Jonson's masque markets and problems of literary ownership

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Spring, 2007 by Alison V. Scott

Books can be owned simultaneously by the author, the merchant, and the purchaser, making it possible, as Lucius Annaeus Seneca observes, "for Titus Livius to receive his own books as a present, or to buy them from Dorus," a bookseller. (1) Ownership of a literary text is thus complicated rather than resolved by its presentation or sale: proprietary interest is multiplied as the text is reproduced, yet the author retains a kind of nonpossessive ownership. This appears to have provided little consolation for Ben Jonson, who complained frequently of losing ownership of his work, explaining that when he "suffer'd ... [a text] to goe abroad, [he] departed with ... [his] right" over that text. (2) In moving from the realm of scribal publication into print, from gift economy into the marketplace, Jonson, whose society did not yet conceive of authorial rights, apparently surrendered ownership and control of his text to an agent who would oversee its publication. (3) Nevertheless, because texts have multiple lives--as works of art and as material objects--Jonson was able to market his work, particularly his masques, in gift and sale economies simultaneously. (4) A professional poet at Court, Jonson existed at the center of patronage circles but simultaneously forged ahead with the publication of his works in a new competitive market. His masques provide particularly interesting examples of this approach and highlight complexities of ownership, valuation, and circulation that arose during this time of social and economic flux and that anticipated modern connections between the availability, the demand, and the price of a product.

Jonson's masques are products of Jonson's labor, printed and sold in the marketplace, and products enabled by, produced within, and reflective of the authority of the king, Court, and systems of aristocratic patronage. More than any other genre of text produced by Jonson, the masques rely upon being owned in some way by numerous people and upon being valued and exchanged in both existing patronage and developing market economies. The premises of valuation in each of these economies were often opposed: rich and personalized presentation copies of texts were the currency of the patronage economy, whereas printed reproductions (stigmatized within coterie circles) circulated in the developing market. (5) Within the patronage economy, the text often gained value from the standing of its patrons, while the text on the market, though no longer owned by the writer, paradoxically relied more upon the reputation of the author. (6) In printing and selling his masques, Jonson increases their accessibility and asserts his authority as a writer, yet he also risks devaluing his texts as he promotes them, not least because he surrenders his authorial rights at the point of publication. Characteristically, Jonson works hard to inscribe the value of his labor upon his work so as to protect it (and Jonson himself) from devaluation in a marketplace of print. A particular feature of this strategy, evident in numerous masques and many of the poems, is an emphasis upon diversified interest in the text so that shared ownership, contrary to the principles of the patronage economy, becomes a means of protecting and even increasing the value of the product. More specifically, as this article will demonstrate, Jonson combines the value systems of two often-conflicting economies to market his work as a type of luxury product--that is, as a marker of social and intellectual distinction to be owned only by an exclusive group of consumers.

Jonson, as T. S. Eliot famously observes, is "damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book." Interestingly, Eliot considers Jonson's "deadly" reputation as a writer to be the result of a "conspiracy" among intellectual readers. (7) Jonson, struggling against his base associations with the public stage, deliberately fashions his printed texts as difficult and weighty works. In this vein, his folio of WORKES is often considered elitist, yet this notion clearly clashes with the market-orientated professionalism of the poet, with what Elizabeth Hanson refers to as the folio's "herald[ing]" of "possessive individualism, modern subjectivity, and bourgeois culture." (8) In short, the classicism of the folio not only contradicts earlier, comparatively vulgar ventures into print but also makes the folio an anomaly in itself--at once an exclusive artifact and Jonson's book for sale. (9) In exploiting the classical connections of the folio style in order to market his work to potential buyers, Jonson, as Don E. Wayne astutely observes, straddles a gap between a moral "anti-acquisitive culture" and an emerging commercial society. (10) Indeed, Jonson's works suggest the classical ideal of anti-acquisitiveness at the same time as the folio is presented as a distinguished object to be acquired at cost. The sign system of the 1616 folio is thus far from monolithic and the publication constitutes, as Joseph Loewenstein notes, "a groping forward toward later authorial property rights" nonetheless "modeled on ... the economics of patronage." (11) Blurring the boundary between those apparently antagonistic modes of exchange, Jonson relies upon patronage systems defined by honorable gifts and bonds of obligation, while circulating his texts in an emerging literary marketplace ostensibly based on entirely different values and bonds.