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By Root 20351 0

interpreted as applied to a literary work, means father, author, producer, and it cannot be seriously urged that Thorpe intended to describe ‘Mr. W. H.’ as the author of the ‘Sonnets.’ ‘Begetter’ has been used in the figurative sense of inspirer, and it is often assumed that by ‘onlie begetter’ Thorpe meant ‘sole inspirer,’ and that by the use of those words he intended to hint at the close relations subsisting between ‘W. H.’ and Shakespeare in the dramatist’s early life; but that interpretation presents numberless difficulties. It was contrary to Thorpe’s aims in business to invest a dedication with any cryptic significance, and thus mystify his customers. Moreover, his career and the circumstances under which he became the publisher of the sonnets confute the assumption that he was in such relations with Shakespeare or with Shakespeare’s associates as would give him any knowledge of Shakespeare’s early career that was not public property. All that Thorpe—the struggling pirate-publisher, ‘the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth’ wares mysteriously come by—knew or probably cared to know of Shakespeare was that he was the most popular and honoured of the literary producers of the day. When Thorpe had the luck to acquire surreptitiously an unprinted manuscript by ‘our ever-living poet,’ it was not in the great man’s circle of friends or patrons, to which hitherto he had had no access, that he was likely to seek his own patron. Elementary considerations of prudence impelled him to publish his treasure-trove with all expedition, and not disclose his design prematurely to one who might possibly take steps to hinder its fulfilment. But that Thorpe had no ‘inspirer’ of the ‘Sonnets’ in his mind when he addressed himself to ‘Mr. W. H.’ is finally proved by the circumstance that the only identifiable male ‘inspirer’ of the poems was the Earl of Southampton, to whom the initials ‘W. H.’ do not apply.

Of the figurative meanings set in Elizabethan English on the word ‘begetter,’ that of ‘inspirer’ is by no means the only one or the most common. ‘Beget’ was not infrequently employed in the attenuated sense of ‘get,’ ‘procure,’ or ‘obtain,’ a sense which is easily deducible from the original one of ‘bring into being.’ Hamlet, when addressing the players, bids them ‘in the very whirlwind of passion acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.’ ‘I have some cousins german at Court,’ wrote Dekker in 1602, in his ‘Satiro-Mastix,’ ‘[that] shall beget you the reversion of the Master of the King’s Revels.’ ‘Mr. W. H.,’ whom Thorpe described as ‘the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets,’ was in all probability the acquirer or procurer of the manuscript, who, figuratively speaking, brought the book into being either by first placing the manuscript in Thorpe’s hands or by pointing out the means by which a copy might be acquired. To assign such significance to the word ‘begetter’ was entirely in Thorpe’s vein. Thorpe described his rôle in the piratical enterprise of the ‘Sonnets’ as that of ‘the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth,’ i.e. the hopeful speculator in the scheme. ‘Mr. W. H.’ doubtless played the almost equally important part—one as well known then as now in commercial operations—of the ‘vendor’ of the property to be exploited.

VI.—‘MR. WILLIAM HERBERT.’

Origin of the notion that ‘Mr. W. H.’ stands for ‘Mr. William Herbert.’

For fully sixty years it has been very generally assumed that Shakespeare addressed the bulk of his sonnets to the young Earl of Pembroke. This theory owes its origin to a speciously lucky guess which was first disclosed to the public in 1832, and won for a time almost universal acceptance. Thorpe’s form of address was held to justify the mistaken inference that, whoever ‘Mr. W. H.’ may have been, he and no other was the hero of the alleged story of the poems; and the cornerstone of the Pembroke theory was the assumption that the letters ‘Mr. W. H.’ in the dedication did duty for the words ‘Mr. William Herbert,’ by which name the (third) Earl of Pembroke was represented as having been