CHAPTER FOUR

1609-1639 “NOTHING IN MY CONSCIENCE . . . DID NEED A CYPHER”

There is no good reason for believing that Shakespeare
himself voluntarily gave to the world those
beautiful records of the errors of a great man.

—The Edinburgh Review, 1840

 

 

When, in 1983, Katherine Duncan-Jones first put her case for an authorized publication in 1609 of a set of poems almost no one dated later than the accession of James I (and many dated a decade earlier), she was challenging what she viewed as a cozy consensus that had gone on too long. In asking, “Was the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets Really Unauthorized?” she sought to extend their composition and/or revision beyond 1603 to a time when one might have expected the playwright to rest on his poetic laurels. Instead, she preferred to have him jeopardizing his literary and social standing, and possibly alienating a former patron, with a set of poems that even on a single reading demonstrate a worrying propensity for masochistic infatuation—with woman and man.

Having transformed the sonnets themselves into a lifelong obsession, not a fleeting fancy, for their author, Duncan-Jones was obliged to recast the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, into a man of taste known for fastidious editions of the great and the very great, not a man of piratical disposition, minimal capital, and literary pretensions that fifteen years in the trade had failed to disabuse. In this act of transforming Thorpe from a “well-wishing adventurer” into a well-respected publisher of literature, she necessarily took certain liberties with the facts.

Even more improbably, she hoped to explain away the seeming deficiencies in the 1609 edition by bringing in the one solid factual snippet that tied Shakespeare down to a place and a time that year—his June 7 court case in Stratford. Seeking legal redress for an unpaid debt apparently resulted in him leaving London in a hurry. Rather than insisting on a delay to Q while he took care of a minor legal squabble in his home-town, we are required to believe that he left Thorpe (and printer George Eld) to it. Yet this was the exact opposite of everything he had done when he sought the epithet “Poet,” in 1593-94. Back then, he had used a fellow Stratfordian, with a respectable name and capital to spare, to print his two long poems, Venus and Lucrece, both of which he dedicated to a named patron, and a renowned one at that.

By overlooking the weight of evidence to the contrary, accumulated by two and a half centuries’ worth of Shakespearean scholarship, the lady was seeking to suggest that the order of Q was Shakespeare’s; that the dedication was his in spirit, if not actual wording; and that the identity of “Mr W.H.” was known not only to author and publisher, but to various other members of the London literati. Oh, and that Shakespeare had reworked some of the sonnets long after he had ceased to display any interest in composing further poetry.

The lady scholar thus reopened a debate that had once raged without respite (and now rages again): Were the sonnets—“those beautiful records of the errors of a great man”—ever intended for publication, and if so, why had it taken Shakespeare so long to get around to publishing them; so long, in fact, that it was a full decade after the Elizabethan sonnet fad had dissipated? If Q was Shakespeare’s idea, he assuredly broke a number of patterns established two decades earlier, when he was still scrabbling to make his way in the literary world.

A certain amount of groundwork, undertaken by Shakespearean scholars in the quarter of a century before Duncan-Jones’s article appeared, anticipated her thesis. The most necessary reinterpretation for anyone who longed to take Q at “face-value” was provided in 1964/ 1965 by a professorial pincer movement. An anthologized article and an academic monograph almost simultaneously decided that “A Lover’s Complaint”—the forty-seven-verse narrative poem in rhyme royal that comes at the end of Thorpe’s edition of the Sonnets (uncredited on the title page, but credited to Shakespeare within)—was indeed by Shakespeare.

First to break ranks with the past was a twenty-five-year-old New Zealand scholar, MacDonald P. Jackson, who brought out a thirty-nine-page pamphlet entitled Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint’: Its Date and Authenticity. He was rapidly followed by the English scholar Kenneth Muir, who published his own essay, “‘A Lover’s Complaint’: A Reconsideration.”

The effect of this “double whammy” on contemporary literary scholars was remarkable. “A Lover’s Complaint” had, for most of its largely secret history, been subordinate to the sonnets. Omitted from almost every non-facsimile edition of the sonnets since Malone, few believed it belonged with these poetic gems. Rejected by Lee, who thought it “a literary exercise on a very common theme by some second-rate poet,” its last rites were seemingly given by J. W. Mackail, in a 1912 article in Essays and Studies. After thoroughly examining its vocabulary, syntax and phrasing, Mackail concluded that “careful study leaves its authorship doubtful.”

The die seemed cast. In 1927, the highly respected John Dover-Wilson called the poem “an elaborate jest.” Professor Hyder Rollins, when commissioned to compile his monumental, two-volume, variorum edition of The Sonnets (1944), chose to leave “A Lover’s Complaint” elsewhere, among the disputed items at the end of his edition of Shakespeare’s other poems. And, in his 1954 volume for The Oxford History of English Literature, C. S. Lewis called it “a still-born chanson d’aventure, in rhyme royal, corrupt in text, poetically inconsiderable, and dialectically unlike Shakespeare.”

Yet its importance in determining the “validity” of Q could not have been greater. As Mackail noted, in his highly influential article, “It obviously cannot be ignored in considering the problem of the Sonnets, and more particularly, that part of the problem which deals with the way in which they reached Thorpe’s hands, the Mss. from which they were printed, and the circumstances of their publication.”

Rather than addressing those issues, most scholars took Muir and Jackson at their word, and decided it was Shakespeare’s work, after all. The restoration of the poem to the canon had begun with Martin Seymour-Smith’s own edition of The Sonnets, the previous year, in which he took Lewis to task. Seymour-Smith suggested Lewis’s curt dismissal of the poem had meant “that general readers have been led to ignore it. This is a pity, because . . . the poem seems certainly to be by Shakespeare.” He still didn’t incorporate the poem into his own edition, though he otherwise adhered to Q with a tenacity rare among modern editors.

