Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship. By Joseph Loewenstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; pp. 221. $60 cloth.

Abstract

For almost twenty years, Joseph Loewenstein has explored the rise of what he calls “the bibliographic ego,” particularly in the work of Ben Jonson, and his new book is his most sophisticated analysis yet of its genesis and evolution in early modern England. What is especially valuable about his new study of Renaissance literary/theatrical sociology is the manner in which he refines and expands our current sense of the complex interface between performance and print that played such a decisive role in shaping the careers of professional writers. Performance and publication were, he contends, competing media that elicited a wide range of attitudes from such dramatists as Shakespeare, Robert Greene, Thomas Heywood, John Marston, and even Jonson himself. The result is an illuminating portrait of Jonson as a writer who took greater pride in the specific theatrical origins of his drama than recent histories have allowed.

Reading the Royal Entry (1604) in/as Print

“…30 This identification of the entry quarto as 'the first Jonsonian text to insist on the differences between the fugitive event and disseminable exfoliation' mark it as a crucial point in the development both of Jonson's sensibilities concerning authorship and text, and of his recognition of the potentialities of the printed book, particularly the printed drama. 31 Loewenstein reads this as an important turning point for Jonson and perhaps for western literary culture more broadly, signaling a reorientation of the author's attitude to the phenomenology of the literary work. The text becomes transhistorical, anti-occasional, certainly antitheatrical.…”