ELH

ELH 69.3 (2002) 727-747

Plagiarism and the Originality of National Literature:
Gerard Langbaine

Kevin Pask

The history of national literary canons has recently become a subject of considerable interest to literary historians, and that interest itself suggests the somewhat frayed conceptual monopoly of national literature as an organizational principle of literary scholarship. ¹ The literary history of the national canon inevitably confronts an earlier pan-European culture of Latinitas against and through which the national vernaculars asserted their dignity. The Latinate writer promiscuously accumulated textual attributions since the authenticity of a textual citation required the authority of an auctor. ² Such auctores acquired legends rather than biographies, most prominently the talismanic status of Virgil in the Middle Ages. ³ The sea change from this form of cultural authority to that of the national author entailed a very different mode of authenticity: originality. This form of authority required the distinction of an authorial individual in both textual and biographical terms, increasingly set in opposition to the oppressive weight of the Latin school texts. Although an individuated author might seem to contradict the new idea of national community, the national vernaculars themselves were understood to mediate between the individual and the community; the canonical author made exemplary use of a collective originality felt to be inherent in the national languages. For this reason, apparently, in the course of arguing that German writers should utilize their Muttersprache, the young Johann Gottfried Herder could simply declare, "An original writer in the high sense of the ancients is, with few exceptions, always a national author." ⁴ More recently, the epilogue of Ernst Robert Curtius's classic study of European Latinity intuited a similar relationship, concluding his survey with what are in effect related discussions of both the formation of vernacular literatures and the literary appropriation of creation in opposition to the older notion of imitation. ⁵ M. H. Abrams aligned neoclassical theories of mimesis with the view that mankind consisted of a "generic human type"; "expressive theories" of literary production, on the other hand, [End Page 727] signaled a shift in focus "from work to poet"—and, effectively, from the universal to the national. ⁶

Unlike Herder, neither Curtius nor Abrams is centrally concerned with the national background of these transformations in notions of authorship. I will argue, however, that vernacular literary scholarship in England is concerned with the question of original authorship from its inception, and this concern with the author as individual marks that discourse as national. This requires us to recognize the adumbration of both nationalism and originality in terms that precede their full articulation in the poetics of Romanticism. My central example will be the obscure figure of Gerard Langbaine, remembered, if at all, as the author of the first dramatic bibliographies in England. ⁷ Langbaine's Momus Triumphans (1687) and An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691) are the first sustained attempts to trace the sources of English literary texts. This labor, essential to literary scholarship, is an ambivalent one for Langbaine, bespeaking a newly anxious concern with the authenticity of a dramatic writer's work. Perhaps for this reason, Langbaine has no theory of originality, but he does possess a highly developed—indeed, overdeveloped—sense of plagiarism, which guides his painstaking bibliographical, biographical, and source studies. His systematic application of the concept of plagiarism to literary texts makes possible the development of the modern literary system around individuated authors. René Wellek describes the importance of this innovation in The Rise of English Literary History:

Genuine literary history became possible only when two main concepts began to be elaborated: individuality and development. . . . We must not, of course, understand individuality as referring only to the person of the poet. A comprehension of the uniqueness of a work of art increased with the new demands on "originality" or "invention." The old communism of subject-matter broke down, and "imitation" became slowly a term of reproach. A book like Langbaine's lists of "thefts" and "plagiaries" shows how sharply the so-called unoriginality of an older period was suddenly felt. ⁸

Wellek...