Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [17]
On one view, patenting books was a classic instance of the Crown intruding on subjects' liberties. Printers and booksellers had long resented patents. And in practice the Monopolies Act left this resentment unresolved, because Charles I continued to issue them regardless of the act. Long before the civil war, the language on both sides had become that of sedition, usurpation, and rebellion. Under Elizabeth, the Queen's Printer denounced John Wolfe, a notorious reprinter of patented titles, as a sectary and seditionist, while Wolfe proclaimed himself the Luther of the trade. And later the poet and patentee George Wither charged that "mere" Stationers, by elevating their customs above the will of the monarch as expressed in a patent, wanted to "usurpe larger Prerogatives then they will allow the King."13 Yet something remained missing from such denunciations. It was not vitriol: theywere slathered in that. Wither called his Stationer opponents "fylthy,""excrements," and "vermine' ; he accused them of "usurpations, Insinuations, Insolencyes, Avarice, & abuses," "fraudulent & insufferable abusing of the people," slander, and in general "abus{ing} the King, the State, and the whole Hierarchy; Yea God, and religion {too}." He charged booksellers with suppressing works, subverting royal power, issuing unauthorized editions while concealing their true authorship, and "usurp{ing} upon the labours of all writers." But he never called them pirates.14 The same was true of John Heminges and Henry Condell, undertakers of the first folio of Shakespeare, who denounced the previous issuing of "divers stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors." Theft, subterfuge, misrepresentation, the corruption of texts-but not piracy. It is striking that until mid-century that accusation of piracy remained un- made.1$ By the end of the century, however, things would be very different. Piracy had become the central accusation in such conflicts. The reason for this lies in the civil wars that wracked Britain in the 1640s and 165os.
HISTORY, CIVILITY, AND THE NATURE OF PRINT
Between 1642 and 166o, the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland descended into in a series of bloody internecine wars. The monarch, Charles I, was put on trial and beheaded, and for eleven years Britain was ruled by a sequence of republican systems. For much of this period the old legal and administrative structures that had regulated the book trade were in abeyance. Patents became a dead letter; licensing effectively lapsed with the eclipse of the episcopal hierarchy; and restrictions on the numbers of printers allowed to operate were ignored. The book trade expanded its ranks enormously, feeding on the political and religious controversies of the time. The Stationers' Company struggled to keep order in a trade increasingly composed of men and women who either ignored its rules or were not members at all. The production of popular pamphlets soared, but "propriety" lost its protections. This was the age of Milton's Areopagitica, in which the poet hailed the advent of a heroic London citizenry dedicated to the hard work of reading and reasoning through print. It was their right and duty to read, they were told, in order to play their part in Providence. The "True Leveller" Gerrard Winstanley urged that, having freed themselves from "slavery," Britons must now follow the apostle's advice "to try all things, and to hold fast that which is best."16 Here surely were assertions of what would later become a public sphere.17 But not all its elements were yet present, and those that were remained insecure.