CHAPTER ONE

1609 “THE ONLIE BEGETTER”

The greatest advantage of Shakespearean studies
seems to be that questions may be asked over and
over again, and that almost nobody pays attention to
the answers—unless he borrows them for his own use
in an article or a book.

 

—HYDER E. ROLLINS, 1944

 

 

May 20, 2009, represents the 400th anniversary of the “publication” of one of the most famous books in the world. It was on that day that Thomas Thorpe, a publisher and “procurer of manuscripts,” registered “a booke called Shakespeares sonnettes” with the Stationers’ Company, a requirement for all publications under a Marian statute. The book, a thin quarto volume, contained a thirty-word dedication by Thorpe, alias “T.T.”—not Shakespeare—154 sonnets, and a long poem, “A Lover’s Complaint,” that has never been definitively assigned to the Bard.

In the intervening four centuries, there have been enough volumes on the subject of the sonnets—and editions thereof—to fill a small public library. At least two entire books exist for the sole purpose of supplying bibliographies of editions of the sonnets. At the same time, the poems have become inextricably linked to a perceived biographical element for which there is still no independent evidence. As such, one would have to say that Shakespeare’s several boasts in the sonnets—of which “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see / So long lives this” (18.13-14) is the most brazen—have been fully vindicated.

So how did it come to pass that the most (in)famous English love-poems of all time—written by the most revered writer the English world has known—remained a secret subtext to the man’s plays for almost 200 years? And what were the circumstances that originally brought it notoriety, then obscurity, and finally the recognition that fulfilled Shakespeare’s own prophecy that they would endure “so long as men can breathe”?

Despite recent assaults on a centuries-old perception, the suspicion remains that we are wholly beholden to Thomas Thorpe for their publication and enduring existence; and that Shakespeare himself, for all his protestations concerning posterity, had long ago washed his hands of these microcosmic masterpieces by the time they appeared in print in the twilight of his career.

Which prompts an altogether different question: What sort of poet would produce such a sustained, endlessly intertwining sequence of poems, only to then forget all about them? The answer may well be a popular poet no longer certain where his true strengths lay. For, like a certain song-poet of the twentieth century who exercises a similar fascination, it seems this Elizabethan bard produced his most personally revealing collection when recuperating from some great personal trauma, and on the brink of more mature work.

In Bob Dylan’s case (fie! compare ye not), his song-poems were recorded in some friends’ basement in the summer of 1967, then cut on acetates and circulated, first as publishing demos, and then, for many years, on bootleg records (which almost single-handedly created the modern bootleg industry). They are the fabled Basement Tapes, Dylan’s most quixotic work. Shakespeare’s sonnets, on the other hand, were circulated in manuscript form for a decade or more, and when they finally did appear in print it was as a “bookleg” quarto, courtesy of Thorpe.

I do not think that in either case the author set out with any greater intention than “killing time”; the inevitable expansion of poetic range being a fortuitous by-product. The intent was to produce a collection that was private, in every sense of the word. But, somehow, both sonnets and songs slipped out.

There was nothing at all unusual about this process in bygone days. Manuscripts were the bootleg tapes of their day; and there was a small but thriving business in manuscript-copies. They were used both by the acting companies, which needed “scribal copies” in order to put on their plays, and by those who preferred to keep their latest work out of the hands of the Stationers’ Company, at least for a time. The scriveners of Shakespeare’s day were not unlike the small pressing-plants that fueled the bootleg vinyl industry in the 1970s and 1980s, while also keeping official record companies supplied: They had an incestuous relationship with the printers and were prone to indiscretion. In such a climate, “an enterprising publisher had many opportunities of becoming the owner of a popular book without the author’s sanction or knowledge” [SL].

In the here and now of the twenty-first century, barely a week goes by without somebody predicting the death of the publishing, music, or movie industries (take your pick), as a result of a flagrant disregard for the rights of artists, whose copyrights no longer confer the requisite protection in cyberspace. The Internet has transformed the nature of all businesses, but none quite as directly as those who trade in the creative media. In such an environment, pity the man trying to discreetly circulate a set of love poems among his bookish friends. Especially if his should be a name that, when “Googled,” generates more than 8 million “hits.”

