Politics, Law, and Constructive Authorship: John Freke and “The Most Infamous Libel That Ever Was Written”

This essay uncovers the use of constructive authorship as a political-legal strategy aimed against oppositional writing under the censorship regime of Charles II in seventeenth-century England. Constructive authorship is defined as the tactic of framing someone as author who is not the author, applying the “logic” that the author is the last discoverable source, principally as a threat in seeking to expose the real author to punishment. The process is illuminated by a detailed examination of a case in which it was notably attempted: the inquiry in 1676 into authorship of the satirical verses known as “The Chronicle” or “The History of Insipids.” Subsequently ascribed to Rochester, the poem was reattributed in the late twentieth century to the young lawyer John Freke on the basis that in 1676 he was “presumed to be the Author” when arrested. The essay demonstrates that literary-historical scholarship mistook a strategy of actively constructing authorship for the fact of authorship, unaware of how the tactic unraveled later in the year, in a case that also featured a youthful Jacob Tonson as prosecution witness and Andrew Marvell as interested observer. The outcome confirms the need for a critical stance toward the construction of authorship that includes a conception of the real author, asking not least whether the alleged author was framed.