In early modern England, almost anyone could be held responsible for the perceived or merely suspected ill effects of what a proclamation of Henry VIII, in 1538, called “naughty printed books.”¹ So potentially toxic, so infectious and “pestiferous” were printed works deemed that merely to “buy, receive, or have” the wrong book without even opening it was at times punishable by death.² If one surveys the official history of press regulation before the Restoration using royal proclamations, patents, and decrees, as well as parliamentary statutes, it quickly becomes clear that liability for printed works was intended to be distributed over...

Any attempt to trace the trials of authorship in the seventeenth century ought, by rights, to begin with William Prynne, benighted author of Histriomastix and hundreds of other tracts denouncing playwriting, drinking, long hair, and all things sympathetic to Catholicism, including, in his estimation, William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, and the family of his employer, Charles I.¹ Prynne, a lawyer, managed to lose his ears not once but twice, in 1634 and in 1637, as a result of his ceaseless advocacy on behalf of Puritan causes. In addition to this, his most spectacular punishment, Star Chamber sentenced Prynne to be...

Five years before the passage of the Act of Anne, Daniel Defoe definitively sketched out the potentially hazardous consequences for an author of “owning all his Performances.”¹ His study of the inextricable relationship between authorial rights and their attendant responsibilities appeared under the title An Essay on the Regulation of the Press (1704) and, along with a series of articles in the Review, contributed to debates then brewing in Parliament and the press about how best to restrain the disorderly business of the book trade. Yet, Defoe’s involvement in the history of press regulation in this period was as much...

The next two chapters tell a story about doubles: two authors, two piracies, two suits in Chancery, and two injunctions. Arbuthnot’s letter concisely captures the main events, which stretched for just over a year, from May of 1728 to June of 1729, of the publication and piracy of Pope’s Dunciad and Dunciad Variorum, and Gay’s Polly.¹ This story’s most striking feature is its doubleness: Pope and Gay each published a dangerous work; each attempted to retain his “copyright” through manipulating recent changes in the law affecting literary property and authors’ rights; each broke with tradition and paid his own printing...

The publication of Polly offers a final meditation on the vexed relationship between property and liability with which much of this book has been concerned. Like Pope, Gay found that literary property was at best a consolation prize—and at worst yet another handicap—in the ongoing “Warfare upon the Earth” called early modern authorship. In particular, Gay discovered that literary property, at least in its earliest form, failed spectacularly to solve the single problem it seemed best designed to alleviate: the problem of the authorized and unauthorized appropriation of literary works—appropriations for which the proprietary author might be...