Modern doom-mongers would like everyone to believe that copyright constitutes some inalienable right, not a manmade invention. They’d prefer us to overlook the fact that it was unquestionably created to protect the rights of publishers, not authors. The latter’s rights still generally remain subsidiary to the former. Even in the wake of a prolonged writers’ strike over “digital rights” in Hollywood, the writer of a TV or film screenplay in the land of the free does not own the primary copyright on his work—or the absolute moral right to be designated its creator. In fact, the studio can have your work rewritten by a.n.other without your input or approval.

So, really not so different from Shakespeare’s time. Back then, the popular playwright—yesterday’s screenwriter—was a man for hire, working for actors’ guilds, for whom he produced new plays for a fee. After he did his job, all rights passed to the company, which jealously guarded these rights, along with the script itself, copies of which remained few and far between. So paranoid were these companies that even the actors would never see the whole play on the page. Instead, their parts “would be written out on a long roll of parchment wrapped round a piece of wood . . . with around three cue words preceding each speech, so he would know when to enter or speak” [BDC]. These scrolls were known as “cue scripts.”

Such ruses were considered necessary because, if a play script ended up in the wrong hands, it could be copied and published, and there was nothing the playwright or the acting company could do about it. Copyright, as we know it, simply did not exist. Nor was there a great deal of honor among the Stationers’ own brand of thief. Publishers would happily breach each other’s rights, republishing books and ballads with new titles whenever the opportunity arose.

And whatever the case when he wrote this private set of lyrics, by 1609 William Shakespeare was undoubtedly the most successful playwright in London. Smart enough to have a financial stake in his own company of players (with a royal warrant), thus controlling the very means of production and any revenue generated, he now knew that publishing was a mug’s game. It had been a useful way to get his name known back in the early 1590s, when his long poems, Venus & Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, had brought him patronage and fame. But the fortune those poems made was reserved for someone else—the publisher—a fact of literary life that Elizabethan poet Thomas Churchyard bemoaned the year Venus appeared, referring to an “infinite number of other Songes and Sonets, given where they cannot be recovered, nor purchase any favour when they are craved”—i.e., published.

Shakespeare no longer craved such recognition. He had long ago decided that he would stake his future—and his commercial concerns—not on his poetry, but on his plays. A steady flow of piratical versions of his plays had been appearing in cheap quarto editions since 1594—i.e., directly after these two poems made publishers aware of his literary worth—proving to be a constant thorn in Shakespeare’s side (hence, John Heminge and Henry Condell’s sideswipe at “stolen and surreptitious copies” in the preface to their “authorized” folio of the plays). Yet he could do very little to stop the steady dissemination of the more popular plays in print. By 1609 he had already seen at least fifteen of them appear in unauthorized quarto editions—with several of the poorer editions not even deigning to name him on the title page.

Nor did he have to write them to see his name in print. (Plays like The Yorkshire Tragedy and Sir John Oldcastle went into second [and third] editions with Shakespeare’s name on them, even though it is highly debatable whether he had any hand in the former, and pretty certain he had no hand in the latter.) No one, though, would have made a mistake like that in 1609. William had the stamp of royal approval, and his name—however one spelled it—was a selling point for any quarto, be it a play or a series of poems.

Even when the Stratford squire had created a tight company of players, and given them a financial interest in the success of the King’s Men, the quarto booklegs just kept coming. As recently as January 28, 1609, a quarto edition of Troilus Cressida had been registered by the publishers Richard Bonian and Henry Whalley—a full six years after another publisher, James Roberts, had registered his own right to publish The book of Troilus and Cressida, as it is acted by my Lord Chamberlain’s men. The 1609 edition was printed by the same printer as Shake-speares Sonnets, George Eld; and, unlike the Sonnets, was popular enough to warrant a second edition inside a year. As for Roberts’s edition, it would appear he had been bought off, or otherwise persuaded by the King’s Men not to proceed.