He need not have worried. Paul Kerrigan put “A Lover’s Complaint” in the Penguin edition of The Sonnets in 1986 and, not surprisingly, Duncan-Jones did the same for her 1997 Arden edition. More significantly, it was included alongside the sonnets in the 1988 Oxford edition of The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, who merely observed that it is “clearly ascribed to Shakespeare” and that “stylistic evidence suggests [it] was written in the early seventeenth century and . . . may have been intended as a companion piece.” Not even a mention of its disputed status. Thus one troublesome issue was not so much resolved, as dissolved. (And, clearly, should anyone successfully prove “A Lover’s Complaint” to be the work of another poet, then the whole issue of Q’s “authorized” status becomes instantly null and void.)

Another awkward encumbrance to any conception of an authorized Q lay with its rather belated appearance. Why would Shakespeare wait until 1609 to publish what are generally regarded as much earlier compositions? A. L. Rowse, writing in 1973, thought he knew why: “The story that is revealed . . . is highly dramatic and that of a poet who was already beginning to be well known as a dramatist. That is why they were not published at the time. . . . They were too near the bone.”

Even before any general consensus treated Q as an authorized edition, there remained no shortage of apologists for this “delayed for fear of scandal” thesis. Indeed, the 1960s saw a new variation on an old theory as to the exact nature of the scandal—first advanced by Arthur Acheson in the early part of the century—gaining favor in certain quarters: that the publication itself was an act of spite from Southampton’s old tutor, John Florio, who helped himself to the manuscript and gave it to Thorpe to embarrass and humiliate Shakespeare.

But Duncan-Jones felt she had found an alternative explanation for the belated publication, and it was all because the plague had returned to London. This “prolonged plague outbreak . . . deprived Shakespeare of income from the theatre. He may [therefore] have finished work on [the] Sonnets during this period, before selling the manuscript to Thorpe.” As for the man who “brokered” this deal with Thorpe, why not fellow playwright Ben Jonson? According to Duncan-Jones, “If Shakespeare in 1608-9 wanted to raise some money by selling an unpublished literary manuscript, Jonson . . . would have been an obvious friend to consult on the matter. . . . It seems more than possible[!] that Shakespeare himself sold the copy to Jonson’s friend Thorpe entire, though without troubling himself to correct the normal crop of errors which appeared in Eld’s text.”

So, in one swell foop, Duncan-Jones aimed to account for the transmission of the manuscript from author to publisher, and at the same time dispense with a previously insurmountable logistical obstacle: Why is Thorpe’s edition riddled with errors if the author was party to its publication? What she failed to address was the sheer unlikelihood of Thorpe and Shakespeare being parties to a mutually beneficial financial transaction. As Charles Nicholl notes, in his engaging literary investigation, The Lodger (2007), “If Shakespeare was a man of substance, it was the substance of money and property. Shakespeare’s earnings were high—estimates vary wildly, but something around £250 a year is plausible.”

That kind of income would have made William a very wealthy man in Jacobean England. Thorpe, by contrast, couldn’t even afford his own printing press. He was, by his own admission, an “adventurer,” a common enough euphemism for “pirate.” The idea that Shakespeare—even if he had decided to publish these poems, irrespective of the wishes of a (former) patron—would have sold them to Thorpe verges on the fantastical.

All the evidence, i’ truth, when examined in an undistorted light, lines up against Duncan-Jones. Arthur Marotti, one of those who has challenged Duncan-Jones’s thesis, points out that Jacobethan “authors might sell texts for modest sums and/or for complimentary copies of their books, but they were more likely to benefit economically from dedicating their works to patrons and patronesses than from any direct payments from publishers for their texts.” As a matter of fact, when John Stow delivered his life’s work, The Survey of London, to the publisher John Wolfe, in 1598, he was paid the princely sum of £3, plus forty copies of the work (and for his Brief Chronicle, he was paid a third of that). An examination of Elizabethan translator Richard Robinson’s accounts shows that twelve of his books only produced about £40—a desultory sum when spread over some fifteen years. In addition, he was given twenty-five copies of some of his publications.

The notion that these sonnets had long ago been consigned to the author’s private locker has a great deal more to recommend it. The 1609 edition Thorpe published certainly shows precious few signs of a carefully marked-up manuscript, and there is plenty of (admittedly circumstantial) evidence to suggest that the book was either suppressed, or quietly sidelined. In fact, Thorpe’s career never recovered from the disaster that was Q, leaving him obliged to continue his piratical ways.

Admittedly, the text itself begets a clear contradiction between the avowedly private nature of the discourse and the repeated, unambiguous professions of the immortality the verses will confer on their subject. But it is a discrepancy we have already addressed. Assuming the poems will be published anonymously and/or posthumously, after a period of discreet circulation, is quite a different mindset from the one that would be required to publish them under one’s own name, during one’s own lifetime.

The Victorians certainly had no problem holding both ideas simultaneously. As Charles Armitage Brown states, in an 1838 essay, “That the poems were eventually intended for publication is certain, since they were to immortalize the ‘only begetter of them.’” And yet, he was still inclined to conclude, “The confused manner in which they were printed, rendering them wholly enigmatical for so long a period, exculpates the author from any share in the transaction.” A year earlier, Boaden doubted whether “the collection of Sonnets addressed to W.H. . . . were ever seen by any eye but his, to whom 126 of them were addressed,” further pointing out that “they are entirely personal, and never intended for the public view. . . . Nay, when at length they are ‘set forth,’ the person addressed by the writer is obscured, rather than revealed,” an interpretation seemingly at odds with Shakespeare’s internally expressed intent.

