Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship

Writing before the institution of copyright, Renaissance authors were not recognized as owning their works, yet the written word could be marketed by printers or acting companies and authors held responsible for their writings. This 2002 book probes the literary and institutional history, the politics and the psychology of possessive authorship.

What is the history of authorship, of invention, of intellectual property? 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 that of Ben Jonson - that identification is tinged, remarkably, with possessiveness. This 2002 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.