Shakespeare and Voltaire: both legally vulnerable and successful

ABSTRACT

Copyright protection was very limited in the past. Both Shakespeare – and, later, Voltaire – suffered from piracy of their ideas. If their respective legal systems were insufficient to provide protection when they published their works, in the later historical development they both became very important in the legal field. Shakespeare became a model to be quoted in judgments for rhetorical reasons, whereas Voltaire was cited because of his strenuous battles to free courts from superstition and religion. The connection between these famous authors is also due to the sincere appreciation for Shakespeare expressed by Voltaire, who highlighted the revolutionary style of the English tragedy when compared with the classicist attitude still prevailing at the time on the European Continent.

KEYWORDS:

• Copyright
• literary and music production
• Voltaire’s and Shakespeare’s authority in law

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Michel de Montaigne, ‘De L’expérience’ in Essais: Livre Troisième, ch. 13 [1580] (Flammarion 1969): ‘il y a plus affaire à interpréter les interprétations qu’à interpréter le choses, et plus de livres sur les livres que sur autre sujet: nous ne faisons que nous entregloser. Tout fourmille de commentaires; d’auteurs, il en est grand cherté’ (emphasis added). The English version, translated by J Florio (1603), retrieved at <https://hyperessays.net/florio/book/III/chapter/13/> accessed 15 January 2024.

2 Similarly, Alexis de Tocqueville observed: ‘History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies’. Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime (1856), available at Oxford Reference, <https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00010959> accessed 26 December 2023.

3 The passage may actually belong to some other thinkers. In a discussion on the life of Shakespeare, Lord Northcliffe (Professor of Modern English at University College, London) points to the fact that, when the sentence was uttered, Robert Greene was ‘deeply dead’: BBC 4, In our Time <https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00547ct> (last played on Thu 15 Mar 2001, at min. 14.30).

4 Jean De La Fontaine, ‘Le geai et le pavon’ in Fables choisies mises en vers par M. de la Fontaine (Paris 1668).

5 Author’s translation. The original text in Italian reads as follows: ‘Il tanto celebre Paisiello ha già trattato questo soggetto sotto il titolo primitivo. Chiamato ad assumere il medesimo difficile incarico, il signor maestro Rossini, onde non incorrere nella taccia di una temeraria rivalità con l’immortale autore che lo ha preceduto, ha espressamente richiesto che il Barbiere di Siviglia fosse di nuovo interamente versificato, e che vi fossero aggiunte parecchie nuove situazioni di pezzi musicali’: in Filippo Annunziata, Prendi … l’anel ti dono, Divagazioni tra opera e diritto privato (Silvana pub. 2016): in this wide-ranging investigation on subjects at the crossroads of music and law, Annunziata reminds us of the episode of Nemorino (the countryman in love with the main female character, Adina) in Donizetti’s Elisir d’amore (1832). This episode is more thoroughly explored by the same author in Nemorino’s Plagiarism: Copyright and Circulation of Texts in the Golden Age of Italian Opera, in F Annunziata and G Colombo (eds), Law and Opera (Springer 2018) 391.

6 Berthold Over and Gesa zur Nieden (eds), Operatic Pasticcios in 18th-Century Europe, Contexts, Materials and Aesthetics, available online: <https://www.transcript-publishing.com/978-3-8376-4885-0/operatic-pasticcios-in-18th-century-europe/> open access materials, accessed 26 December 2023.

7 Letters Concerning the English Nation [1732], N Cronk (ed), (OUP 2009) 42.

8 Jacques Boncompain, La Révolution des auteurs. Naissance de la propriété intellectuelle (1773–1815) (Fayard 2002).

9 The Statute of Anne, the Copyright Act 1710 is considered the first statute to provide for copyright regulated by the government and courts, rather than by private parties (by means of enforcement sought by the Stationers’ Company, a guild of printers having exclusive power to print – and the responsibility to censor – literary works under the Licensing of the Press Act 1662).

10 In 1777, Louis XVI already granted some protection to authors, at least in the form of a right to dispose of their writings. Boncompain (n 9).

11 A legislative act passed in Milan (7 May 1801) reproduced the revolutionary legislation and grants to authors acting within the ‘Repubblica Cisalpina’ an exclusive right of exploitation over their writings.

12 The opening sentences of Letter X (On Trade), in the Letters concerning the English Nation starts with the following observation: ‘As trade enriched the citizens in England, so it contributed to their freedom, and this freedom on the other side extended their commerce, whence arose the grandeur of the State’. The connection between wealth and freedom was not obvious under the Ancien Régime when status, class belonging, had a main role in society.