In modern times another “W.H.,” Auden, a preeminent poet himself, simply could not conceive of the sonnets having been written from the artistic remove generally required to create art. He used this to defend Shakespeare against the charge of allowing such wildly varying work to appear in his name, “For the inferior ones we have no right to condemn Shakespeare unless we are prepared to believe—a belief for which there is no evidence—that he prepared or intended them all to be published. . . . Wordsworth defined poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility. It seems highly unlikely that Shakespeare wrote many of these sonnets out of recollected emotion.”

Whereas Martin Seymour-Smith sees their private nature as an intrinsic aspect of their worth: “The Sonnets seem to have . . . been written from day to day and from week to week, without much thought, at any rate at the time they were written, of publication, [which perhaps explains why] the Sonnets are of a higher poetic value than Shakespeare’s two ambitious narrative poems; . . . because they were not written with the public in mind.” And yet, “there are few readings of the Sonnets that do not [at least] tacitly assume that Shakespeare’s prime intention was to create art.”

This distinction is not mere Whatifism. If Shakespeare had elected to publish poems of such a private nature, it would have been a monumental decision. As Duncan-Jones herself points out, “Where Jonson, through such a figure as Horace in The Poetaster, makes a clear definition of his artistic personality and ideals, Shakespeare nowhere asserts his presence in the plays, either as a writer or as a personality.” What I, for one, extrapolate from such an observation, and a close reading of the sonnets, is that a key characteristic of the great wordsmith was self-effacement. This was something William Hazlitt noticed as far back as 1826, when he observed how, in “some of Shakespear’s Sonnets . . . he appears to have stood more alone and to have thought less about himself than any living being.”

And one thing seems sure. The author of the sonnets cannot have ever imagined they would fit easily into the genre that inspired them. Simply put, “Autobiographical confessions were not the stuff of which the Elizabethan sonnet was made. The typical collection of Elizabethan sonnets was a mosaic of plagiarisms, a medley of imitative or assimilative studies” [SL]. Which perhaps explains why modern tastes find it so hard to equate Shakespeare’s sonnets with those of technically superior contemporaries.

Shakespeare himself was consciously adopting the “inferior,” quintessentially English, Surrey-inspired sonnet-mode—“the first twelve rhym[e] in staves of four lines by cross metre, and the last two rhyming together,” as defined by Sir Philip Sidney—rather than the more convoluted Petrarchan model, with which he would have been equally conversant. As one critic opined, “The only explanation seems to be that he considered the form evolved by Surrey and other English poets to have, on the whole, for English practise, the advantage.”⁵ But then, he was not trying to impress an audience with his literary dexterity. He was hoping to communicate with a directness and immediacy altogether lacking in those contemporaries.

All of this argues against a wealthy, semi-retired playwright opening his drawer for a second time, and letting Thorpe do what he wilt. As, indeed, doubtful Thomas did—however he came by the manuscript(s). Hence, E. K. Chambers’ uncharacteristically categorical statement, “The volume cannot have been ‘overseen,’ as Venus and Adonis and Lucrece may have been, by Shakespeare.”

It is an uncomfortable fact for advocates of an authorized Q, noted as early as Malone’s 1780 edition, that there are some fourteen instances in sonnets 26-70 where the printer has mistaken “their” for “thy” (said confusion doubtless arose from the common use of certain abbreviations at that time: “y^r” for “their” and “yⁱ” for “thy”). This does rather suggest a printer who reprinted what he saw in his “copy,” even when it made poor sense, and thus that there was no author on hand to consult, and that the printer-publisher had only the original scribal copy with which to work.

Three obvious and embarrassing errors—even for a Jacobean printer—also argue against an overseer with a vested interest in textual consistency. The last couplet of Q96 repeats that of Q36; while Q99 (“The forward violet thus did I chide”) has an additional line (probably line 5), perhaps transposed from another page in the printing process; and the phrase “my sinful earth” closes line 1 and opens line 2 of Q146 (“Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth”). Even though George Wyndham in 1898 went to great pains to demonstrate that the “use of italics, capitals, and punctuation [shows] evidence of design,” any such design was mangled by an uncomprehending compositor.

Actually, one suspects that the italics did originally serve an important purpose, and this purpose is occasionally apparent in Q (as in the italicizing of Will in sonnets 135, 136, and 143). But the printer either failed to consistently discern the meaning of markings in manuscript, or there were intrinsic textual inconsistencies he simply could not reconcile. Tucker Brooke’s supposition that words like “mighst” (57), “unstayined” (70), and “preuenst” (100) were the poet’s attempt to avoid “harsh clusters of consonants” likewise retains its appeal. As does Wyndham’s idea that “Rose,” when italicized, “stands . . . for the Idea or Eternal Type of Beauty.” But at every turn, Q obliges us to guess the author’s intent. Oh, the irony, that a minor publisher’s carelessness should culminate in more books on Q than the entire output of all his contemporaries.

Thorpe certainly failed to adopt the modus operandi of Bartholomew Yong, who in his address “to divers learned Gentlemen, and other . . . friendes” that precedes his translation of Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana (1598), asked the reader’s pardon for “the faults [that] escaped in the Printing, the copie being verie darke and enterlined, and I loth to write it out againe . . . [and] could not intende the correction.” This “wellwishing adventurer” saw little wrong with what he wrought. And, anyway, he had no one to whom he need answer.