It was in this anarchic climate that Thomas Thorpe, a little known publisher with just thirteen books to his name after almost fifteen years at the trade, registered this “booke called Shakespeares sonnettes” in the spring of that very year. The book, which probably appeared a matter of weeks after registration, was the only volume Thorpe published in 1609. Presumably, he hoped it would establish his name and relieve him of some of the financial hardships he had endured to date.

So sure was Thorpe of the clout the name Shakespeare held that he felt just two words, “SHAKE-SPEARE” and “SONNETS,” would suffice to sell the initial print run, which he evenly divided between two respected London booksellers, William Aspley and John Wright. As he undoubtedly knew, both the playwright’s two long poems, first published in 1593 and 1594, respectively, were still “in print,” the former in its fifth edition, the latter in its fourth.

And yet, not only is the 1609 edition of Shake-speares Sonnets one of the world’s most famous volumes, it is also one of the most valuable. Just thirteen copies have survived the centuries (as opposed to almost 300 copies of the 1623 “First Folio”), which has led to the suggestion that the book itself was suppressed, either as a result of its contentious contents, or because it was issued against the wishes of all concerned—i.e., author and dedicatee, the enigmatic “Mr W.H. ”(who may well have had the political clout to do something about it). One thing it certainly was not, was a publishing phenomenon.

In some ways, the book might as well have stayed in manuscript. There are as many seventeenth-century manuscript copies of the second sonnet in Thorpe’s collection (now thought to have circulated independently in this form) as there are surviving copies of the 1609 edition, known almost universally as “Q” (a moniker it shares, ironically, with the fabled—and long lost—Aramaic source of the first-century Synoptic gospels). Something, it would appear, went badly wrong. Yet, if the failure of Shake-speares Sonnets signaled the beginning of the end for Thorpe’s personal ambitions as a serious publisher of literary works, it was just the start of the sonnets’ own journey through the centuries.

So, what do we know about the elusive “T.T.”(as he signed himself here), surely the most scrutinized booklegger in literary history? The short answer is, Not a lot. While other members of the Stationers’ Company flourished, directly benefiting from the era’s extraordinary literary outpouring, Thorpe never found a secure footing in a business for which he seems to have been singularly unsuited. Sidney Lee starkly portrays him as someone whom “fortune rarely favoured, [but who] held his own with difficulty for some thirty years in the lowest ranks of the London publishing trade . . . never enjoy[ing] in permanence the profits or dignity of printing his ‘copy’ at a press of his own, or selling books on premises of his own . . . [while he] pursued the well-understood profession of procurer of ‘dispersed transcripts’ for a longer period than any other known member of the Stationers’ Company.”

Apprenticed in 1583 at the age of fourteen, to a reputable stationer, Richard Watkins, Thorpe was finally granted the “freedom” of the Stationers’ Company in 1594, which allowed him the legal right to publish and be damned. Yet it was a full six years—part of which he spent in Spain—before he was in a position to publish his first title, whether because of the “lack of capital or of family connections among those already in the trade” that Lee speculates hindered him, or because he had ideas above his station when it came to the type of book on which he wished to put his name.

The first book Thorpe did publish, at the turn of the century, set its own pattern of sorts. Featuring Christopher Marlowe’s translation of the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia, it was a title replete with real literary credentials, if hardly containing the “wow” factor, commercially speaking. He had seemingly acquired the manuscript from fellow-stationer Edward Blount, to whom he dedicated the volume. But without his own printing press, he was obliged to have the book printed by another stationer—another practice that was always eating into a hard-up publisher’s profits.

