Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Renaissance - History, Writing - General & Miscellaneous, Getting Published, Publishing Industry - History, 1485-1603 - Tudor Dynasty - British History, Mass Media - Europe

Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship

Name: Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship
Author: Joseph Loewenstein
ISBN: 9780521038188

by Joseph Loewenstein, Cambridge University Press

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Overview

What is the history of authorship, of invention, of intellectual property? In this book, Joseph Loewenstein describes the fragmentary and eruptive emergence of a key phase of the bibliographical ego, a specifically Early Modern form of authorial identification with printed writing. In the work of many playwrights and non-dramatic writers - and especially in the work of Ben Jonson - that identification is tinged, remarkably, with possessiveness. This book examines the emergence of possessive authorship within a complex industrial and cultural field. It traces the prehistory of modern copyright both within the monopolistic practices of London's acting troupes and its Stationers' Company and within a Renaissance cultural heritage. Under the pressures of modern competition, a tradition of literary, artistic, and technological imitation began to fissure, unleashing jealous accusations of plagiarism and ingenious new fantasies of intellectual privacy. Perhaps no one was more creatively attuned to this momentous transformation in Early Modern intellectual life than Ben Jonson.

Synopsis

Writing before the institution of copyright, Renaissance authors were not recognized as owning their works. Yet, in an environment in which the written word could be variously marketed by printers or by acting companies, and in which authors could be held uncomfortably responsible for their writings, we can discover complex stirrings of possessiveness among such writers as Bacon, Heywood, Daniel, Shakespeare, Wither, and--most powerfully and interestingly--Ben Jonson. This book probes the literary and institutional history, the politics, and the psychology of possessive authorship.