PLAGIARISM !

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 892, 8 February 1930, Page 24

PLAGIARISM !

Author of “Journey’s End” Sued for £40,000 WOMAN’S STRANGE THEORY An American woman, Katherine Bourke Sherman, has 'brought a, suit against It. C. Sherriff, author of “Journey's End," for £40,000 damages. She charges him with stealing his play* from her three-act piece, “Flags and Flowers.” St. John Ervine, the celebrated London dramatic critic, writes of plagiarism and Miss Sherman, as follow: Some time ago she accused Somerset Maughafn of stealing “The Sacred Flame” from the same play, and while I was in. New York she badgered me with long screeds in which she begged ine to ipake all the wicked authors of the world stop stealing their plays from “Flags and Flowers.” The depths of this piece must be astonishing, for not only have Mr. Sherriff and Mr. Maugham apparently pinched their pieces from it, but Eugene O’Neill, according to her story, took his nine-act play, “Strange Interlude,” from it too. As “Strange Interlude” takes about five or six hours to perform, one might pardonably imagine that there was little left in “Flags and Flowers” to he stolen by other authors, b,ut it had enough material left in it seemingly to furnish Mr. Sherriff and Mr. Maugham with the stuff for two totally dissimilar pieces. A Joke The reader, at this point, will feel inclined to share Mr. Sherriff’* view of her suit, that it is a joke, but charges 'of this sort are seldom jokes for those against whom they are made, Mr. Sidney Howard discovered when he found himself obliged to rebut a charge of plagiarism in connection with his fine play, “They Knew What They Wanted.” Another person with a grievance alleged that Mr. piece had been taken from his, basing his charge on the fact that in each play an old man married a young woman who subsequently fell in love with a young man! Mr. Howard was put to the expense of defending an action in California, and won the case. •

If Miss Sherman does not discover that my play, “The First Mrs. Fraser,” when it is produced in New York, has been stolen from “Flags and Flowers,” I shall he very much astonished. A woman who can believe that plays so different from each other as “Strange interlude,” “The Sacred Flame,” and “Journey’s End,” have all been lifted from her work, will have no difficulty in convincing herself tha't every play that has been written since 1926 has been stolen from her. Identity of theme is not uncommon in plays or novels. Let me give the most remarkable example of this known t.o me. I give it because no one but a fool would believe that there v/as any conscious plagiarism by either of the authors; indeed, only one of them could be accused of plagiarism at all, since the first author, if I am not mistaken, was dead before the second author’s play was produced. Bernard Shaw is the author of a small piece called, “OverRuled”; it is remarkably similar in idea and execution to a play called “Fancy Free” by the late Stanley Houghton. A stupid person might imagine that Mr. -Shaw had stolen his play from Houghton, but the charge would not bear examination, because the idea of the two plays is one that plight occur to a dozen authors. It is what we call “an idea in the air,” one that is put into an author’s mind by social events. What matters in such a play is the treatment of the idea, and the treatment in “Over-Ruled” is as different from that in “Fancy Free” as Mr. Shaw is from Stanley Houghton. All Plagiaristy The truth is that we are all plagiarists to some extent, and the best of ns plagiarise from life; the worst of us merely plagiarise from each other. The apprentice author models himself on some elder whom he admires, and is likely to take pride in repeating his master’s tricks. Inevitably, a time of reaction comes to the apprentice author, who will then free himself from that influence, and may even try to beat the idol to which he formerly prayed. All authors steal sentences in their dialogue from the lips of their friends and neighbours. Mr. Shaw, in The Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” represents Shakespeare as doing little else. Life plagiarises itself. Has the Spring not been repeated, with scarcely any variation, for millions of years? Does it not remain as lovely and as novel as it must haye been in the first year?

The woman who accuses Mr. Sherriff of taking his play from hers, may be easily answered. She bases her accusation on the fact that her MS was read by someone “closely associated with Mr. Gilbert Miller,” who produced “Journey’s End” in New’ \ ork. Mr. Miller, apparently, read “Flags and Flowers,” and then ran round the earth telling other authors bits of its story, so that they could make brilliant and successful plays out of them!

Mr. Sherriff’s play, however, w r as produced by The Stage Society before Mr. Miller had ever heard of it, nor, indeed, did he acquire it for America until after its success in London had become well assured. It is on grounds as insubstantial as Miss Sherman’s that many authors are accused of stealing ideas, ond one may well complain that the life of the author is hard.

Only. the other day, two novelists, Upton Sinclair and Temple Thurston, in one week published novels with the same title, “Millennium”; and in the same week, in New York, two novels, one by Charles Morgan and one by Mrs. E. M. Delafield, were published under the same name, “First Love,” although, fortunately. Mr. Morgan was able to alter the title of the English edition to “Portrait in a Mirror.”