Thomas Pettit’s talk — during his time, a contemporary of Shakespeare, Robert Greene, referred to him as “an upstart crow beautifying himself with our feathers.” Many felt that Shakespeare was simply a hack recycling old plots and mashing together familiar plots for the groundlings, a kind of Stephen King figure in Elizabethan England. Pettit’s paper centered on the idea of “the Gutenberg parentheses” — the period in which the idea of the author and of proprietary ownership of the text were predominant. His thesis is that different cultures, different genres, entered this parentheses at different times, and that Shakepeare’s time was just pre-parentheses for plays. In Renaissance England, plays were often written for hire by committees of hacks and university wits. The players owned the play thereafter, and the value resided in the performances, not in the text. Playwrights sold the texts, the players owned the site of cultural value. Playwrights often mashed, mended, patched together plays. Pettit thinks we’re currently entering the end of the parentheses, returning, in terms of contemporary textuality, to pre-parentheses values. In response to a comment on authorship, Pettit theorized that the valuing of the author happened twice — first in the classical age, in order to canonize particular works — ie attributing works to “Homer” — and again in the Gutenberg era — more or less as a way to create an economic relationship. We are now experiencing “the freedom of the breakdown of the system.”

Hyde’s talk was on Benjamin Franklin. Franklin both advocated patents, encouraging an English friend to immigrate to America and promising him a 7-year exclusive import license on a particular optic device, and simultaneously piracy — as the friend had not himself actually developed the device. Early patent law did not actually reward innovators who designed inventions, but the people who brought them forth to the public.