The corollary of this is distasteful only if one’s primary intention is to do away with the textual difficulties that a “bookleg” edition of the English language’s most revered love-poems generates. And that has been the direction most academics have been moving in for the past half-century, more in love with the idea of an “authorial” text than in the historical reality. Thankfully, the occasional voice in the academic wilderness has cried wolf. Heather Dubrow, for example, asserts in her necessarily revisionist 1999 essay, “Incertainties Now Crown Themselves Assur’d”: “The 1609 edition represents not that dream of traditional textual editors, the author’s final intention, but rather a set of poems in various stages of composition. If this is so, the division between poems to one addressee and those to another is not likely to be perfect.”

To further compound the improbability of a middle-aged Shakespeare letting Thorpe publish “a set of poems in various stages of composition,” we are required to believe that this was because he had to hurry back to Stratford on pressing personal business. In fact, Shakespeare’s documented financial prudence makes Duncan-Jones’s explanation for his departure from London rather unlikely. The matter that required his personal attendance was the recovery of a debt totalling six pounds, with twenty-four shillings interest attached, from one John Addenbrooke, the hearing for which was convened at the Stratford Court of Record on June 7, 1609.

Not only was the sum a trivial one for a man whose annual income was forty or fifty times that, but the judgment in the playwright’s favor in no way resolved the matter, or resulted in the recovery of the debt (the case had already been dragging on since the previous August). Addenbrooke simply failed to appear, and the court finally instructed his surety, a local blacksmith, to show cause why he should not pay. Samuel Schoenbaum ruefully notes, in his William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, “Whether Shakespeare ever collected is not recorded.”

So Shakespeare had traveled 100 miles to his country home, at a time when this was a two-day journey, to recoup a debt he would have had some expectation would end up unpaid whatever the judgment of the Court of Record. And, as a result, he “knowingly” allowed his first published collection of poetry in fifteen years to appear riddled with typos, and with a dedication more obtuse than any part of The Phoenix the Turtle?

And yet, precious few have dared vouchsafe the suggestion of W. L. Phelps, in a 1939 article in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, that the appearance of Q was the real reason why the dramatist left town, it having “caused Shakespeare to leave London and to retire to the seclusion of Stratford,” at least temporarily, while the hubbub died down, à la James VI leaving Edinburgh after the murder of the Earl of Moray. Though permanent retirement was still a couple of years away, the timeline fits such a premise rather well.

Registered on May 20, the Sonnets probably appeared in early June (though the so-called receipt for a copy purchased by Edward Alleyn on June 19 is almost certainly another Payne-Collier forgery). If Shakespeare’s reaction has gone wholly undocumented, that unabashed homosexual poet, W. H. Auden, expressed very little doubt as to what it would have been:

It is impossible to believe either that Shakespeare wished them to be published or that he can have shown most of them to the young man and woman, whoever they were, to whom they are addressed. Suppose you had written Sonnet 57, “Being your slave, what should I do but tend / Upon the hours and times of your desire?” Can you imagine showing it to the person you were thinking of! . . . Of one thing I am certain: Shakespeare must have been horrified when they were published. . . . The poets of the period, like Marlowe and Barnfield, whom we know to have been homosexual, were very careful not to express their feelings in the first person, but in terms of classical mythology.

Though the above statement probably says more about Auden than it does about Shakespeare. Yet there is no getting away from the fact that no Jacobethan—even Barnfield—wrote sonnets of such ardent desire to a man. And, as Seymour-Smith points out in his edition, “It is unlikely that Shakespeare would have failed to remember that one of the charges outstanding against Marlowe at the time of his murder had been that he was alleged to have said, ‘All thei that love not tobacco and boyes are fooles.’”

That the state took such matters seriously is indicated by the fact that, in 1533, “buggery,” which to date had only been an ecclesiastical crime, was made a felony punishable by death, and though that statute was repealed by Edward VI, it was reenacted in 1562. Nor would the king’s own infatuations have saved Shakespeare from a visit to the Privy Council. There was one rule for king and court, another for commoners—as would be the case even after the Restoration, when the Earl of Rochester could boast in rhyme, “There’s a sweet, soft page of mine / Does the trick worth forty wenches.”

Assuming that the emotions pouring off the pages of Q were now as embers to the older, wiser man, any reminder the appearance of these poems provided must have been painful; as must the shabby way they had been collected and printed, a sick shadow of what the poet probably once intended. But that self-effacing streak still probably propelled the playwright to run and hide, not challenge and confront. After all, he had a long-established pattern of “uncomplainingly submitt[ing] to the wholesale piracies of his plays and the ascription to him of books by other hands” [SL].

And it must have been especially galling to find he was obliged to share this edition of the Sonnets with a wordy narrative poem by one of those “alien pen[s]” of which he complained in Q78. And yet he made no documented public complaint—unlike three years later, when he found himself in a similar situation, having the work of a.n.other attributed to him. In that case, a quiet word with the publisher, our friend William Jaggard, probably through a third party, sufficed to have the title page of a revised edition of The Passionate Pilgrim canceled and a new one, no longer bearing the dramatist’s name, substituted in its place (further demonstrating that self-effacing streak).

We are obliged to a caustic aside from the fellow dramatist whose work had been attributed to Shakespeare for evidence of the playwright’s annoyance. That peeved polemicist was Shakespeare’s acquaintance Thomas Heywood. And it was in his Apologie for Actors (1613) that he reported, “The Author [i.e., Shakespeare] I know [was] much offended with M. Jaggard (that altogether unknowne to him) presumed to make so bold with his name.” What inspired William’s ire was the inclusion of poems from Heywood’s own Troia Britanica, originally published in 1608, in a third edition of The Passionate Pilgrim. As Rollins relates, “A reader who did not know the exact details of the situation might conclude that [Heywood] had plagiarized these poems from Shakespeare and that Shakespeare to expose his dishonesty was printing them under his own name.”