Between those upfront costs he paid the printer and the cut taken by the bookseller, it is highly unlikely Thorpe made any money out of this “niche book.” He probably just hoped it would establish his credentials as a publisher of literary remains. That he had become infected with a dose of pretentiousness is evident from his long-winded dedication, full of self-serving allusions to someone struggling to make his way in the world of publishing:

Blount: I propose to be blunt with you. . . . This spirit [presumably Marlowe] was sometimes a familiar of your own, Lucan’s first book translated, which (in regard of your old right in it) I have raised in the circle of your Patronage. But stay now, Edward, (if I mistake you not) you are to accomodate yourself with some few instructions touching the property of a Patron that you are not yet possessed of, and to study them for your better grace as our Gallants fashion. . . . One special virtue in our Patrons of these days I have promised myself you shall fit excellently, which is to give nothing. . . . Farewell, I affect not the world should measure my thoughts to thee by a scale of this Nature: Leave to think good of me when I fall from thee.

Thine in all rites of perfect friendship,
THOM. THORPE.

In such a way did Thorpe establish his credentials as a man with an ostentatious love of the literary, but too little appreciation for language itself. This effusive dedication also demonstrates a man finding it hard to attract patronage, and reliant on the good graces of his fellow stationer, Blount, who seems to have been something of a “procurer of manuscripts” himself. In the preface to a later volume of his own, Blount informed readers of how he learned about some interesting papers, and, “curious to see and reade them over[,] . . . supposed if I could get the copie, they would be welcome abroad,” though “the author of this booke I knowe not.” Such was the lot of the Jacobethan stationer, ever on the prowl for material he could purloin.

One recent reinterpretation of Thorpe’s dedication has suggested that his bitterness may have been at least partly directed at Blount, for claiming ownership of every remnant Marlowe left behind. Obliged to make his own way in the cutthroat world of Jacobethan publishing, Blount had not provided Thorpe with quite the prize his friend may have hoped for, as he probably knew all along. But their association endured well into the first decade of the seventeenth century, with Thorpe invariably turning to Blount whenever he needed a literary leg up.

As it appears he often did. It was Blount who gave Thorpe the opportunity to publish Ben Jonson five years later, relinquishing his original copyright in Jonson’s Sejanus, and assigning the rights to Thorpe in August 1605, surely another rite of this “perfect friendship.” And far from claiming ownership of everything Marlowe left unpublished, Blount gave Thorpe an interest in Hero and Leander. (Thorpe subsequently sold his share of said copyright to another publisher, Samuel Vicars, when his own publishing career came to an end.)¹

Before that, in late May 1603, Thorpe and Blount embarked on a second venture together. Unfortunately, this entry into the Stationers’ Register coincided with them running foul not only of the rules, but of the unwritten code, of the company, by registering “a panegyric or congratulation” to James I that had already been registered to another publisher, Gregory Seton. They were duly obliged to cancel the registration. As Colin Burrow recently observed, Thorpe thus violated “one of the key principles of the Stationers’ company,” a respect for other printers’ copyrights, and probably alienated a couple of his fellow stationers into the bargain.

Nor was this Thorpe’s only breach of Stationers’ etiquette that summer. Another fortuitous association with a fellow stationer, William Aspley—which seems to have been largely responsible for the improvement in Thorpe’s publishing prospects in the years preceding the publication of Shake-speares Sonnets—commenced in June 1603 with a joint attempt to license for publication another Stationer’s copyright. Their claim to “A letter written to y^e governors . . . of y^e East Indian Merchants” was duly “cancelled owing to the official recognition of another publisher’s claim to the copy concerned” [SL-F]. So much for the recent suggestion that “Thorpe was a publisher of some deserved status and prestige” [KDJ].

After this rocky start, things steadily improved, and through the remainder of that difficult decade Thorpe began to make some headway in his chosen vocation. Producing between one and three books a year, he would be responsible for a surprisingly high number of enduring literary works: translations by John Healey and plays by Ben Jonson and George Chapman, as well as the poems of Shakespeare he bequeathed to posterity.

Thorpe’s joint registration (with Aspley again) of John Marston’s The Malcontent, assigned to the pair in July 1604, suggests he had now begun to develop some literary connections of his own. It was perhaps an interest in literature that he shared with Aspley, who had already—in partnership with Andrew Wise—acquired copyrights to both Henry IV Part Two and Much Ado about Nothing. Aspley, like Thorpe, never owned his own press, but unlike Thorpe, he had his own means of distribution—a shop in St. Paul’s.

