Authors and Adaptation

This chapter traces continuities and changes in the laws governing authorship and ownership in adaptation. Writers had no legal or economic rights over intermedial adaptations of their work prior to the early twentieth century. Using case studies of popular authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Wilkie Collins, Marie Corelli, and Charles Dickens, the chapter documents their writings and actions taken in response to copyright laws and unauthorised adaptations of their work. As writers complained of copyright laws in fiction, letters, and the press, they began to change public and parliamentary opinion; they also banded together in author collectives to protest the laws and collectively strengthened momentum to change them. Most pertinent to this study of adaptation, the inequity of copyright laws spurred many authors to adapt their own work and claim their own adaptations as “authoritative,” even though doing so could not prevent others from adapting it and profiting from it as well.

This chapter focuses on the social and cultural stratifications of writers within and across media and the status of theatrical writing, which had been affected significantly by copyright laws. It finds that theatre’s status as a primarily adapting rather than original domain of writing had been indirectly determined by lax copyright laws, which led to producers favouring adaptations over original writing. The chapter further ponders adaptation’s effects on theatrical aesthetic theory, as well as the cultural and social position of the English theatre and the dramatic writer. Creating dialogues between prose writers and dramatic adapters such as Charles Dickens and William Thomas Moncrieff and studying other prose writers’ attempts to dramatise their own work, including Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, this chapter finds that the hierarchical values attached to different forms of writing and media were very much shaped by adaptation and in turn shaped attitudes towards adaptation and authorship. These dynamics only started to abate in the final decades of the nineteenth century, when copyright laws governing adaptation tightened, resulting in more original theatrical writing and higher esteem for cross-media writing.

This chapter considers how literary writers responded to the arrival of film and its development as a mass narrative form in the late 1910s. It finds that many legal, social, and cultural issues that had informed nineteenth-century relations between drama and prose were newly directed towards film’s relationship to both drama and prose, as film sought to establish itself as an art. Concerns and uncertainties regarding adaptation practices also continued nineteenth-century dynamics, with one major contrast: literary writers were intrigued by the potential that the new medium of film (by contrast to the ancient medium of the stage) held for developing their writing. Authors addressed in previous chapters such as Frances Hodgson Burnett and Marie Corelli are joined by other popular writers, including H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, P.G. Wodehouse, and George Bernard Shaw, to consider their experiences of early film adaptation. This chapter furthermore investigates the role of ‘picture-playwrights’ in the film industry, particularly with regard to medium-specific advice given by newly created screenwriting manuals. It treats film and writing more generally, locating intriguing trajectories between the profession of the dramatist in the nineteenth century and the role of the emerging film writer in the twentieth.

This chapter reflects on what a longer, trans-century purview of living writers’ variable engagements with adaptation and writing across prose, plays, screenplays, and film brings to our understanding of adaptation and intermedial studies more generally. Supplemented by other discursive forms (biographies, autobiographies, letters, periodical reviews, interviews, industry marketing, screenwriting manuals, copyright laws and more), it offers a rich, multifaceted view, bringing together discourses usually separated by media forms or century lines. Despite and because of legal and economic obstacles to adaptation, as well as limitations set by media industries and academic theories of medium specificity, literary writers engaged innovatively in writing across media. After looking back at the book and the period it addresses, the conclusion ends by looking ahead to film’s relationship with writers such as Graham Greene who, born at the turn of the century, shaped by different social and cultural contexts from their literary predecessors, created new diachronic approaches warranting closer examination in future studies of living writers responding to and writing adaptations across media.