[Harmon]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

Copyright would have given the author the right to sell his play to one company, which he did anyway. What you quoted has to do with what the company did next. They didn't keep the script, and that is why it didn't survive intact in time. They tried to keep the script from being copied, just like the publishers are using DRM today, and that is why few copies exist. They didn't want the script to circulate. If there would have been copyright laws then we wouldn't have had the copies we have today.

I am answering the question that was asked, namely, how does lack of copyright lead to fewer copies rather than more?

Please read this again, with attention to the bold:

Per Dr. Debora B. Schwartz (English Department, California Polytechnic State University): http://cla.calpoly.edu/~dschwart/engl339/problems.html

Quote:

Because there was no such thing as copyright in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, playwrights and theatrical troupes tried to keep their plays out of print. Without copyright protection, there was no compensation to a troupe and/or playwright if a rival troupe obtained a copy of and produced a play, thereby cutting into the original troupe's audience (and profits). For this reason (and because copying handwritten scripts was a long and tedious task), individual actors generally received only a copy of their individual lines and cues. Some of the quarto versions of Shakespeare's plays seem to have been pirated from a single actor's partial script, with other passages reconstructed from memory or invented.

Do you see it now? They made fewer copies in order to prevent piracy. This is not a universal statement about how copyright impacts copying - it is a particular statement about how the dynamics of copying worked in Shakespearean theatres.

The kind of variances I am talking about were brought up by you.

Where? I don't recall doing that, so unless you can point it out, I'll just continue to think I didn't.

You base this on what?

Humor. Or at least, an attempt at it. I thought that the title of the missing Shakespeare play was pretty funny...

Or he would have been a pirate, or he wouldn't have had the money to pay the royalties and his works would have never been created.

Not Shakespeare. He was that unusual thing, a creative artist who was also a businessman. Depend upon it, he would have thrived under copyright.