Meanwhile, Thorpe continued to call in favors from his former fellow-apprentice Blount. In 1605, he had managed to persuade Blount to let him publish Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, transferring the copyright as part of whatever bargain was struck. Perhaps Blount was concerned that Jonson might prove to be the kind of demanding publishing-bedfellow who made it hard to make an honest shilling. And it must be said that the 1605 quarto of Sejanus made quite a contrast to contemporary “bad” Shakespeare quartos, “with its severe columns of verse flanked by marginal scholia and with the proclamations set in the style of a Roman lapidary inscription with medial stops between each word” [HL]. Jonson, who evidently oversaw its publication, was pleased enough with the outcome to let Thorpe publish his next offering, an altogether chancier venture.

Eastward Ho, coauthored with George Chapman (and probably John Marston), fully tested the new monarch’s willingness to be lampooned. But then, Thorpe took risks. He had already chanced his arm back in 1604, publishing an eighteen-page pamphlet by the former Jesuit and Catholic priest, Thomas Wright, on “the nature of Clymactericall yeeres, occasioned by the death of Queen Elizabeth,” a book as contentious as anything he ever published, and one which highlighted his Catholic connections. Perhaps it was this reckless nature which ultimately resulted in Shakespeare’s sonnets being thrust into his sweaty palms.

While Eastward Ho appears to have brought Jonson and Chapman a degree of notoriety—resulting in the temporary incarceration of its caustic coauthors, not so much for expressing overtly anti-Scot sentiments as for making a number of sarcastic references to James I—it perhaps put Thorpe’s business on a temporarily sounder footing. It also cemented his relationship with Aspley, who again acquired joint copyright in the provocative play (though, according to its title page, it was published by Thorpe alone—as per the Sonnets).

By the end of 1608, when Thorpe probably acquired the precious manuscript of sonnets, he had reached the high tide of his fortunes. That year he had managed to publish three books for the first time, and had even occupied a shop, The Tiger’s Head, in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Those three books included George Chapman’s Byron and Ben Jonson’s Masques of Blackness and Beauty, the third of Chapman’s and the fourth of Jonson’s works that Thorpe had put into the world.

Thorpe’s association with the likes of Jonson and Chapman—a strong candidate for the so-called “Rival Poet” of sonnets 78-86—undoubtedly reinforced his own literary pretensions, and probably convinced him to take a chance on Shake-speares Sonnets. That he knew he was taking a chance is borne out by his famous dedication at the front of that volume, which includes a description of himself as a “well-wishing adventurer” for “setting forth” these sonnets. Had he paid too much for the precious “scribal copy,” or was he merely concerned that the sonnet fad was largely spent? Or did he recognize a potentially scurrilous subtext underlying the majority of these lovelorn sonnets?

Whatever his concerns, it seems clear Thorpe was staking much of his meager finances and reputation on a single roll of the dice—and the publishing value of this singular poet’s name. But he still couldn’t do it by himself. Or didn’t want to. When it came to the sonnets, he was still reliant on a printer-friend and two booksellers, one of whom was Aspley, to make it happen.

Even in 1609, Thorpe would have needed Aspley more than Aspley needed Thorpe. Having entered into his part-time partnership with Thorpe five years earlier, when he was just another struggling stationer, Aspley was now an altogether more prestigious name than either the sonnets’ printer or their publisher. Indeed, he would later become Master of the Stationers’ Company, the most esteemed position in Jacobethan publishing, as well as being a member of the syndicate responsible for the 1623 First Folio, and eventually acquiring the rights to publish Venus Adonis.

All of which could well suggest that his appreciation of Shakespeare’s work transcended mere commercial interest. And the fact that Aspley was given his own “edition” of the Sonnets, credited as seller of the book on the title page, implies that he provided upfront capital, while Thorpe again fulfilled his familiar role as “procurer of manuscripts.” (Of the two title pages Thorpe printed, Aspley’s is significantly rarer—just four copies of “his” edition have survived.)