The annoyance of the “much offended” Shakespeare may have stemmed in part from the fact that this dubious collection, from another century, had returned to vex him. Or it could be that he felt the charge of plagiarism, whether directed at him or Heywood, was not one he could let stand unchallenged. It was, after all, an accusation that had stained him before.⁶ Of course, there could be other explanations—none quite as original as Duncan-Jones’s: “Jaggard’s 1612 piracy was all the more brazen in its audacity because, as Heywood said, ‘he [Shakespeare] since, to do himself right, hath published them in his own name.’ That is, in 1609 Shakespeare had assumed control of his own text of his Sonnets, by selling the collection to Thorpe.”

Yet again, the audacity of the lady takes my breath away. By carefully excising a choice phrase from its context, Duncan-Jones has transformed a hypothetical statement from Heywood—i.e., that the appearance of his own poems under Shakespeare’s name in the 1612 work “may put the world in opinion I might steale them from him; and hee to doe himselfe right, hath since published them in his owne name”—into an altogether different complaint. The poems that “hath [been] published . . . in his own name” no longer apply to Heywood. They have been transmuted into a reference to the 152 Shakespearean sonnets that do not appear in The Passionate Pilgrim. Such an interpretation would qualify as arch-revisionism even if Duncan-Jones had also provided readers of her influential Arden edition with the generally accepted interpretation of Heywood’s barb.

Heywood responded to this act in the only way he knew how. He had no comeback legally, because Jaggard owned the Troia Britanica poems outright, having published them back in 1608 (with Heywood’s blessing). Likewise, the original edition of The Passionate Pilgrim had been published twice thirteen years earlier, explicitly attributed to Shakespeare.

The chances of getting the Stationers’ Company to suppress a book of poetry (even one that was never registered, like The Passionate Pilgrim ) on any grounds save prurience or the ruffling of religious or political sensitivities was small. Shakespeare, the hapless author on the receiving end of more bookleg quartos than any other Jacobethan, undoubtedly knew this. Which makes the suggestion proposed by John Kerrigan, “that Thorpe diverted copies [of Q through two booksellers] to avoid the suppression of his volume by Shakespeare,” a most uncharacteristic misunderstanding of the nature of Jacobethan publishing.

Yet, at the time of Q’s appearance, there were still a couple of options available to Shakespeare, if he wanted to put pressure on Thorpe. Unfortunately, they would have required him to draw attention to the Sonnets at a time in his life when he probably no longer held them, or the feelings that originally kindled them, in high regard. There were two recent precedents for the recalling of unauthorized works, both of which, in all likelihood, he personally knew about. The first of these concerned Spenser’s Complaints, registered by William Ponsonby on December 29, 1590. It contained a classically Elizabethan publisher’s preface:

Gentle Reader, SINCE my late setting foorth of the Faerie Queene, finding that it hath found a fauourable passage amongst you; I haue sithence endeuoured by all good meanes (for the better encrease and accomplishment of your delights,) to get into my handes such smale Poemes of the same Authors; as I heard were disperst abroad in sundrie hands, and not easie to bee come by, by himselfe; some of them hauing bene diuerslie imbeziled and purloyned from him, since his departure ouer Sea. Of the which I haue by good meanes gathered togethaer these fewe parcels present.

All protestations to the contrary, Ponsonby is here brazenly proclaiming his act of piracy—and not expecting any comeback. And yet, according to Woudhuysen, “By the next year there is evidence that [all] the unsold copies [of Complaints] were called in by the authorities.” However, unlike Thorpe’s act of piracy, Ponsonby’s had its own reward. Even with the attempted suppression, a large number of copies of his edition survived.

Altogether more pertinent to the history of Q is the successful suppression of the first quarto of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil Stella. Like Ponsonby, who had himself registered Sidney’s New Arcadia a couple of years earlier, the publisher of Sidney’s sonnet-sequence, Thomas Newman, claimed due diligence for his edition, asserting that he had “beene very carefull in the Printing” of the poems from manuscript, “and whereas being spred abroade in written Coppies, it had gathered much corruption by ill Writers: I have used their helpe and advice in correcting & restoring it to his first dignitie, that I knowe were of skill and experience in those matters.” (He then added assorted sonnets from other authors after Sidney’s sequence, which is hardly the act of a concerned publisher.)

Nonetheless, sometime in September 1591 the Stationers’ Company took action against Newman, demanding that he bring his books to Stationers’ Hall, and consulting Lord Burghley about the matter, even though he was “on progress” with the queen. Something about Newman’s publication had led to its “takinge in,” and though the Stationers’ Register gives no indication of why such action was undertaken or who initiated it, it was surely at the instigation of Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke. The nature of Newman’s crime is unclear, but “may have involved compromising the honour of the Sidneys by publishing Sir Philip’s adulterous poems, or by associating him with dubious characters; [or] it may simply have been to steal the thunder from the Countess of Pembroke’s plans” [HRW] to publish her own edition.

Whatever the case, when a new edition, prepared from a more accurate text, appeared, albeit still under the auspices of Newman, the incursions of “alien pen[s]” had been removed. At the same time, one of those “alien pen[s],” Samuel Daniel, set about publishing heavily revised versions of twenty-four sonnets that Newman had incorporated into the original edition of Astrophil Stella as part of his own sonnet-sequence, the delightful Delia. Dedicating the edition to the Countess of Pembroke, he insisted that he had previously been “betraide by the indiscretion of a greedie Printer.”