13 A protestant himself, or at least descending from a protestant family (a fact that explains the justification of earning money from an intellectual occupation according to Calvino’s teachings). Louis De Lomenie, ‘Beaumarchais: Sa Vie, ses Écrits et son Temps’ [1852] Revue des Deux Mondes, 16(1) (1er Octobre 1852) 25 (at 37: ‘un certificat du cardinal de Noailles que j’ai entre les mains, et qui est précédé d’une déclaration ainsi conçue: Le 7 mars 1721, j’ai prononcé mon abjuration de l’hérésie de Calvin à Paris, dans l’église des Nouvelles-Catholiques. Signé: André-Charles Caron’). The biographer refers to a document dated 7 March 1721 in which André-Charles Caron certifies a declaration by Beaumarchais by which he ‘renounces the heretic doctrine of Calvin, in Paris at the Church des Nouvelles-Catholiques’.

14 La Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques (SACD), société à but non lucratif, anciennement Bureau de législation dramatique (jusqu’en 1829) (…) la plus ancienne des sociétés de gestion collective des droits d’auteurs, créée par Beaumarchais en 1777. The text is available at <https://www.sacd.fr/fr/les-missions-et-les-valeurs-de-la-sacd> accessed 21 March 2023.

15 Robert Darnton, On the Lucrative Business of Pirating Voltaire in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2021) <https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/enterprise-solid-gold> accessed 26 December 2023.

16 Timothy Stanley, On Voltaire’s Questions sur l’Encyclopédie, <https://timothywstanley.com/notes/2021/2/5/on-voltaires-questions-sur-lencyclopdie> accessed 26 December 2023 (‘Voltaire felt morally committed to his publisher and refused to offend him by collaborating openly with the pirates. He even urged Cramer to fight back against them: ‘You won’t be pirated if you take the right measures, and you can put a notice in Volume II that will discredit the pirated editions’. In fact, Cramer knew very well that his Questions would be pirated. He merely sought to cream off the demand with a first edition by beating the pirates to the market.’).

17 Robert Darnton, Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment (OUP 2021).

18 According to investigations carried out by scholars specializing in the production by the philosopher, Voltaire decided to obscure his identity as the author of Lettres sur la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), a short and argumentative booklet, by attributing it to Augustin-Louis de Ximénès who had therefore to endure Rousseau’s resentment. This invention was orchestrated to condone Ximénès’ theft and sale of a manuscript written by Voltaire – a fact having taken place sometime previously. R Campi, Le Conchiglie di Voltaire (Florence 2001) 247 (L’inutile Ironia. Voltaire Lettore di Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse), footnote 2 <https://www.montesquieu.it/biblioteca/Testi/Voltaire_conc.pdf> accessed 17 March 2023. In his quarrel with Rousseau, another episode concerns Voltaire’s ‘Le Temple du gout’ (1734), which an enemy secured and published without his approval, causing Voltaire serious concerns. He fought to re-establish the truth and he won (in a letter to M. Cideville, Voltaire: ‘Une des plus mauvaises et des plus infidèles copies d’un des plus négligés brouillons de cette bagatelle, ayant couru dans le monde, a été imprimée sans mon aveu ; et celui qui l’a donnée, quel qu’il soit, a très grand tort’) (‘One of the worst and most unfaithful versions of one of the least relevant drafts of this negligible writing has been printd without my permission; and he who has transmitted it, has acted very wrongly’ (my translation).

19 N Cronk, Voltaire: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2017).

20 Voltaire, Correspondance (Gallimard 1980) 281.

21 Marie-Hélène Cotoni, Les Dégoûts de Voltaire: exploration d’une sensibilité complexe (Voltaire Foundation 2017): ‘an examination of the letters to Mme Denis, his niece, gives evidence not only of their retreat in Ferney and the disagreements that were sparked between the elder philosophe and the younger relative, but it also reveals the disloyalty of certain friends – the theft of several manuscripts and their clandestine publication – which left its mark on the sensibility of the correspondent’.

22 Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, The Letter: Purloined and Printed, Anonymous and Edited, posted on 4 February 2014 by the Voltaire foundation <https://voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/the-letter-purloined-and-printed-anonymous-and-edited> accessed 17 March 2023.

23 Byng’s execution was satirized by Voltaire in his novel Candide. In Portsmouth, Candide witnesses the execution of an officer by a firing squad and is told that ‘in this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, in order to encourage the others’ (Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres): Voltaire, Candide, ou l’Optmisme (1759), Chapter 23.