This convoluted alliance also involved George Eld, printer of most of Thorpe’s Jacobean titles, as well as John Wright, the second “distributor” of Shake-speares Sonnets. Wright, who “was largely concerned with chap-books and ballads” [SL], may have been Eld’s suggestion, given that Eld also published the 1611 edition of Marlowe’s Faustus for Wright, which “bore the same imprint as his impression of Shakespeare’s sonnets” [SL-F]. The copyright, though, remained with Thorpe, suggesting he considered it a commodity worth hanging on to, even when allying himself with others who shared a history of disregard for the rules of the Stationers’ and an interest, commercial and/or literary, in the works of William. Of these comrades, Eld would prove the most “loyal.”

George Eld had already published his own contribution to that ever-expanding canon of Shakespearean Apocrypha—a 1607 edition of The Puritan, a.k.a. The Widow of Watling Street, initially credited to “W.S.,” but now considered to be the work of Thomas Middleton. Eld enjoyed a similarly checkered career as a publisher-printer, being fined by the company in 1606 and 1610 for printing ballads without license, a common enough practice. In fact, something like a third of the books published were never entered at all—for reasons hard to comprehend, given that the four or six pence it cost to register a broadside or a book conferred the company’s protection and copyright (though, according to J.W. Bennett, “the custom of the trade” meant “copyright was assumed and enjoyed by many who did not trouble to enter their copies”).

That Eld was fined twice suggests he was producing, at least for a short time, such broadsheets on a brazen scale. Most such piracy was carried out by the company’s members—just as in the present day most audio piracy is conducted by members of the “official” phonographic industry (and is equally tacitly condoned). And Eld, like Thorpe, was fully prepared to violate another printer’s copyright, for which he was fined by the company in 1619, by which time he was no longer an associate of Aspley, who had gone on to greater things, or Thorpe, whose days as a publisher were nearing an end.

During the first decade of the new century, though, Eld shared Thorpe’s desire to become more than just a printer and/or procurer of works, having in 1604 married a widow of two previous master-printers. As David Frost points out in The School of Shakespeare (1968), Eld was doing his utmost in 1606-8 “to break out on his own as a publisher.” Having previously published just two books of his own, in these three years “he entered a large number of works in the Stationers’ Register, printed fine editions of histories in translation, and acquired the copyright” on some four plays, all of which he published himself.

With partners like these, Thorpe must have acquired the manuscript for the sonnets independent of Eld and/or Aspley. Otherwise, I doubt they would have had any reason to make him a part of the venture. Unlike Thorpe, Eld had his own printing presses, and Aspley had vital means of distribution. Thorpe probably felt the Sonnets provided a God-sent opportunity to demonstrate his literary taste, and contacts, and show his fellow stationers that he had what it took. And so it was probably with some bravado, and not a little trepidation, that he penned the most famous dedication in literary history, sometime early in 1609:

TO. THE .ONLIE . BEGETTER . OF.
THESE . INSVING . SONNETS.
MR. W.H. ALL .HAPPINESSE.
AND .THAT. ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OVR. EVERLIVING. POET.
WISHETH.
THE . WELLWISHING.
ADVENTVRER . IN .
SETTING.
FORTH .

—T.T.

According to Sidney Lee, just the act of writing the dedication “on behalf of the author” was a clear indication that “the stationer owned a copyright and controlled the publication,” while “the exceptionally brusque and commercial description of the poems” provided further “evidence that the author was no party to the transaction.” Poet George Wither articulated the general practice in a 1595 volume of his own, “It is a usuall manner . . . for all those that goe about to publish any work or writing of theirs, to dedicate it to some one or other.”

