Joseph Loewenstein. Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship.

(Cambridge Studies in English Literature and Culture, 43.) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. index. illus. xii + 221 pp. $60. ISBN: 0-521-81217-8.

This book proposes itself as an ancillary study to The Author's Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: 2002), and includes in revised and amplified forms material published in Joseph Loewenstein's groundbreaking essays of the 1980s and early 1990s, in which he first identified the emergence of "the bibliographic ego" (2) in early modern writers. Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship explores the evolution of authorial prestige, a cultural transformation often associated with Jonson's canny promotion of his texts as literature and even as works, but situates this phenomenon within the competing proprietary claims made by those involved in the marketing of books. Richard C. Newton, in what may be the single most influential essay written on the subject, argued that Jonson "invents (discovers) the printed book" (Newton, "Jonson and the (Re-) Invention of the Book" [1982]). Loewenstein regards this epochal moment of authorial self-consciousness less as Jonson's individual legacy--though Jonson was its most articulate proponent--than as the outcome of negotiations among writers, publishers, acting companies, and others who stood to profit from publishing in an era before copyright laws. Much of the evidence for this cultural shift exists in prefatory materials that rationalize and justify the decision to publish texts whose ownership is being contested. Loewenstein is alert to this kind of evidence, especially when it articulates writers' fantasies about their relation to their texts. His readings of Jonson's angry repossession of The New Inne (1629) for print after it was spurned by hostile audiences, or of Thomas Heywood's snub of Jonson a few years later in The English Traveller (1633), where Heywood pointedly remarks "That it never was any great ambition in me, to bee in this kind Volumniously read" (50), are wonderfully subtle and fascinating. Martial's Epigrams come in for extended analysis as classical texts prefiguring proprietary authorship, and his importance for Jonson is convincingly established. Martial's avid interest in monitoring the distribution of his texts, his vanity, his "ingenious insolence" (127), his investments both in attracting a coterie readership and in disseminating his works to the Empire's provinces make him an apt model for Jonson to imitate. Loewenstein's Ben Jonson, it should be said, is not the writer who repeatedly proclaimed his affinity to Horace. "Formalist, domineering, and competitive" (149) by temperament, Jonson is precisely the opportunist most capable of seizing the possibilities his culture presented him with to invest the printed text and its author with maximal prestige.

In later chapters, Loewenstein examines the trajectory of Jonson's career, revisiting the question of his antitheatricalism. He argues that Jonson's early quartos should be viewed as "a playwright's homage to a melior theatrum, an idealized stage" since they "work out typographic devices that reinforce or replicate effects proper to the theater" (144-46). Sejanus (1605) becomes the watershed text in this reading of Jonson's career. The title-page departs from the practice of affiliating plays with their stage-life to proclaim it a play "Written / by / BEN. JONSON" (150), the annotations of Jonson's classical sources crowd the quartos pages, and a proliferation of elaborate prefatory poems defends Sejanus from various misconstructions. In Loewenstein's view, Jonson's achievement in the 1616 Folio is fully anticipated by his important quartos of Sejanus, Volpone (1606), and Catiline (1611), which construct an ideal readership detached from the vagaries of theatrical performance. "The Folio is a remarkable book, but it is continuous with the remarkable quartos that provided so many of its copy texts," he writes, adding that "The most striking feature of the volume--the grand homogeneity it confers on its separate texts, written for separate occasions--sustains the anti-theatrical, anti-occasional, and repossessive tendencies of the quartos" (183). One of the crucial contributions Loewenstein makes to Ben Jonson studies involves his untangling of the competitive efforts of printers and stationers to corner the rights to Jonson's texts. Jonson's collaborations with Thomas Thorpe, Walter Burre, and William Stansby replicated the contentious relations of his other failed professional collaborations (most notoriously, of course, with Inigo Jones in the production of their court masques). Most of these relationships with stationers had a shelf life of about three years, and Loewenstein's careful reconstruction of Jonson's intense and fractious history with his printers and the complex "story of proprietary negotiation" (211) surrounding the Second Folio of 1640 adds to our understanding of Jonson's singular possessiveness about his texts.

JENNIFER BRADY

Rhodes College