Restoration parody and plagiarism

Property and propriety in literary texts were vexed issues in the Restoration, both legally (as with the Licensing Act of 1662) and in the contested cultural politics of print and scribal publication. Was writing, especially in its most prestigious form as poetry, primarily an appurtenance of a courtier’s prestige? Or was it a source of profit to writers and booksellers in a growing national market? In the late seventeenth century, the obvious answer was that it was both, in ways well exemplified by the different centres of gravity in the works of the rival writers of the era, including Butler, Marvell, Rochester, Shadwell, and Dryden. This chapter first surveys practices of literary reuse and abuse in the period, before a new reading of Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe brings the tensions between parody and plagiarism in the small literary world of the Restoration into focus. The battles were intensely personal as well as highly significant for the development of print culture.