Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates and the Problems of the Transmission of His Text

LEGAL writers on English copyright have not
shown much interest in the steps by which the
*• conception of literary property was gradually
built up, nor are any data easily accessible for comparing
the course of its development in England
and foreign countries. The accident by which our
first English printer was also an exceptionally prolific
literary producer and possessed of considerable
influence at Court might well have led to a very
early recognition of an author's rights to the fruits
of his brain, had there been any competitor possessed
of sufficient capital to be a really formidable
pirate. In Germany, Italy, and France literary work
of a kind for which copyright could now be claimed
accounted for only quite a small proportion of
the output of the earliest presses. The demand in
Germany was mainly for printed editions of the
ponderous text books of the previous three centuries.
Italy added to these an even greater appetite for the
Latin classics. In France, more especially at Lyons,
there was a healthy demand for works, both imaginative
and didactic, in the vernacular. But Caxton's
fertility as a translator can hardly be paralleled in
the fifteenth century, and this despite the fact that
he came to the task late in life and burdened himself
almost simultaneously with the cares of a printing