Article: The poet of labor: authorship and property in the work of Ben Jonson.

I want to start by revisiting a traditional distinction between Shakespeare, the poet of nature who never blotted a line, and Jonson, who blotted so many that he became famous for slow and laborious composition. I would rediscover this distinction in the briefest work that either poet ever produced: their names.

To put things as simply as possible, Shakespeare never bothered to regularize the spelling of his name, either in his personal practice or in the practice of others; Jonson, on the other hand, did. The evidence on both sides is extensive. In Shakespeare's case, the surviving signatures point in various different orthographic directions; he is "William ...

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