The Quarto Edition of 1609 and its Dedication

LISTEN TO THE SONNETCAST
SPECIAL EPISODE ON
THE QUARTO EDITION OF 1609
AND ITS DEDICATION

[INTRODUCTION]​

Frequently in this podcast we refer to 'the 1609 Quarto', or to 'The Quarto Edition', and so as we approach the end of our  exploration of William Shakespeare's Sonnets together, it is only right and proper that we take a closer look now at this, our original source for these poems.

On the 20th of May 1609, a publisher and stationer named Thomas Thorpe went to the Stationer's Hall near St Paul's Cathedral, where the Worshipful Company of Stationers of London kept the Stationer's Register and “Entred for his copie under the handes of master Wilson and master Lownes Wardenes, A booke called Shakespeares sonnettes.” 

The actual title, as printed on the book's first page reads:

​SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS.
Neuer before Imprinted.

​And is followed with:

​AT LONDON
By G. Eld for T. T. and are
to be solde by Iohn Wright, dwelling
at Christ Church gate.
1609.

Whereby some copies give as the bookseller William Aspley without mentioning his location. His two shops, too, though were based at St Paul's Cathedral. 

From this we also have Thomas Thorpe (T. T.) confirmed as the publisher and George Eld as the printer.

This is as much as we know for certain, because these are the verifiable facts.

We don't know how many copies of the Sonnets were printed in this original edition, but a standard print run for a book of this nature could have seen anything from about 500 to maybe 1250 copies. A plausible estimate, considering Shakespeare's standing as a playwright and poet by that time, suggests that likely in the region of one thousand copies were printed. No reprints of this edition were made, and today 13 copies of the Quarto are known to survive, all of which are kept in established institution libraries.

From here on in, nothing is absolutely certain any longer, but not everything is entirely up for grabs either.


[THE QUALITY OF THE QUARTO'S TEXT AND ITS ISSUES]

The Quarto is a 'good' item of bibliographical evidence where its textual integrity and typesetting are concerned. This cannot be taken for granted as it is not necessarily and not always the case. Several of Shakespeare's plays were published during his lifetime as quartos and by no means all of them are 'good': some are clearly from manuscripts that have been cobbled together or pirated, and even the First Folio, which was produced with great respect and care after Shakespeare's death, contains many errors.

The Quarto of the Sonnets by comparison and by contrast is of an almost exceptionally high standard. Setting aside some spelling inconsistencies and idiosyncratic punctuation, both of which were entirely common at the time, the edition of 1609 contains few actual cruxes or textual issues. 

The most serious one appears in Sonnet 146, where part of the first line is repeated in the second line in a way that upsets the meter and makes no sense:

Poore soule the center of my sinfull earth,
My sinfull earth these rebell powres that thee array;

"My sinful earth" in the second line is clearly an error, but since we don't have the manuscript or any other version of the sonnet, we don't know what Shakespeare wanted to say there, and so editors have to make their own decisions, which is something we also do and discuss, of course, in our episode on Sonnet 146.

The famous and much loved Sonnet 116 Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds finds itself in the right position between Sonnets 115 and 117 in the Quarto, but actually carries the number 119. So does Sonnet 119 though and this, therefore, is generally accepted to be a straightforward printing error.

Sonnets 36 and 96 both have the same closing couplet, which is the only case of such a duplication occurring in the entire collection, and there is no way of knowing for certain whether – as some people believe – the manuscript for Sonnet 96 was illegible or unclear and the publisher or even the typesetter simply borrowed something from an earlier sonnet that appeared to, and does, make sense, or whether Shakespeare with Sonnet 96 is deliberately referencing the earlier poem, or indeed whether he simply forgot that he had used that line before and so placed it again accidentally. But since the poems are thematically linked and both speak of a reputational damage that both men incur through the actions of each other, a widely held view in scholarly circles takes this as a deliberate reference and link by Shakespeare and therefore not as a printing mistake.

Sonnet 99 is the only one to have 15 instead of 14 lines, but since it makes perfect sense as it is written, this is considered to be an authorial decision or oversight and thus in either case true to the manuscript; and Sonnet 126 deliberately leaves out the closing couplet, replacing it with two sets of empty brackets instead. Some scholars venture that this may be the publisher's decision, but there are thin grounds for such a suggestion since the poem is formally so categorically different from all the others, consisting, as it does, entirely of rhyming couplets and thus is not following the standard sonnet rhyme scheme. Most people therefore also accept this to be authorial.

As of course is the oddity presented by Sonnet 145, which is written in the octosyllabic iambic tetrameter, meaning that it has eight syllables per line instead of the usual ten or eleven, and this cannot be anything other than a deliberate choice by the poet. 