Given his undoubted knowledge of (and debt to) Sidney’s Astrophil Stella sonnet-sequence, it seems unlikely that the Stratford dramatist would not have known something of its publishing history. And one of two options would probably have been available to the King’s Man: to ask for any unsold copies to be impounded, pursuant to an approved edition appearing; or, to take the more contentious route, to simply publish the sonnet-sequence as he had originally intended, in a rival edition, just as “good” quartos of Hamlet and Romeo Juliet had succeeded “bad” ones. The fact that Shakespeare adopted neither course rather suggests that the last thing he wanted was for his own sonnet-sequence(s) to become another cause célèbre, à la Astrophil Stella.

Thorpe had probably already calculated that he had little to fear from the author of the Sonnets. But there remains the contentious issue of what feelings the unexpected publication of these once-private poems might have induced in the Fair Youth with “beauty, birth, wealth and wit,” now that he was no longer so “fresh” or “green.” If the Fair Youth was in fact Southampton, there was very little—save scuttlebutt—to connect the earl, now released from prison and restored to favor, with these sonnets. He may therefore have been content to let the matter lie.

However, if Pembroke was the “W.H.” to whom these poems were directed—and dedicated—then Thorpe would never have knowingly “dared the hazard of offending the most powerful nobleman at court” [CAB]. Even if William Archer’s investigation into Pembroke’s character left him convinced that the earl, “never a man of scrupulous morals, may have been privately far from ashamed of the episode, and [was] willing enough to permit a dedication to which only the initiated had the key,” the powerful peer would have surely responded to a request from the poet to put the screws on the upstart publisher. As we know, he “prosequuted . . . their Authour living with so much favour.”

The scraps of evidence that exist favor the thesis that Thorpe knew nothing of his dedicatory faux pas. For one, there is quite a contrast between the Q dedication and one published the following year, where Thorpe sought Pembroke’s favor as the “poore delegate” of John Healey, now in Virginia. Healey’s translation of Civitas Dei was dedicated on his behalf by Thorpe to “the Honorablest Patron of Muses and Good Mindes, Lord William Earle of Pembroke” (this dedication could predate Q, given that the book was registered as far back as 1608).

Neither dedication brought Thorpe any favor, and when he published a new English edition of the Manuall of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, translated into English by the same John Healey, later in 1610, he dedicated it to the more susceptible John Florio, despite Healey’s expressed wish that his “translations . . . might only bee addressed” to William, Earl of Pembroke. This rather suggests that Thorpe felt he had nothing to gain from (further) courting the earl.

Possible further “evidence” that Thorpe was not “in on the joke” has been deduced from two subsequent dedications by bit-players in our little drama. In 1613, the poet George Wither seemingly parodied Thorpe’s Q dedication—with, “To himself, G.W. wisheth all happiness”—in his preface to Abuses Stript and Whipt. Though it is likely he was simply sending up a general convention, not Thorpe specifically, it is possible that the satirist—a friend of John Davies of Hereford—was responding to that earlier, cryptic dedication in a knowing way. Wither somehow managed to annoy somebody grand with the book in question, being incarcerated in the Marshalsea in Southwark for his pains.

No direct connection, however, ties George Wither to either Shakespeare or Thorpe. But if anyone in London, save the personalities themselves, would have known of a hidden history behind those initials, it would have been Ben Jonson, the one known friend of Shakespeare already published by Thorpe. And in the 1616 edition to Epigrammes—published as part of his own first folio—Jonson apparently decided to share a private joke with the playwrights’ patron, dedicating the work to “William, Earle of Pembroke” in almost Thorpean terms:

MY LORD. While you cannot change your merit, I dare not change your title: It was that made it, and not I. Under which name, I here offer to your Lo[rd]: the ripest of my studies, my Epigrammes; which though they carry danger in the sound, doe not therefore seeke your shelter: For, when I made them, I had nothing in my conscience of which I did need a cypher.

The Jacobethans certainly did love their in-jokes, though I wouldn’t necessarily agree with Gerald Massey’s claim in 1872 that Jonson’s epigram “tells us plainly enough that the Earl’s title had been changed in some previous dedication.” But his reference to “nothing in my conscience of which I did need a cypher” appears designed to counterpoint some previous work which had need of a cypher.

In the same year, coinciding with Shakespeare’s passing, Thorpe finally decided to give Healey his wish, dedicating the second edition of his translation of Epictetus’ Manuall to Pembroke, using the most obsequious language at his command. But by then his career as a publisher was nearing its end, and it is unlikely that Pembroke, who was now Lord Chamberlain, took the slightest notice of Thorpe’s belated pleading. Or that he greatly cared to know that Thorpe’s troubles had begun when he had published the sonnets of a former favorite.

My supposition that the publication of the Sonnets predicated the collapse of Thorpe’s publishing dreams seems borne out by everything we know concerning his business before and after its fateful registration. Lee’s account of the publisher, in his 1905 facsimile edition of Q, records that Thorpe finally managed to occupy a shop of his own in 1608, a fact given due prominence on the title pages of all three publications he issued in that year, “but his other undertakings were described on their title-pages as printed for him by one stationer and sold for him by another; and when any address found mention at all, it was the shop-keeper’s address, and not his own.” Well, by the time the Sonnets appeared, he had already been obliged to give up the shop in St. Paul’s Churchyard.

