Shakespeare as Author: His Times

In order to talk about Shakespeare as an author in our modern definition, we should first place him in his times so we can know what authorship was like then. Shakespeare was active in London, England, from c. 1590 to c. 1614. Writers weren't known as "authors" at the time; that term was a general term for someone who created or originated something, such as the author of a crime. There were different "varieties" of writers at the time: poets who wrote poetry, playwrights who wrote plays, scientists and mathematicians who wrote tracts. Shakespeare was known as a poet and a playwright, as he wrote poems and plays.

During this time, authors did not have control over their publications, mainly because they were not seen to have control over their works. They usually wrote material for a patron, such as Shakespeare did with his poems and sonnets, or for a purpose, as he did with his plays. The works he created for his patron, the Earl of Southampton, would have then become the property of the Earl, who could decide when and where they were published and who could read them. The plays he wrote would have been intended for performance by his acting troupe, the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men), and would have been the property of the acting company.

While plays were sometimes published as stand-alone works, there wasn't the type of reading population that would have supported the practice of publishing everything he or other playwrights created. The act of entering a work into the stationers' register, a way of copyrighting the material, was more for business purposes so others couldn't profit off the works of a particular acting company. Many of Shakespeare's plays were entered for publication, but were not printed immediately, so it appears they were entered to record them in order to protect the acting troupe's interests associated with the script.

Stationers' Register for
2 Henry VI