Deflating plagiarism (and Stoppard)

• Robert McCrum pops plagiarism-accusation bubbles in The Guardian.

A lot of good sense here:

One person's 'homage' is another's 'copyright infringement'. The question of originality in literature is complicated. Until the mid-18th century English writers did not hesitate to borrow from each other's work. Good writers, if they are honest, will acknowledge that when they come across a good thing in someone else's work, either consciously or unconsciously they store it away.

If writers are pickpockets, then Shakespeare is our Fagin, always a 'snapper-up of unconsidered trifles'. Shakespeare did not confine himself to individual lines or phrases. Apart from A Midsummer Night's Dream, his plots were appropriated from other, often classical, sources.

...It was the Romantics, for whom originality of expression was central to literary authenticity, who made plagiarism literature's capital offence. This hasn't stopped all kinds of conscious and unconscious borrowing. No one put it better than the American critic James Atlas, defending novelist David Leavitt against the charge of plagiarising Stephen Spender's World Within World. 'Literature,' Atlas said, 'is theft.' TS Eliot said: 'Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.'

One caveat, though. McCrum makes the same mistake that a seemingly large number of English critics do -- namely by assigning all the credit for the screenplay of Shakespeare in Love to Tom Stoppard. These writers need to do their homework: the story did not originate from Stoppard but from Marc Norman, the credited co-writer, who spent years trying to get it made. Stoppard was one of many script doctors who contributed to the script as it passed through several different studios, directors and stars. Due to the WGA's byzantine credit rules, Stoppard's contribution was considered substantial enough to award him credit for the final film. Norman did all right, though, by it all -- in addition to the Oscar that he shared with Stoppard for the screenplay, he took another home as well (Best Picture), due to his co-producer credit.

Getting it right

• Daphne Merkin profiles Tom Stoppard in the New York Times Magazine.

A good bit from an otherwise kinda-fawning article (enough about his clothes, already):

Stoppard has written for film as well as television (his screenwriting credits include “Brazil,” “Empire of the Sun” and “Shakespeare in Love,” for which he won an Oscar), but his commitment to theater is very real. When I asked him why he chose it as his medium — and why he stuck with it — he responded via e-mail: “The standing of the theater in 1960 did have a lot to do with it. But it’s not just that. I like the smell of it, and the immediacy. Also the danger: getting it wrong in public. Also the thrill when you get it right in public.”

"Clever Tom", and more product placement

• William Langley profiles Tom Stoppard in The Telegraph.

A fascinating look at one of the world's preeminent wordsmiths. It's somehow unsurprising that a chaotic, and frequently horrific, upbringing resulted in a writer best known for his wit, wordplay and narrative inventiveness. Langley's piece is refreshingly nonjudgmental, despite the colorful and sometimes salacious elements in his subject's history. It's a rare author profile that gives you a greater appreciation for the subject and their work without making you feel like you've had your nose rubbed in their dirty laundry, and Langley pulls it off:

First there were the Nazis who, when he was still little Tomas Straussler, murdered half his family, and forced the remnants to flee to Singapore. Next came the Japanese Imperial Army, which, less than two years later, invaded Singapore, sending Tom's mother, Martha (his father stayed behind, and was never seen again), on a refugee boat to India with her two young sons.

...At 68, he is still discovering himself. When he was a boy, his mother drew a veil over the family's past. There had been a Jewish grandmother, she said, and this was why they had to leave Czechoslovakia. Only relatively recently did he learn the fully story.

His whole family was Jewish. Most of his relatives had been murdered in the death camps. His father, once the house doctor at the Bata shoe factory in Zlin, had been killed in a Japanese air raid. Some years ago, after a visit to Czechoslovakia, he wrote movingly of meeting an elderly woman, a former Bata employee, whose gashed hand had been stitched by Dr Straussler. "I touch it. In that moment, I am surprised by grief, a small catching up of all the grief I owe. I have nothing which came from my father, nothing he owned or touched, but here is his trace, a small scar."

• Motoko Rich details product placement in young-adult lit in The New York Times.

I would like to think that books that are obviously engineered from the get-go to be de facto catalogs for some corporation's catalog of products will set off young kids' bullshit meters. But I wonder... (See also: The dark side of copyright law.) As for the rest of us, insert your own reason why this is insane and get on with it.