'Plagiarism': A literary concept in England to 1775

English

Volumn 56, Issue 214, 2007, Pages 1-16

  Terry, Richard ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SUNDERLAND   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 43249134350     PISSN: 00138215     EISSN: 17561124     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/english/56.214.1     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. For an overview of the concept in the classical period, see the Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, third edn revised (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 'plagiarism'.
2. See also Creative Imitation and Latin Literature, ed. David West and Tony Woodman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
3. For discussion of literary theft in early modern England, see H. M. Paull, Literary Ethics: A Study of the Growth of the Literary Conscience (London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd, 1928);
4. Harold Ogden White, Plagiarism and Imitation During the English Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935);
5. Stephen Orgel, 'The Renaissance Artist as Plagiarist', ELH 48 (1981): 476-95;
6. Laura J. Rosenthal, Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996);
7. Brean S. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670-1740: 'Hackney for Bread' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 83-104;
8. Paulina Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998);
9. and Plagiarism in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
10. As a crime of writing, plagiarism also bears a relation to literary forgery: see Nick Groom, The Forger's Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (London: Picador, 2002).
11. Cited from Martial, Epigrams, Loeb Classical Library edition, ed. and trans. D.R. Shackleton Bailey, three vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1: 79-81. Poems concerned with plagiarism are indexed.
12. Several epigrams, though not the one just quoted, name Martial's plagiarizing rival as Fidentius. I use the name here, with licence, as a generic cognomen for the plagiarist.
13. See Epigrams X. 100: 'Fool, why do you mix your verses with mine? What do you want, wretch, with a book at odds with itself?'. Loeb edn, 3: 415.
14. See Loeb edn, 1: 89-91.
15. This epigram is cited, and its implications discussed, in Christopher Ricks's 1997 British Academy lecture on 'Plagiarism', subsequently reprinted in Kewes ed., pp. 21-40
16. and in Ricks's Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 219-40.
17. Epigrams I. 29, in Loeb edn, 1: 61.
18. Of course, this date also equates to the birth of print, and so to the advent of exactly that kind of material on which I am drawing as evidence. In this respect, my generalization is a compromised one.
19. For Martial's influence on English poets, see Martial in English, ed. J.P. Sullivan and A.J. Boyle (London: Penguin Books, 1996).
20. The Proverbs and Epigrams of John Heywood, reprinted from the original edition of 1562 for the Spenser Society (1867), p. 130.
21. Flowers and Epigrammes of Timothe Kendall, reprinted from the original edition of 1577 for the Spenser Society (1874), p. 22.
22. See also pp. 25, 26.
23. See Harington, Epigrams, 1618 (Menston: Scolar Press, 1970), 'Of Don Pedro and his Poetry'.
24. For Jonson's relation to the plagiarism issue, see Ian Donaldson '"The Fripperie of Wit": Jonson and Plagiarism', in Kewes ed., pp. 119-33.
25. Cited from Jonson, The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1975), p. 60.
26. Ben Jonson, Poetaster, ed. Tom Cain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 181.
27. Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, ed. Robin Robbins, two vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1: 34-35. Note Browne's final point about plagiarism pre-dating print. It remains unclear whether the phenomenon of plagiarism in a pre-print culture was one he associated exclusively with the classics.
28. See Samuel Butler's Contradictions: 'There is no one Originall Author of any one Science among the Antients known to the world, . . . for the old Philosophers stole all their Doctrines from some others that were before them, as Plato from Epicharmus and as Diognes Laertius say's, Homer stole his Poems out of the Temple of Vulcan in Ægypt where they were kept, and sayd to have been written by a woman, and from him and Ennius, Virgill is sayd to have stole his'. Cited from Samuel Butler, Characters and Passagesfrom Note-books, ed. A.R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), p. 429.