Thorpe also seems to have chosen to give up at least one publication he’d previously planned in order to devote himself to the popular playwright’s “lost” poems, assuming, as seems likely, that he acquired the manuscript(s) around January 1609. It was on the 18th of that month that he had entered at Stationers’ Hall A Discovery of a New Worlde, a translation by “an English Mercurye” of Joseph Hall’s satirical treatise Mundus alter et idem. However, before the book could appear, the copyright was transferred to his old friend Edward Blount, who issued it later that year in collaboration with William Barrett.

Nor was this the only copyright Thorpe was obliged to surrender—for what one must assume were financial reasons—in those pivotal years 1609-10. If, as Duncan-Jones would like us to believe, it was Jonson’s association with Thorpe that gave Shakespeare the impetus to enter into a transaction for his own “sugred sonnets,” then it was almost the last time Jonson did anything to help Thorpe’s business. Less than a year after the publication of the Sonnets, Thorpe transferred his rights in Jonson’s Sejanus and Volpone to a former fellow-apprentice, Walter Burre; and as Leona Rostenberg has observed, “With this transfer of copyright, Thorpe’s association with Jonson was concluded.”

Such a transference hardly comes across as the transaction of a shrewd businessman. Rather, it suggests pecuniary pressures had begun to bite. The two plays in question were just about the only potentially valuable copyrights Thorpe now held. Perhaps he simply had no option—he needed money. Or maybe Jonson, unhappy at the unwarranted publication of his friend’s private poems, wanted nothing more to do with the piratical publisher. A leap, I know. But it seems clear that Thorpe fell on hard times on or around the time he published Q. To start with, it was the only publication he registered that year (excepting the Healey translation that he “gave” to Blount to publish)—and however much he had paid for the manuscript(s), this kind of thin quarto was hardly a costly production.

Matters had not greatly improved by the following year, when he dedicated the Manuall of Epictetus to John Florio in terms that suggested he was hoping for a handout. He calls himself “your poor friend,” and compares himself to “distressed Sostratus,” while alluding to Florio as “more fortunate Areius.” Having recently become a groom of Queen Anne’s privy chamber, Florio now enjoyed an annual salary of a hundred pounds, whereas Thorpe was struggling to raise enough money to publish Healey’s monumental translation of Civitas Dei (registered in May 1608—to Eld, not Thorpe—it did not appear until 1610).

Meanwhile, the Sonnets proved to be neither the kind of “bestseller” Thorpe had been hoping for, nor a copyright that would come in handy in his old age. Which brings us back, neatly I trust, to the highly charged issue of whether the Sonnets were in fact suppressed. Many have thought so—though, according to Duncan-Jones, “There is no evidence whatsoever of suppression.”

By which, she presumably means there is no direct evidence. There is more than enough circumstantial evidence to mount a solid case, the salient features of which J. M. Robertson summarized back in 1926, “[Q] is now a very rare book; yet the natural presumption would be that in 1609, at the height of Shakespeare’s contemporary fame, it would have found a considerable sale if it were not interfered with; and that a second edition would have followed in a few years. . . . There is fair ground for a presumption that . . . [Q] was stopped, whether through the intervention of Shakespeare or another.”

Duncan-Jones has suggested that thirteen is actually quite a large number of copies to survive the centuries, given the relatively flimsy nature of seventeenth-century quartos. But I would counter that thirteen is statistically too small a number to draw any inference with confidence. If the number of copies in any way equated with the number of contemporary references to Q, or manuscript transcriptions of poems therein, she’d have a stronger case. It does not. And is it really so hard to imagine that there were a dozen or so Jacobeans who recognized the genius of this uniquely English sonneteer and, knowing of the book’s scarcity, treasured their precious quarto enough to bind it well and preserve it?

No reasonable person could fail to be struck by the contrast between the continuing popularity of Shakespeare’s two narrative poems and the disappearing act that is the 1609 Sonnets. Just three decades on, the second publisher of the sonnets couldn’t even find a copy of Q to cross-reference with his text (see next chapter). And that invisibility manifests itself most pertinently in the total lack of contemporary references to the collection, compounded by an equal absence of its contents in Caroline commonplace books or manuscripts—even though, as was shown in Chapter 2, at least one sonnet in the collection had begun to circulate widely from a manuscript source.

The manuscript culture lent itself to this kind of indirect fame. John Donne’s “poems circulated extraordinarily widely in manuscript during his lifetime, principally in the 1620s” [HRW]. In fact, some seventy-three contemporary manuscript-miscellanies containing Donne’s poems have survived, a marked contrast to the dearth of Shakespearean sonnets so anthologized.

But the most salient point Robertson made back in 1926 was that the sonnets secured “no second edition.” From this Seymour-Smith drew the obvious conclusion: “It is significant that Thorpe, who did not entirely cease publishing activities until 1624, never reissued [the Sonnets]. Why not, unless the edition had been bought up, withdrawn or otherwise suppressed?” Certainly, by the time Thorpe got around to republishing the one other book he issued in the same twelve-month period, the Manuall, in 1616, he had all but stopped publishing new books, though he remained a member of the Stationers’ Company a while longer.

Unfortunately for Thorpe, whatever the status of the original edition of Q, the days when Shakespeare’s foul papers were “fair game” apparently died with the playwright. When that old rogue Jaggard, in cahoots with fellow stationer Thomas Pavier, decided to issue quarto editions of at least four Shakespeare plays and one pseudo-Shakespearean offering (Sir John Oldcastle), in or around 1619, he found that the King’s Men had a powerful new ally whom they could call upon to stop the pair in their tracks. (Some time in 1618-19, Pavier issued new quartos of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Pericles, The Yorkshire Tragedy, and Henry VI Part 2 and Part 3, and, in partnership with Jaggard, fresh editions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Sir John Oldcastle, and King Lear.)