Thorpe had not, however, presumed to provide one of his own inimitable dedications to any of the volumes he published for Jonson or Chapman. Indeed, Shake-speares Sonnets seem to have provided a first opportunity to exercise his own penmanship since that garrulous dedication to Blount, back in 1600. And though he pruned the length to which he went this time to sing the “inspirer” or procurer’s praise, he managed in the space of thirty words to create quite enough conundrums for the centuries. The meaning of “onlie begetter”; the identity of “Mr W.H.”; the import of “well-wishing adventurer”; the kind of “eternitie” which he here promises, are issues that have taxed some of history’s finer minds, all of whom have ultimately admitted defeat. Thorpe’s dedication has become the literary equivalent of the Sphinx’s riddle.

The most contentious, and least resolvable, of the many disputes occasioned by these few words undoubtedly revolves around the meaning of the expression Thorpe coined at its outset, “To The Onlie Begetter.” Professor Hyder Rollins displays not the slightest propensity for exaggeration when claiming, in his indispensable variorum edition of the Sonnets, “An entire library has been written on [just] the[se] four opening words.”

Many a tree has been wasted on the etymology of the expression “onlie begetter” itself, with various authors hoping to demonstrate that “begetter” must mean “inspirer”; or that, all things considered, it could just mean “procurer.” A few brave souls have even had the temerity to suggest that it means both—i.e., that the “inspiration” behind the sonnets might have passed them to Thorpe, directly or indirectly.

Most anyone arguing that he meant merely “procurer” has tended to avoid highlighting one contemporary use certainly known to both poet and publisher. Samuel Daniel, dedicating his 1592 Delia sequence to the Countess of Pembroke, described his own sonnets as “begotten by thy hand and my desire.” Such folk have generally taken their lead from James Boswell, who, in his 1821 “Malone” edition of The Plays Poems, “wished to relieve the poet from the imputation of having written the sonnets to any particular person, or as anything but a play of fancy.” But, as Edwardian scholar H.C. Beeching was obliged to point out, “[Even] allowing it to be conceivable that a piratical publisher should inscribe a book of sonnets to the thief who brought him the manuscript, why should he lay stress on the fact that ‘alone he did it’?”

In fact, anyone attempting to explicate the reasoning underlying Thorpe’s dedication is obliged to take account of the fact that the publisher rarely expressed what he meant, and rarer still, managed to do so with the requisite lucidity or economy of phrasing. As R. G. White observed, a century and a half ago, “This dedication is not written in the common phraseology of its period; it is throughout a piece of affectation and elaborate quaintness.”

The sheer convolutedness of the dedication should at least remove any possibility that it was really Shakespeare’s own, published, as it were, by proxy. And yet, Katherine Duncan-Jones, in her 1997 Arden edition of the sonnets, refused to let Thorpe stand as the only begetter of his tortuous dedication, suggesting instead that, “though the initials of ‘T.T.’ are at the bottom, and the over-rhetorical wording is evidently Thorpe’s, the dedication, like the text itself, had Shakespeare’s authority.” The basis for her novel suggestion is a house of cards theory that presupposes Shakespeare not only wanted to see his poems published, but gave them to Thorpe for that purpose.

An altogether more plausible explanation for the cryptic dedication—and one which would still have “Shakespeare’s authority”—had been made as far back as 1897. This generally attractive theory, first espoused by William Archer in an article in The Fortnightly Review, in which he presented “The Case against Southampton” as the Fair Youth of the sonnets, suggested that the words “To Mr W.H.” had been “prefixed to sonnet one” all along:

The overwhelming probability is that Thorpe did not know the secret history of the Sonnets, and, reading them either carelessly or not at all, supposed them all addressed to the dedicatee whose initials no doubt figured at the head of the Ms. . . . There is no difficulty in supposing that Thorpe did not quite know the history of the poems he was publishing; whereas it is very difficult to conceive his using so common a word [as ‘begetter’] in so quaint, affected and archaic a sense [as ‘procurer’].

