionally difficult to ever reach the ‘last page’ of a popular work, or to decide who ought to have the ‘last word’ about what those pages ought to contain.

Today, writing of a similar kind proliferates under the name of ‘fanfiction’ and has recently received considerable media attention. Now generally published online, these are non-profit, amateur works set within the worlds of existing media properties. While some content creators have welcomed or even encouraged such fan activity, a number of prominent authors have been vocal in their disapproval. In May 2010, for instance, the historical novelist Diana Gabaldon posted a series of blog entries in which she writes, ‘My position on fan-fic is pretty clear: I think it’s immoral, I know it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.’ She then expands on this literally visceral reaction, describing such stories as being akin to a stranger having sexual fantasies about members of her family, ‘break[ing] into [her] house’, or ‘camp[ing] in [her] backyard without permission’. Gabaldon’s views clearly demonstrate the highly-charged, emotional discourse that often results when one author’s work is continued by another. Statements like hers raise questions about the boundaries of literary property, the relationship between authors and the characters they create, and the role that an author might claim in the subsequent reception of his or her published work: all questions that this book seeks to explore.

The strong pushback that Gabaldon’s announcement received from supporters of fanfiction – leading to several further blog posts clarifying her position, and finally to the deletion of the entire episode – may signal that we are now living in a period of transition when legal and critical opinions about these issues are being renegotiated, much as they were in the Early Modern period. In fact, many defences of fanfiction look to the pre-copyright past to provide a precedent for their engagement with existing texts. Sheenagh Pugh’s The Democratic Genre, for instance, begins with references to the myth of Robin Hood, Robert Henryson’s fifteenth-century continuation of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in ‘The Testament of Cresseid’, and the plays of Shakespeare and his Restoration successors. Assertions that Virgil’s Aeneid is fanfiction of Homer’s Iliad, that Shakespeare stole his plots, or that Milton’s Paradise Lost is derivative of the Bible abound in these sorts of discussions. As the diversity of these examples demonstrates, however, establishing a lineage for fanfiction often involves a very generalising view of literary history. My aim is to revise such broad claims through a detailed study of prose fiction continuations and the discourse surrounding them in another period of transition: the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This enables me to trace the roots of the strongly possessive attitudes, and indeed of many of the specific metaphors of violation and invasion, that find their expression in Gabaldon’s posts.

By focusing specifically on cases of continuation by someone other than the writer of the ‘original’ text, I necessarily engage throughout with the definition and extent of authorship. The idea of the author is at play in any discussion of a continuation as ‘genuine’ or ‘spurious’, or of whether its events will be accepted as the ‘authorised’ and ‘canonical’ version of what happens to a given set of characters. As one of Samuel Richardson’s correspondents writes, ‘I find there is a Second Part of Pamela Advertised. If it is by the Author of the First I shall expect it with Impatience and Pleasure. If it is the Work of another Hand, I am resolved never to look into it’ (Forster XVI.1.16). If the ‘author function’, as Michel Foucault has influentially theorised, brings ‘unity’ to a set of texts and marks off their boundaries (284–6), then a different author must necessarily result in disunity. Unlike the forms of traditional culture with which Pugh begins (in which stories of Robin Hood or King Arthur circulated and were reshaped without any names being attached to them [26]), all of the texts that I examine were written in response to works attributed to known biographical individuals, and all of them find various ways of dealing with this fact.

My work therefore participates in the recent critical effort to historicise the concept of authorship, inaugurated by Foucault’s ‘What Is an Author?’ In that essay, he suggests that there was a time, vaguely dated to before ‘the seventeenth or eighteenth century’, when literary texts circulated without an ‘author function’: that is, without the author’s name serving as a special classificatory category that defines the nature and status of the text, setting it apart from others (284–5). Critics following Foucault have built on these assertions to provide a more nuanced history of the author function and literary property: Joseph Loewenstein, for instance, has discussed the development of the idea of ‘possessive authorship’ in the career of Ben Jonson, while Brean S. Hammond has traced what he calls a ‘prehistory’ of copyright in the late seventeenth century. The majority of this work, however (going back to Harold Ogden White’s classic study of Plagiarism and Imitation during the English Renaissance), has focused on the disputed distinction between plagiarism and imitation: specific forms of intertextuality that cannot be translated wholesale to the discussion of continuations. Although they may also involve imitation of style, continuations do not require it, and (unlike instances of plagiarism) they must announce themselves as continuations in order to be effective. In their unique combination of repetition and difference – what the preface to David Simple, Volume the Last calls ‘putting known and remarkable Characters into new Situations’ (vi) – continuations sit adjacent to without fully fitting into the history of debates about literary imitation, and are only rarely discussed as a discrete mode.

