Plagiarism and Hermione...

[Ebony AKA AngieJ]

Hi, OT-Chatterers... here's something that may be of interest.

This week in my theatre course here at Corpus we are studying several 
plays that are currently running.  One is called *Jubilee*, a 
production commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company to 
commemorate the 1769 Jubilee Celebration of the Bard at Stratford-on-
Avon, at a time when he was not nearly as popular or canonical as he 
is now.  The action alternates between three time periods, but most 
of it takes place in 1769.  The play was written by one Peter Barnes, 
who has been cited by the Times as one of Britain's foremost 
humorists and playwrights.

One of the minor characters, a serving maid at a brothel, is named 
Hermione.  (As the play is c. 2001, did Barnes name this character 
after the HP character, the character from mythology, or the 
character from *The Winter's Tale*?)  

I will get to the plagiarism issue in a moment.  Here are some lines 
from this rustic "serving maid" who is constanly critical of this 
1769 Jubilee:

********************

>From I:ix--

Hermione:  Since you asked, why celebrate Shakespeare?  What if some 
poets soar high enough to hear the music of the spheres and write it 
down and Shakespeare is one such transcriber?  While you celebrate 
him, the real world is being forgotten for a verb or a non.  Life... 
listen to me... life is a series of lessons which must be lived 
through to be understood.  What does Shakespeare know of the terror 
of my life, a slave to fetching and carrying?  Don't cry over his 
verse, cry over my life.  Celebrate me, not that scribbler who is 
rotting in the earth.  He doesn't need your flags and your trumpets.  
Celebrate me!  Celebrate me!

>From I:x--

Hermione:  They aren't doing it for Shakespeare, but for themselves.  
If he lives, perhaps they will too.  It's natural.  It's the wish of 
every human being not to be forgotten.  The universal secret, from 
which all other secrets spring, is the longing for more, much more 
life.  But immortality lasts a generation for most of us.  We're 
remembered, if at all, by our children.  We're buried in our sons and 
daughters.  Generations pass while trees grow tall.  It's vanity to 
think that any names should last.

<snip!>

Hermione:  How many poets wrote in the former age and yet the works 
of scarce--what?--one in ten thousand remain.  Neither their books 
nor their bodies persist and after every Jubilee their shadows are no 
longer than before.

Mrs. Ross (the madam of the brothel, to whom she is speaking):  
Men're too weak to face the truth, women can.  We begin to die the 
moment we begin.  Our days add up by tiny accumulations to one long 
night.

(The next is my favorite line in the whole play...)

Hermione:  And we'll never know what song the Sirens sang, or what 
name Achilles used when he hid himself among the women.

****************

I was so enthused about that line, and this very philosophical 
character appeared in what really is mostly a second-rate romp.  Fun 
but not all that deep... and this Hermione character added what I 
perceived as depth.

I was enthused, that is, until my tutor for this session (another 
Oxford guy) told us not to be impressed.

"It's blatant plagiarism, really," he says.  "Barnes lifted that line 
without attribution, and several others."

So our tutor then hands out a few copies of an excerpt from *Urne-
Burial*, by Sir Thomas Browne.  Written in 1651, this text is a 
rather obscure essay on how the ancients buried their dead.  Sure 
enough, most of the above is found somewhere in this dusty text that 
no one but scholars read anymore.

Our tutor's field is seventeenth century British literature... but my 
American colleagues and I have come to the conclusion over pints that 
this man knows absolutely everything.  He is completely intelligent 
and conversant on just about any subject, which is why he teaches at 
Oxford, I supposed.

Anyway, we asked if we ought to blow the whistle.  After all, this 
play just opened in Stratford a week ago.  Although Browne's work is 
now public domain, we were horrified that he hadn't done an 
attribution.  It'd be different if the text in question was something 
like the Bible (which needs no attribution, really) or he wasn't 
making any money off of it (I personally wouldn't have minded so much 
if his play had been fanfiction or not-for-profit) or even if he'd 
lifted only a couple of phrases or lines instead of whole paragraphs.

And secretly I thought it ironic that my favorite character in HP 
canon, one who would *definitely* blow the whistle in this case, had 
a namesake in this play who was the mouthpiece for this transgression.

"No, no," he said with a smile.  "I just want you to read the 
original source."  (Groans.)  "Let's just keep this among friends."

But I did ask my tutor if I could share it with all of you.

The moral of this story is... I'm not so sure that it has one.  
Except that I am tired of Stratford, having been there several times, 
and am almost all Shakespeare'd out.  ;-)

At least I got a good sig quote out of all this.  ;-)

--Ebony