Copyright and context: The intellectual property of nineteenth-century Spanish theater

In this dissertation I analyze the development of Intellectual Property for dramatic literature and its effects on nineteenth-century Spanish theater. Derecho de autor is shown to have framed and constrained the composition, publication and circulation of plays throughout the Spanish nation and directed the public's consumption of the text in both performance and reading practices. This dissertation argues that the public's consumption of both theater and dramatic literature, as guided by a Romantic concept of art in modern society, was the material enactment of the Liberal ideology of property upon which Isabel II's regime was legitimated.; Through a textual analysis of various drafts of the initial copyright laws for dramatic literature, this dissertation examines the construction of Spanish dramatic poets as authors in relation to new literary schools, the political economy and legal apparatus of a nascent Liberal state. The designation of dramatic poets as authors led to a privileging of the literary text over other elements of production and was an early marker of the spectacle/text tension that was to challenge theatrical practices at the end of the century.; My examination of the transformation of dramatic literature, after the 1837 copyright laws, encompasses a study of the editions' paratexts. These material aspects show that the material circulation of dramatic literature was cloaked in the Liberal language of property that, in turn, legally guaranteed the stability of the Romantic works printed within them.; Likewise, this study widens the focus of literary production and consumption from the author and public to include the editor. He was not only responsible for the proliferation of Romantic dramatic literature in the first half of the century but also was one of the most influential sources of the politics of literary exclusion, or the construction of the canon.