Blackwell Reference Online

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Pens can forge, my Friend, that cannot write. ( Alexander Pope , Epilogue to the Satires: Dialogue II , 188) Imitation arises as a scandal, forgery as a style of genius, and scholarship as a cure. ( Susan Stewart , Crimes of Writing ) The century and a half from 1640 to 1790 witnessed not only the rise of literary property and the establishment of copyright, but a concurrent increase in literary – as well as legal – cases of forgery and plagiarism. The period was obsessed by authenticity and literary theft and produced some of the most renowned literary forgeries: James Macpherson's Ossian and the ‘marvellous boy’ Thomas Chatterton's Rowley, the fake Formosan George Psalmanazar, William Lauder's interpolated plagiarisms of Milton, and William Henry Ireland's Shakespeare forgeries. Indeed, the entire literary milieu was saturated with these issues through cases of copyright infringement (such as Pope v. Curll ), pirate printing, and literary property debates (such as the Tonsons' hold over Shakespeare editions). In the field of scholarship too, charges of forgery and plagiarism dogged the development of editorial protocols and historical criticism in literature as diverse as the Bible and old ballads. Forgery and plagiarism are legal – or at least quasi-legal – terms which carry a powerful literary charge, and this chapter will consider them first as criminal activities, and then ... log in or subscribe to read full text