29. See also Dryden, Preface to An Evening's Love (1671): 'Virgil has evidently translated Theocritus, Hesiod, and Homer, in many places; besides what he has taken from Ennius in his own language'. Cited from John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson, two vols (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1962), 1: 154.
30. Langbaine, Momus Triumphans: or, The Plagiaries of the English Stage (1688), sig. A4 v.
31. A Journal from Parnassus, ed. Hugh Macdonald (London: P.J. Dobell, 1937), pp. 44-45.
32. For the relation of allusion to plagiarism, see Ricks, 'Plagiarism', in Kewes ed., pp. 31-33.
33. The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith. Commonly Called Mal Cutpurse. (1662), in Counterfeit Ladies, ed. Janet Todd and Elizabeth Spearing (London: William Pickering, 1994), p. 33.
34. For an historical view of literary piracy, see John Feather, Publishing, Piracy and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain (London: Mansell Publishing Limited, 1994).
35. Edward Ward, A Journey to Hell Part II (1700), Canto VII. 11-12; cited from http:// lion.chadwyck.co.uk.
36. Nathan Bailey, Dictionarium Britannicum (1730), 'pirate'.
37. Thomas Cooke, The Candidates for the Bays. A Poem. (1730), fn to line 154.
38. Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language (1755), 'Pirate 2.'.
39. Book IV, Satire ii, line 84; cited from The Collected Poems of Joseph Hall, ed. A. Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1949), p. 57.
40. See also I. vii. 11; VI. i. 251-52; and editorial note (pp. 259-60).
41. Cain ed., p. 181.
42. For the general development of English lexicography, see Dc Witt T. Starnes and Gertrude E. Noyes, The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson, 1604-1755 (1946), rev. Gabrielle Stein (Amsterdam: J. Benjamin Pub. Co., 1991).
43. For verification of the absence of 'plagiarism' (or any variant) as a lemma in pre-1640 dictionaries, see Jürgen Schäfer, Early Modern English Lexicography, two vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Schäfer surveys all lemmas in printed glossaries and dictionaries between 1475 and 1640.
44. Waller ed., pp. 247-48.
45. for 'Upon Critics', see Hudibras, Parts I and II and Selected Other Writings, ed. John Wilders and Hugh de Quehen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 227-29.
46. Thomas Blount, Glossographia: or, A Dictionary Interpreting the Hard Words of Whatsoever Language, now Used in our Refined English Tongue, fourth edn (1674), 'plagiary'.
47. John Bullokar, An English Expositor, or Compleat English Dictionary (1695), 'Plagiary'.
48. Watson ed., 1: 31.
49. See also Dryden's Preface to his translation of Fresnoy's De Arte Graphica: The Art of Painting (1695): 'Without invention a painter is but a copier, and a poet but a plagiary of others'.
50. For a concise overview of the Lauder affair, see Michael J. Marcuse, 'Miltonoklastes: The Lauder Affair Reconsidered', Eighteenth-Century Life 4 (1978): 86-91.
51. Letter of 27 August 1756, in the Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, with corrections and additions by H. W. Starr, three vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 2: 477.
52. See Roger Lonsdale, 'Gray and "Allusion": the Poet as Debtor', in Studies in the Eighteenth Century IV, ed. R.F. Brissenden and J.C. Eade (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), pp. 31-55.
53. Matthew Green, The Spleen: An Epistle, second edn corrected (1737), lines 524-27 (pp. 29-30). See also lines 11-32 (pp. 2-3) for discussion of the difference between stealing from living authors and from dead ones.
54. Colley Cibber, An Apology for his Life (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1976), p. 138.
55. Poetical Characteristics, Canto I, line 250, published in Stevenson, Original Poems on Several Subjects. Volume II. Satires (1765). Cited from http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk.
56. Swift, A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation (1738), in The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis et al., fourteen vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939-68), 4: 103.
57. Percival Stockdale, An Inquiry into the Nature and Genuine Laws of Poetry (1778), pp. 74-76.