Where critical accounts (including those of Hammond, Laura Rosenthal, and Paulina Kewes) do comment on forms of appropriation beyond direct textual borrowing, such as the adaptation of plots and characters, they have done so almost exclusively in the domain of the theatre. Prose fiction, on the other hand, has been largely neglected, particularly before the turn of the eighteenth century. Kewes sketches a literary history that justifies this tendency, finding that attitudes toward literary property change ‘in response to the changing status’ of different genres, with drama being the dominant form of the seventeenth century and poetry of the eighteenth:

Our period provides few instances of prose fiction coming under scrutiny. This is not to say that writers of novels, novellas, romantic fiction, and the like, were wholly exempt from censure if their work was perceived to be derivative; however, given the relative generic novelty of such writings, there seems to have been greater scope for ‘novelty’ of subject-matter. … By contrast, in the modern world, the majority of plagiarism charges involve novels. This is because prose fiction is much the most profitable and popular of literary forms. (‘Plagiarism’ 14–15)

Similarly, Paul Budra and Betty Schellenberg, introducing the sole collection of essays on literary sequels to date, argue that it is usually ‘the ascendant form that is likely to be responded to as charismatic and produce a demand of extension’, again equating the Renaissance with the theatre in their table of such forms (12). However, while it is certainly true that drama was the most commercially prominent genre in the Early Modern period, this does not mean that it existed in isolation. Even before the novel had properly ‘risen’, the works of prose fiction discussed in subsequent chapters served as both bestsellers and cultural touchstones, sparking multiple debates over authorial ownership that merit closer attention.

Moreover, a study of prose fiction continuations poses questions different from those related to dramatic or poetic adaptation, highlighting issues of story rather than style. In defining precisely what I mean by a prose ‘continuation’, I adopt Budra and Schellenberg’s focus on the ‘chronological extension of a narrative’ (7). This extension is implicit in the word ‘sequel’, although I generally follow period usage by calling these texts ‘continuations’ (or, in the case of the bridging passages inserted into Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, ‘supplements’).¹ ‘Sequel’ only begins to assume its modern meaning in the mid-eighteenth century, at the same time when (as detailed in the concluding chapter) it first takes on pejorative connotations. This concentration on sequence and continuity delimits the scope of my study: Francis Quarles’s Argalus and Parthenia and Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania, for example, are not continuations of the Arcadia, although they are clearly inspired by it: the former retells a single subplot from the story in a different form, while the latter alludes to it without sharing any narrative elements. According to these criteria, the major aspects of continuations emerge as an emphasis on (or a resistance to) textual closure, and the adaptation of common characters and settings.

By ‘continuing’ a prior text, continuations necessarily question the very idea of closure: in spite of authorial fiat or the conventional endings of marriage or death, the text is always capable of going on past the ‘last page’ anticipated by Johnson. In some cases, such as the publication of Sidney’s incomplete Arcadia, continuations seek to fill plot lacunae in a satisfactory and economical manner (Chapter 2). In others, however, texts initially presented as formally finished (such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela) are seen as potentially serial, capable of being reopened into further narrative. Such opposition to closure is frequently associated with the Early Modern romance: in Inescapable Romance, Patricia Parker characterises the genre as one which ‘both projects and postpones or wanders from a projected ending’ (13); it ‘keeps its fiction going and defers, like the storytelling of Scheherazade, the fateful moment of truth’ (37). In moving from seventeenth- to eighteenth-century continuations, however, this study seeks to bridge the traditional gap between the ‘romance’ and the ‘novel’ by seeing both as forms of extended fictional narrative. Indeed, as J. Paul Hunter argues in ‘Serious Reflections on Further Adventures’, eighteenth-century novels are also frequently ‘additive, digressive, lumpy, and resistant to closure defined in the generally accepted sense’, and these are not faults but rather ‘intentional, inevitable, and significant to their working power’ (278). In addition to challenging such critical standards of completeness, I hope that my work will also allow serial fiction (even when it becomes so retrospectively, through the later addition of continuations) to be seen as a part of the history of prose fiction, rather than as an aberration resulting from publishing practices somehow extrinsic to the creative process.

Another defining feature of continuations is the characters they share with their source texts. These are not simply archetypal figures (such as a disguised prince or a virtuous servant) but the same people with a common past, who become recognisable through their proper names. This may seem too obvious to be worth stating, yet it appears to be a point of confusion for critics writing about character appropriation. Thus Hunter, for example, sees Sophia Western as an adaptation of Clarissa Harlowe because the two encounter some similar incidents (282), and Elizabeth Judge writes that ‘It must have been especially difficult given the uncertain contours of the new genre of the novel for contemporary readers to know whether’ the authors of continuations were ‘kidnapp[ing] the same characters or … creating original characters of their own’ (50–1). In fact, the name of the character is what cuts through this apparent difficulty: it signals the nature of a text’s engagement with a precursor, distinguishing continuations from more broadly-defined imitation. One might therefore posit a ‘character function’ that, in the case of a continuation by a different writer, serves as a unifying principle rivalling that of the ‘author function’ by creating what Abigail Derecho terms an ‘archive’ encompassing all texts relating to a particular set of characters. A 1749 review of a continuation titled The History of Tom Jones in his Married State draws attention to these conflicting principles of authorship and story by arguing against the belief that ‘when a work is generally well esteemed … any thing that carries the same name, or seems to be a continuation of the work, will be in more or less request, if but for the sake of compleating, and taking all in, which is wrote on the subject’ (Cleland 25–6).

