Before the age of mechanical reproduction – especially photography, sound recording, and video recording – it was difficult or impossible to use exactly someone else’s creation in your art. You could copy their painting or sculpture or tune, but you couldn’t literally lift their creation and drop it into your own. Literature – which did rely on mechanical reproduction for the most part (the printing press) – was an exception, where it would be possible to quote/plagiarize verbatim a previous artist’s words.
While Folk Culture was often collaborative and could involve a fair bit of sharing of creative work between different individuals – high culture in the period before 1900 frowned on the direct use of other people’s material in your own creation. The accepted methods by which you might re-use or place your own stamp on the creation of someone else were limited forms of quotation, copying, or modification, including emulation, allusion, adaptation, edition, translation, parody, transcription, and variations on a theme.
Emulation involved imitating the style or approach of a precursor (an artist who came before you). When Virgil wanted to write the great epic of the the Romans, he emulated Homer, who had written the great epics of the Greek people. He borrowed ideas, motifs, and some stylistic effects from Homer. When John Milton, in the period around the English Restoration, wanted to outdo both Virgil and Homer by making Paradise Lost the epic of the whole human race, he copied aspects of the approach and style of Virgil, writing in blank verse, for example. On the whole, he did not actually quote or rework the words of Virgil, but the emulation was recognizable, and sometimes meaningful.
Allusion is about mentioning the creative work of the precursor. At times you would actually quote from the creative work, but this was intended as a shorthand way of invoking some of the context (and cultural force) of the previous work. Allusion was often not explicitly indicated, but was an effect which the knowledgeable reader, listener, or spectactor would recognize. A modern example of allusion would be the Tupac chorus “Something wicked this way come,” which is a quotation from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and was also used as the title of a novel by Ray Bradbury (and an album by The Herbalizer).
Adaptation is moving material from its original genre into a new one, for example turning an epic poem into a play, or – as we still do today – basing a film on a novel, a comic book, a stage show, etc. In some cases, not just plots and characters but also words and motifs will be appropriated for the new genre.
Edition can sometimes be a form of appropriation. In the guise of establishing an accurate text, the editor can impose his or her own interpretation on texts that have come down to us in various manuscripts or early editions. For instance, the English poet Alexander Pope edited Shakespeare’s plays in the 1700s and made numerous “corrections” to the wording from the (often corrupt or mystifying) earliest editions, assuming mistakes had been made by copyists or printers and that he understood what Shakespeare must actually have written. Many of these were considered acceptable – or indeed superior to what the early editions had – and some have fallen into such common use that they are still in modern editions of Shakespeare today.
Translation is another way in which one creative artist can appropriate the work of another. Every translation is an interpretation, and occasionally the translations have become better known or more influential, as with the so-called “King James Version” of the Christian bible.