very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not have ventured to have inserted; that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to.’
Shakespeare's description of the rival poet, ‘of tall building and goodly pride,’ and the references to ‘the proud full sail of his great verse,’ would (it is commonly suggested) apply to George Chapman, George Chapman.and allusions have been detected in Sonnets lxxxii. and lxxxvi. to Chapman's devotion to Homer, and to phraseology employed by Chapman in his ‘Shadow of Night,’ 1594 (cf. Minto, Characteristics, p. 291; Leopold Shakspere, ed. Furnivall, lxv.). But Chapman was only one among many of the protégés of Southampton, and another of them, Barnabe Barnes, has claims to be considered ‘the rival poet’ of the ‘Sonnets.’ Southampton married in 1598, against the queen's wish, Elizabeth, daughter of John Vernon, a lady of the court, but there is no ground for identifying her with the conventional lady of the ‘Sonnets’ (cf. Gerald Massey, Secret Drama of Shakespeare's Sonnets, 1888).
Other theories of identification rest on wholly erroneous premisses. Shakespeare undoubtedly plays more than once on his own Christian name, Baseless theories.Will (cxxxv.–vi., cxliii.); but there is nothing in the wording of these punning passages to warrant the assumption that his friend bore the same appellation (this misinterpretation is attributable to the misprinting in the early editions of the second ‘will’ as ‘Will’ in cxxxv. l. 1). No more importance can be attached to the fantastic suggestion that the line describing the youth as
A man in hue all hues in his controlling
(xx. 7), and other applications of the word ‘hue,’ imply that his surname was Hughes. There is no other pretence of argument for the conclusion that the friend's name was William Hughes. No known contemporary of the name answers either in age or position in life the requirements of the problem (Notes and Queries, 5th ser. v. 443).
Thomas Thorpe's position.
A third theory has received wide acceptance. When the sonnets were published in 1609 they appeared with the following dedication: ‘To. the. onlie. begetter. of. | these. insving. sonnets. | Mr. W. H. all. happinesse. | and. that. eternitie. | promised. | by. | ovr. ever-liuing. poet. | wisheth. | the. well-wishing. | adventvrer. in. | setting. | forth. | T. T.’ T. T. are the initials of Thomas Thorpe, who procured the manuscript for publication. He belonged to a class of men well known at the time in the book trade who neither printed books nor sold them, but procured manuscripts how they could, and, in the absence of any copyright law, the means they employed were not keenly scanned. Having procured the manuscript, they commissioned others to print and sell the book, and in the case of Shakespeare's ‘Sonnets’ Thorpe commissioned George Eld to print them, and the function of distribution he divided between John Wright and William Aspley. Some title-pages give Wright's name as the seller, others give Aspley's. Thorpe stood in no need of Shakespeare's assent before publishing his ‘Sonnets,’ and there is no ground for supposing that it was given or even invited. The volume's tradesmanlike entry as ‘Shakespeare's Sonnets,’ not only in the ‘Stationers' Register’ but also on the title-page, practically confers on the speculator in the manuscript—‘the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth’—sole responsibility for the enterprise.
As proprietor of the ‘copy’ Thorpe was entitled to supply the dedication. In 1600 he dedicated Marlowe's edition of ‘Lucan,’ the manuscript of which he had somehow acquired, to a friend in the trade, Edward Blount [q. v.] Oblivious of Thorpe's position, writers on Shakespeare have assumed that he was in Shakespeare's confidence, that Shakespeare inspired or even wrote the ‘Mr. W. H.’dedication, and that the Mr. W. H. in Thorpe's inscription concealed the initials of the Sonnets' youthful hero. The perplexing phrase ‘the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets,’ with the words that follow, was doubtless a high-flown compliment which in a dedication cannot be taken literally. No single person begot the sonnets in the sense of inspiring them; at least two persons, the youth and the dark lady, were in an equal degree sources of the poet's inspiration. ‘Beget’ was often used in the sense of ‘get’ or ‘procure’ (cf. ‘beget … the reversion,’ Dekker, Satiromastix, 1602; ‘acquire and beget a temperance,’ Hamlet, iii. sc. 2; see Murray, New English Dict.) It is therefore probable that the object of the dedication was some friend of Thorpe through whose good offices the manuscript of the poems had reached his hands.
But since 1832, when James Boaden first propounded the theory in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine,’ Mr. W. H. has not only been regarded as the friend commemorated in the ‘Sonnets,’ but he has been confidently identified with William Herbert, third earl of