The multiplicity of continuations I study, however, shows that further stories about familiar characters were, in fact, in significant ‘request’ throughout the period. This is because fictional characters are more than named signifiers within the text or, as Martin Price contends, functions of narrative that exist only in so far as novels require them (37). Followed over the course of many pages and incidents, they can be imagined to possess a past and future, conferring on them some of the attributes of ‘real’ people. Characters thus hold a privileged position in discussions of continuations. According to Gabaldon, in fact, they are the sole aspect of a text that should never be open to adaptation by others:

The central – the only truly vital part – of a story, and what makes it unique, is the character or characters … Therefore, while all kinds of things in a piece of writing can flow throughout the collective consciousness and inspire new work – theme, style, form, setting, mythical archetype, ideas of any kind … a character is not merely an idea. He or she is a real thing, and no less real for having no bodily presence.

Like Gabaldon, some Early Modern authors display what Judge calls a ‘custodial and affective’ interest in their characters as people (43). John Bunyan is protective of ‘his’ pilgrims in The Second Part of the Pilgrim’s Progress (Chapter 4), while Richardson fears that his Pamela would be ‘depreciated and debased’, or even murdered, by rival continuations (Chapter 5). For readers, too, accuracy of characterisation serves as a primary criterion for judging the success of a continuation, and can be discussed in highly emotional terms. Even critics seeking to offer an impartial literary-historical account can change tone abruptly when evaluating characterisation: thus A. D. G. Wiles complains that Gervase Markham in his English Arcadia ‘has profaned these noble characters [Helen and Amphialus]; and what is worse, he suddenly breaks off his account of them, leaving these evil implications upon them’ (124–5), while Paul Salzman notes that the heroines of the Arcadia are ‘“transmigrated” almost unrecognizably’ in Anna Weamys’s Continuation, so that ‘the reader is disturbed to see’ it (131). Such attachment to characters by both authors and audiences is particularly evident in the interactions between Richardson and his readers, who wept and pleaded for Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison. However, although both Hunter and David A. Brewer argue that it is only in the eighteenth century that characters become more ‘portable’, gaining an ‘independence and detachability’ that allows them to move more readily between texts (Hunter 282; Brewer 78), the earlier examples of the Arcadia and The Pilgrim’s Progress demonstrate that this focus on character is not exclusive to the greater psychological realism attributed to the novel.

While a shared cast of characters serves as the most obvious indication that one work continues another, the details of setting around them also play a role. This is especially true in the case of the Arcadia – one of the few Early Modern romances to be titled, not after its protagonists, but the country where it is set. ‘Arcadia’ thus shifts from being the generalised pastoral realm of classical and Renaissance literature to a particular country in a particular book by Philip Sidney: a defined and self-contained environment with a known creator, but with space within its borders for other writers to set their stories. More broadly, continuations require certain assumptions about fiction itself as a kind of alternate reality. This is what we mean we talk of a fictional ‘world’, even in works (like Richardson’s Pamela) that appear to have a recognisably quotidian setting. In Narrative as Virtual Reality, Marie-Laure Ryan terms this process textual ‘immersion’: ‘the experience through which a fictional world acquires the presence of an autonomous language-independent reality populated with live human beings’ (14). Although Ryan does not see such immersion as a factor prior to the nineteenth century – before that, she writes, ‘the visibility of language acted as a barrier that prevented readers from losing themselves in the story-world’ (4) – the existence of continuations seems to argue otherwise. Continuations also suggest that immersion and ‘interactivity’ (the process of engaging with a work on the surface level, as an artificial textual object) are not the disparate poles that Ryan describes. As many of the examples in this book show, readers who become writers of continuations care deeply about what happens within the narrative world and to its people, reacting to it ‘as though’ it were real. Yet the experience of constructing their own fictions in response means that they do not lose sight of the fictional nature of that world, taking place through language and having been created by an author.

The fact that all writers of continuations must begin as reade...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Works of Another Hand
• 2 The ‘Perfect-Unperfect’ Arcadia
• 3 Approaches to Authorship in the Arcadia Continuations
• 4 Rogues and Pilgrims: Two Restoration Bestsellers
• 5 Samuel Richardson vs. the ‘High Life Men’
• 6 Closing the Circle: Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison
• Conclusion: The Fall of the Sequel
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index