1. Paulina Kewes's new monograph is an essential complement to Brean Hammond's Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670-1740: 'Hackney for Bread' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Focussing on dramatic writing, Kewes convincingly demonstrates that the notion of proprietary authorship emerged in the later seventeenth century as a result of 'institutional changes in the theatrical marketplace' (12), rather than in the early eighteenth century, following the Copyright Statute of 1710 (Chapter 1). Kewes also decries the popular misconception that Restoration drama is straightforwardly derivative and imitative, by charting the progressive decline of the practices of adaptation and collaborative authorship (Chapters 2 and 4) and the emergent tendency to condemn plagiarism and unacknowledged literary borrowings (Chapter 3). The pre-eminence of pre-Civil War dramatists, and of Shakespeare in particular, is similarly disputed through an accurate analysis of how print culture contributed to the elevation of contemporary playwriting to canonical status (Chapter 5). Kewes's lucid and engaging narrative offers the reader an outstanding amount of original information, mostly derived from traditionally neglected sources, such as pamphlets, private correspondence and play catalogues. With much factual information in footnotes and two Appendices (Appendix A: 'Dramatic Collaboration, 1590-1720'; Appendix B: 'Collected Editions of Plays, 1604-1720'), the wealth of details never compromises the brisk pace at which Kewes's arguments develop. The clear-sighted reassessment of the cultural standing of Shakespeare's works prior to the establishment of Bardolatry in the first half of the eighteenth century makes Authorship and Appropriation a compelling reading for both Renaissance and Restoration specialists.

2. In her first chapter, 'The Playwright and the Marketplace', Kewes establishes an interesting connection between the evolution of benefit arrangements and the improved social, economic and cultural status enjoyed by Restoration playwrights. The abolition of the flat fee received on delivery of a new script and the extension of the net profits of the third night to every third night of performance encouraged playwrights to take a more active role in the production and promotion of their plays, so as to ensure a longer and more profitable run of performances and revivals. According to Kewes, these changes in the economics of playwriting were also responsible for the increasing preoccupation with issues of 'originality' and 'imitation'. In chapter 2, 'The Proprieties of Appropriation', Kewes explains how this emergent view of dramatic works as intellectual property forced playwrights to provide a conceptual defence of the appropriation of their sources. Kewes specifies that change of medium, aesthetic and formal improvement of the original and emulation of the classics (including the 'Triumvirate of Wit' - Shakespeare, Jonson and Fletcher -) still justified appropriation. However, she perhaps too hastily dismisses the hypothesis advanced by Laura Rosenthal in Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), according to which gender also affected current attitudes towards adaptation. It is similarly rather peculiar that, given the emphasis Authorship and Appropriation places on the emergent notion of proprietary authorship, relatively little attention is paid to Catherine Gallagher's conflicting view that 'the writer's inability to own the text remains constant [during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries] and is explicitly linked to the author's gender'. 1

3. Kewes's contention gains momentum when she links material changes to cultural practices and current discourses of property and proprietary authorship. In 'Plagiarism and Property' (Chapter 3), for example, she argues that the increasing tendency to alphabetize authors' surnames as opposed to the titles of plays in contemporary catalogues reflects the emerging conception of dramatic works as inalienable commodities. This tendency is also explained in terms of the wider philosophical discourse of property rights developed by John Locke in Two Treatises of Government. In 'Collaboration' (Chapter 4), Kewes accounts for a fall in the number of collaborative plays in this period as a direct result of a fall in demand for new scripts when the King's and the Duke's Companies merged in 1682. However, the practice of listing collaborative plays under the name of one of the authors suggests that proprietary authorship had started to be regarded as singular authorship. Contemporary critical commentary on Dryden and Lee's Oedipus (1678) and The Duke of Guise (1682) records a similar prejudice against collaboration. Kewes rightly interprets this prejudice as a further indication of the growing 'concern about the assignment of intellectual property [which] produced a preference for solo authorship' (130).

4. Readers with a specialist interest in Renaissance Drama will find the last chapter particularly useful and thought-provoking. Kewes endorses the view recently put forward by Bate, Dobson and Hume, 2 according to which Shakespeare enjoyed no higher canonical status than either Jonson or Fletcher prior to the establishment of Bardolatry in the 1720s and 1730s. Kewes however argues that 'preoccupied as they are by the standing of Shakespeare, [Bate, Dobson and Hume] overlook the interest in and respect for modern dramatists' in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (234). The comprehensive and reader-friendly list of collected editions of plays Kewes provides in Appendix B shows that the collections of Shakespeare, Jonson and Fletcher's dramatic works were outnumbered by Folio editions of plays by genteel amateurs in the late seventeenth century and by the collected works of post-Restoration playwrights in the early eighteenth century. Kewes therefore concludes her thoroughly researched and imaginative monograph by pointing out that although the notion of proprietary authorship, the conditio sine qua non of the rise of Bardolatry, originated in the late seventeenth century, the dramatic canon between 1660 and 1710 was undoubtedly, if unexpectedly, a predominantly modern one.

Notes

1. Catherine Gallagher. 1994. Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Market Place, 1670-1820 Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. xx.

   

2. Jonathan Bate. 1989. Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730-1830 Oxford: Clarendon Press; Michael Dobson. 1992. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660-1769 Oxford: Clarendon Press; Robert Hume. 1997. 'Before the Bard: "Shakespeare" in Early Eighteenth-Century London', ELH 64: 41-75.