The actors and/or their agents persuaded the Lord Chamberlain to send a letter to the Stationers’ Company in May 1619 saying that none of the plays belonging to them could be printed without their express permission. Such a “request” was quite unprecedented. But the Lord Chamberlain’s powers over what could and could not be published were as great as those he enjoyed when regulating the theater. And since 1615, the Lord Chamberlain’s office had been occupied by William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whom Heminge and Condell would thank, four years later, for having “prosequuted both [the plays], and their Authour living, with so much favour.”

Evidently, Heminge and Condell had already begun to assemble the First Folio of their late friend’s plays when Jaggard and Pavier began to queer the pitch. This time the pirate-publisher was suppressed, though Jaggard did not go quietly. Canceling title pages was a favorite ruse of the man, and soon enough these piratical quartos had reappeared bearing a series of new “publication dates”—either 1600 or 1608. The only way to stop him from continuing to run interference with their ambitious project may have been to let him join the syndicate. Jaggard, that pirate extraordinaire, thus ended up being the chief (of two) printers who, along with two respected booksellers, William Aspley and John Smethwick, produced the most important volume in English literature. The other printer was Edward Blount. Small world.

Because the Chamberlain’s office was scrupulous about their paperwork, we know all about the Lord Chamberlain’s May 1619 letter. But if the same individual, or someone of equal stature, directly or indirectly made it clear to Thorpe privately back in 1609 that there would be no second edition of Q, and that he would be strongly advised to let Shakespeare’s Sonnets disappear quietly, it is unlikely it would have crossed Thorpe’s mind to argue, even if it meant financial ruin. There would, of course, be no public record of any such “agreement.” The object of such a (wholly hypothetical) exercise could only have been to avoid a scandal. After all, several sonnets of Shakespeare’s had been in print by then for more than a decade, without upsetting the cart; and piracy of his work had long been a fact of life.

The most compelling evidence for such a covert suppression of the Sonnets is the conspicuous “failure” of Thorpe to sell the copyright to a fellow publisher, even after the First Folio appeared in 1623, or after Pembroke’s death in 1625. It was his property. And as late as November 1624, he assigned, in tandem with Edward Blount, “all their estat and interest in a booke called Hero and Leander begun by Christopher Marlowe and finished by George Chapman” to the London stationer, Samuel Vicars. And this wasn’t even a book Thorpe had personally published.

In fact, there was a former business associate to whom, one would assume, the copyright to the Sonnets would have held instant appeal. Back in 1609, William Aspley had been one of two booksellers who received printed editions of Q. Since then, Aspley had become a junior partner in the publication of the First Folio (thanks to the copyright he held in two of its plays); had acquired the copyright on the still-lucrative Venus Adonis (presumably at quite a cost); and had become an equal partner in the 1632 publication of the Second Folio. By the time of his death, in 1640, he was the master of the Stationers’ Company.

Given his increasing involvement in the company’s affairs, Aspley must have known all about Thorpe’s increasingly dire straits (and probably of his death, sometime after 1635). So why would he not have made Thorpe an offer he couldn’t refuse, unless he had already had his fingers burned, and/or there was an aura to this particular volume from which he was keen to dissociate himself?

Subsequent to Q’s appearance, a chastened Thorpe learned to be more discreet, or at least less brazen, when attempting to publish any of his more dubious ventures—something he continued to do. When he published a translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia by Sir Arthur Gorges in 1612, he was remarkably coy about how he had procured his “copy.” This time, when he concocted a preface, he did so in the name of Gorges’s son, Carew, who had apparently stumbled on the poem “in my father’s study, amongst many other of his Manuscripts.” Carew was ten at the time.

Likewise, when Thorpe attributed a third-rate poetic eulogy for a murdered Devon landowner to a certain “W.S.” the very same year, he refrained from even putting his initials, T.T., to the production (as he had with the Sonnets, almost the only instance when drafting his own dedication that he did not put an abbreviated version of his full name—Tho. Thorpe). The title page of “A funerall Elegye in memory of the late virtuous master WILLIAM PEETER of Whipton neere Exetour” merely named the printer, his old partner-in-piracy George Eld. There seems little doubt that he and/or Eld hoped to convince some potential purchasers that “W.S.” was a rather well-known dramatist.⁷

One doubts, though, that in even his most fevered dreams, Thorpe imagined that this formulaic tripe would, 380 years later, be added to the “official” Shakespeare canon on the say-so of a single Shakespearean scholar. And if that was not ironic enough for him, that his anonymous publication of this dirge would be used as evidence of his own publishing credentials, and of a connection between the dead man and the London-based playwright that never existed.

Just as one assumes that when Thorpe was lying in his bed in the room he had been provided with in the hospital of Ewelme, Oxfordshire, in the last few years of his long life, he finally accepted that he had never been cut out to be a publisher. By the time he arrived at Ewelme in December 1635, a broke(n) man, it had been twelve years since he had last paid his Stationers’ dues. In that time, he may well have noticed how Shakespeare’s standing had only continued to grow. In 1632 there had even been the Second Folio, which added more than its fair share of errors to the slowly formalizing official canon. In the next three years, two more plays attributed to the late bard (this time with justification), Pericles and The Noble Kinsman, appeared in quarto form. But the Sonnets seemed destined to remain Shakespeare’s greatest secret, a fact that probably brought a rueful smile to the old man, in his comfortable alms-room. If only he had known.