Owning performance: literary property and embodied authorship on the 18th-century stage
Date
2016
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
In the century following the passage of England’s first Copyright Act (1710), authorship increasingly became defined in terms of the author’s proprietary rights. Yet, this newfound ownership was limited to print publication, and as a result, dramatists, who published their work primarily through performance, did not share the ability to control the publication and circulation of their plays. “Owning Performance” recovers a legal and economic history of authorship that recognizes the medium-specificity of ownership. I argue that by protecting one medium that dramatists worked in (print), but not the other (performance), the Copyright Act pushed dramatists away from print, which enabled unauthorized performances by making their plays widely accessible. While early modern and restoration dramatists, from Ben Jonson to John Dryden and Aphra Behn, had used print to assert their authorial singularity, eighteenth-century playwrights, and especially actor-playwrights like Charles Macklin, David Garrick, and Samuel Foote, radically altered their authorial strategies. Instead of proclaiming their authorial status in print, these actor-playwrights used their own bodies and physical presence in order to maintain proprietary and artistic control over their work. Celebrating the affordances of the medium, they created intentionally-ephemeral and unfixed works, using mimicry, improvisation, and actorial invention to ensure that, in the absence of legal protection, they would continue to control and profit from the re-performance of their plays. ☐ Examining the careers and publishing choices of actor-playwrights Charles Macklin, Samuel Foote, and Arthur Murphy and actor-manager Tate Wilkinson, this dissertation aims to answer three questions: How did literary property and the economics of the theatre affect the practice and perception of dramatic authorship? How did the theatre intervene in the legal and conceptual development of intellectual property? And how did a shift away from print impact the ways eighteenth-century drama has been preserved and studied? Drawing on an archive of plays, playbills, correspondence, and legal cases, I argue that the most exciting dramatic works were created in ways that intentionally evaded print. Actor-playwrights “wrote” their plays with their bodies, commodifying their physical presence to create demand and secure control. I moreover trace the effect of this cultural shift towards embodiment on the development of British theatrical and literary traditions by studying the playwrights and managers who developed performance-based equivalents to printed genres, including stage “anthologies” of popular performance. These strategies circulated British drama beyond the metropole, making theatre at once local and national. This dissertation reconstructs networks of circulation and influence, and engages with pressing questions in performance studies about the preservation of what some scholars argue is an ephemeral medium, to understand the role of performance in the creation of a national theatrical culture and, with it, the shared national identity that the theatre helped shape.
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Keywords
Century theatre, Actor-playwrights, Dramatic authorship, Literary property, Performance studies