24 <https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/publishing/texts.html>: Internet Shakespeare editions (ISE), accessed 23 March 2023.

25 Liam Séamus O’Melinn, ‘The Recording Industry v James Madison, aka “Publius”: The Inversion of Culture and Copyright’ (2011) 35 Seattle UL Rev 75.

26 Voltaire (n 8) 87 (Letter XIII, On Tragedy).

27 Emphasis added.

28 Benedetta Craveri, Quando i poeti guadagnavano una bella corona d’alloro, Repubblica (11 January 2004) (quoted in translation from Italian).

29 G Martini and F Annunziata, Il taccuino finanziario di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan 2022) (accessed 23 March 2023).

30 Norman Lebrecht, When the Music Stopped: Managers, Maestros and the Corporate Murder of cla$$ical Music (Simon and Shuster 1996) 326.

31 The first representation was held in Turin, in 1884, with Eleonora Duse playing the main character (Natuzza).

32 The version in rhymes was signed by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci, both authors of the ‘libretto’. Cavalleria rusticana: dalla novella di Verga all’opera di Mascagni <https://semprelibera.altervista.org/pietro-mascagni/cavalleria-rusticana/cavalleria-rusticana-novella-verga-opera-mascagni/> accessed 26 December 2023.

33 The lawyer providing Giovanni Verga with a written opinion, was a very distinguished scholar, Moisé Amar, who argued successfully, insisting on the difference between an ordinary ‘libretto’, often a modest composition of rather inferior quality in comparison with the music, and the creation of a celebrated author (even though the first version by G. Verga was a simple ‘novella’ (tale), not extensively developed, that had in fact to be expanded to support a whole opera): S Torre, Fra letteratura e opera lirica: l’intervento di Moisé Amar nella causa Verga contro Mascagni (oral intervention in a meeting on Moisé Amar, Turin, 15 May 2023); see also S Torre, Processi illustrati. Storie di cause celebri tra narrazioni e immagini nell’Ottocento italiano, paper presented during the meeting L’arte di giudicare. Percorsi ed esperienze tra letteratura, arti e diritto (Verona, 15–16 dicembre 2017). The judgment by the Milan Court of Appeal was published in (1891) Il Foro Italiano, Vol. 16, Part I, 788 ff. (also available on Jstor, <https://www.jstor.org/stable/23097109> accessed 3 June 2023. The documents pertaining to the case have been shown in Catania in November 2022, during a celebration for the centenary of the death of Giovanni Verga (‘il testo completo della causa civile che lo scrittore intentò nei confronti del musicista e compositore Pietro Mascagni sui diritti dell’opera Cavalleria Rusticana’): <https://www.cataniatoday.it/cronaca/mostra-verga-archivio-documenti-famiglia-castello-ursino-catania.html>. There, we discover that, in turn, Verga was very reluctant to pay his own lawyer, who had to insist in a long correspondence to obtain some satisfaction for his professional advice.

34 Greenland Bank Ltd v American Express Bank Ltd [2009] EWCA Civ 14, par. 1 (Lord Justice Ward).

35 George Mitchell (Chesterhall) Ltd. v Finney Lock Seeds Ltd, [1982] EWCA Civ 5 (Lord Denning); Investors Compensation Scheme v West Bromwich Building Society [1997] UKHL 28 (Lord Hoffmann) accessed 21 March 2023.

36 Mannai Investment v Eagle Star Assurance [1997] H.L. (Lord Hoffmann) <https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199798/ldjudgmt/jd970521/mann01.htm>.

37 Goldberg v Autocephalous Greek Orthodox Church, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, 917 F.2d 278 (7th Cir. 1990), (Bauer Chief Justice) <https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/917/278/351297/> accessed 21 March 2023.

38 Commission for Racial Equality v Dutton [1989] QB 783 CA (Stocker, Nicholls, and Taylor L. JJ).

39 Navtej Singh Johar v Union of India, 6 September 2018, Chief Justice of India, Dipak Misra, <https://indiankanoon.org/doc/168671544/> accessed 21 March 2023: the case concerned the crime of sodomy that was still prosecuted in India, previously to this overruling of the decision delivered by the Supreme Court in 2013 (Suresh Kumar Koushal & Anr (appellant) vs Naz Foundation & Ors (defendant), 11 December 2013 <https://indiankanoon.org/doc/58730926/> accessed 21 March 2023.