The Author's Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright.

Joseph Loewenstein. The Author's Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. x + 349 pp. + 7 b/w pls. index. $45. ISBN: 0-226-49040-8.

This is an unusually important and interesting book in terms of both its methodology and its findings. The object of this investigation is the author--or more precisely, how the modern understanding of authorial function emerged within the book culture of early modern England. Where we choose to look for something, of course, plays a significant role in what we find, and the merit of this study is that Loewenstein has chosen to trace the history of authorial agency in the history of intellectual property law. Authorship is therefore a literary matter, but it is also an economic issue, so that the author emerges as a laborer who serves as a significant agent in the transition from medieval feudalism to early modern capitalism.

Loewenstein begins his study by noting that there were three important institutions for regulating the Elizabethan press: the royal licensing that served to keep ideologically unacceptable books out of print; entry into the register of the Stationers' Company, a guild privilege by which an individual member obtained the exclusive right to market a text; and the granting of patents, by which certain stationers were given control over entire classes of publication. From the beginning tensions arose among institutions whose powers overlapped in both theory and practice, and for sixty or seventy years the various parties involved in book production struggled to determine what economic rights a reproducible manuscript might have and who should control those rights. In 1643 Parliament passed a Licensing Act that recognized the rights of someone who appeared occasionally in earlier discussions, for this act prohibited printing any book if it was entered into the Stationers' Register for "any particular member ... without the license and consent of the Owner or Owners" (39). This is hardly a full-blown defense of authorial rights, but it does acknowledge that the economic rights of a work of literature inhere in a common law owner as well as a stationer. In other words, "[a]uthor's rights will thus appear as back-formations within the development of industrial copyright" (44).

In tracing the connection between authorship and literary property, Loewenstein anchors his discussion in a number of well known events, which often take on new meaning. The machinations by which Greville served as literary executor and Ponsonby as unofficial stationer to the Sidney circle, for example, helped clarify what it meant for Sidney to have been a poet by envisioning him as an author whose heritable rights were allied with, yet distinct from, the economic rights of his publisher. In some cases, significant steps toward defining authorial rights were taken by figures now almost forgotten, like George Wither, whose The Schollers Purgatory clearly asserts a natural authorial property: "yfhis Majestie hath not a legall power to confirme unto me that which is naturally myne owne, By what right, then, doe they and others enjoy priviledges for those books wherein every man hath as good property as they[?]" (149). In other cases the text is well-known but the common interpretation of it, when placed into the history of authorial agency, is called into question: Milton's Areopagitica, for example, turns out to be a defense not of authorial, but of stationers,' copyright.

This is an immensely learned, subtly argued book, one that ranges freely from the early Tudors to Pope and Swift in a narrative of multiple origins and uneven development. Methodologically The Author's Due steers an exemplary course between traditional scholarship and contemporary theory: as a "quest for origins," it challenges the poststructuralist assault on sequence and causality, yet it anchors its explanation of a literary concern in the materialist approach on which much of the best of today's scholarship rests. Loewenstein does a particularly impressive job of placing his work alongside book historians like Eisenstein and Johns without losing sight of what earlier bibliographers like Greg and Pollard had achieved. The Author's Due merits a careful reading by anyone with a serious interest in early modern literary culture, both as a source of new information and as a model for how similar investigations might be conducted.

CRAIG KALLENDORF

Texas A & M University