Archer’s theory resolves so many of the issues which have plagued sonnet-detectives that it is slightly surprising it has gone largely unadopted—even though Beeching refined it further in his 1904 edition, suggesting that Thorpe may have “found his manuscript of the Sonnets headed ‘To W.H.’ and, being ignorant who W.H. was, supplied the ordinary title of respect.” (Beeching was seeking to explain away how a noble, as he supposed, came to be addressed as a mere gentleman.)

The two twentieth-century commentators who have taken Archer’s suggestion to their bosoms—E. K. Chambers in the forties and J. Dover-Wilson in the sixties—are also the two most astute literary historians to have tackled the many thorny issues thrown up by these lyrics. In Chambers’ case, it took him a while to come round to the view that “Thomas Thorpe in 1609 . . . had [no]thing before him but ‘To W.H.’ on a manuscript”; he adopted it thirteen years after completing his monumental two-volume magnum opus, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (1930), in a supplementary essay on “‘The Youth’ of the Sonnets.” Dover-Wilson, meanwhile, drawing on Chambers, modified the view to fit his own supposition “that Thorpe procured his collection from a person or persons he had discovered possessed them and that he found ‘To W.H.’ at the head of the portfolio or chief manuscript.”

However, like Chambers and Archer before him, Dover-Wilson found his suggestion fell on stony ground when it came to fellow academics. He was arguing against a rising tide of opinion—in academia, at least—that preferred an ordered, authorized Q text. In suggesting that Thorpe, as the “procurer of the manuscript,” had no clue as to the identity of W.H., he was a man out of time.

Yet a private inscription would in an instance remove the demands of social propriety which convinced so many Victorians that “Mr W.H.” could never be a man of title. For anyone like the 1855 correspondent to Fraser’s Magazine who insisted that “if ‘Mr W.H.’ had been a man of rank and importance . . . ‘T.T.’ would have given his name in full, with all [his] titles and additions,” the possibility that the initialed dedication was a private one—perhaps written when the Fair Youth (i.e., Master W.H.) was still not in his majority—had not even been entertained.

Thorpe’s failure to attach any significance to these initials would certainly help “explain” his adoption of such a clumsy expression as “onlie begetter.” He was surely making a very bad, if archetypally Elizabethan, pun on “only begotten,” a familiar phrase even then, and one with a very specific sense that directly relates to the subject of the first seventeen sonnets—an heir. Indeed, it could have been these sonnets—and these alone—that were dedicated “in ms.” to “Mr W.H.”

It would be rather fitting if “T.T.” did, in the words of Louis Gillet, render these “few lines of gibberish [that] have accounted for more commentaries than the Apocalypse,” while wholly unaware of their import. After all, such dedications on manuscript copies were hardly unknown in the Elizabethan era. A manuscript copy of Robert Southwell’s Fourfold Meditation, published by another “W.H.” in 1606, contains an “epistel dedicatorie” by Peter Mowle on the first page that, according to Lee, expressed “the conventional greeting of happiness here and hereafter”; while so-called presentation copies of Jonson’s and Chapman’s assorted works invariably contained their fair share of self-conscious inscriptions.

If Thorpe was faced with a similar “epistel dedicatorie,” and had no way of checking with the author without alerting him to the publisher’s acquisition of said poems, then Duncan-Jones is entitled to suggest that “the over-rhetorical wording is . . . Thorpe’s, [whereas] the dedication, like the text itself, had Shakespeare’s authority.” However, such a dedication would date from the time the manuscript copy was made, not when it was acquired by Thorpe—i.e., at the turn of the century, and not 1608-9, when “T.T.” overelaborated what little he had to go on.

For surely, if Shakespeare did agree to the 1609 publication, and “Mr W.H.” was a reference to either “lovely boy” who in the interim became Earl of Pembroke or the already-titled Earl of Southampton—and that is a can of worms we shall open soon enough—the playwright-poet himself would never have allowed the original dedication to stand, whatever the earl’s feelings about the matter. Circa 1600, when the sonnets remained a private matter, he would have had no such concerns. Whatever the case, methinks some fuel has now been added to the fire of doubt swirling around Thorpe’s credentials as a publisher “of some deserved status and prestige.”