At least two hands – some people believe three – have been identified as typesetters, generally referred to as Compositor A and Compositor B, of whom Compositor A worked on the majority of the Sonnets, specifically Sonnets 1-103, and Compositor B on the remaining sonnets and A Lover's Complaint.

This too was entirely normal practice at the time and presents no real issue, other than some minor variations in spelling and the use of italics.

All of which means that George Eld's printers were able to work from a high quality manuscript that has a high level of integrity and presents few textual issues. Which in turn by necessity means that the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, was able to furnish them with such a manuscript.

And this then leads us to the first big issue of contention and conjecture about the 1609 Quarto Edition:

Who provided the manuscript?

This, we should note immediately, is distinct from the next big question, which, for reasons of simplicity, we'll address first: who put together the manuscript?


[WHO CURATED THE COLLECTION?]

The Sonnets, as you will know if you've been listening to this podcast, are clearly structured into a collection that presents with an evident coherence and curatorial intent.

It starts with the 17 Procreation Sonnets which do nothing other than tell a young man to get married and produce an heir, and then moves to the 109 poems that concern themselves with the poet's love for a young man. Together these first 126 poems are therefore known as The Fair Youth Sonnets, and we discuss them collectively in our special episode on The Fair Youth, where we also deal with the various real and supposed 'controversies' around him, and indeed who this might be. 

The Fair Youth Sonnets end on the formally exceptional Sonnet 126 just mentioned, and then give way to The Dark Lady Sonnets. Of these 28 remaining poems, 25 actually concern themselves with Shakespeare's mistress. One, Sonnet 145, which we also just noted is also formally distinct, and it is today widely believed to be not about the Dark Lady but about Shakespeare's wife Anne. And the series ends with two allegorical poems that tell the same story of Cupid and his Torch of Hymen in two slightly different ways, and jointly serve as a bridge to A Lover's Complaint, the longer narrative poem that concludes the collection, much in the tradition of other sonnet series at the time.

All of this points towards a competent, authoritative hand in the curation. Whether this is also the hand of the author, we cannot be certain, but the likelihood would appear to be high, perhaps as high as 9-10 on our Sonnetcast scale of probability where 1 is so unlikely as to be practically impossible and 12 so likely as to be practically certain: whoever put these sonnets together knew what they were doing and not only structured them into these clearly distinguishable sections, but also cared to give several sonnets a number that references, or appears to stand in direct connection to, its contents. Sonnet 12, with its clock, Sonnet 22 with its mirror, and Sonnet 60 with its minutes being immediately recognisable examples of this.

There are also indications – and we will address these in a little more detail in our next and penultimate episode on dating the sonnets – that William Shakespeare went back to earlier poems nearer the time of publication to revise them, and this too would point towards Shakespeare himself being the person who curated the collection.


[WHO PROVIDED THE MANUSCRIPT TO THE PUBLISHER?]

Does this mean that William Shakespeare also provided Thomas Thorpe with his manuscript, fully intending to have it published at that time?

Not necessarily. Big debates have been and continue to be had about this particular question, and it has not, and may well never be, conclusively answered. 

There are good arguments for both: that Shakespeare got them ready for publication and now wanted them published and so handed them to Thomas Thorpe, and also that he had no involvement with their publication at all and may in fact have been taken aback by it.

Between 1603 and 1606, there were several severe outbreaks of the plague, causing the deaths of 25,000 to 35,000 people, or about a fifth of the London population. This was followed by smaller outbreaks every year during that decade, including 1609. Whenever there were outbreaks of the plague, the theatres had to close and so it is conceivable that going through several periods of low or no income from his theatre activities, William Shakespeare sought to capitalise on his by now well-established name and proceeded to put his most personal work up for publication at last, even though the great fashion for sonnets had by then already abated.

What would support this line of argument is the fact that from about 1610 onwards – a year or so after publication of the Sonnets – Shakespeare largely moves back to Stratford-upon-Avon, and so he may have actively decided that he can now place these poems in front of the public, since he himself was no longer going to be much part of London society.

Conversely, and in the absence of any evidence, it could also be assumed that his withdrawal from London had no bearings on whether or not he was going to publish his Sonnets, or even that a pirated publication of the Sonnets, making public some deeply private and intimate thoughts and emotions, hastened his departure from `London, which would therefore favour the unauthorised publication line of argument. Also, Shakespeare by 1609 was a wealthy man with property and land in Stratford, and there is no proof or even indication that he was pressed for money at that time.

The strongest argument though for the publication of the Sonnets being unauthorised and executed entirely without Shakespeare's direct involvement or approval lies in the volume's dedication.

​
[THE DEDICATION IN THE QUARTO EDITION OF 1609]

And this is the second great issue of conjecture, confusion, and consternation with regard to the Quarto Edition of 1609: its dedication.

It appears on the first recto or right hand side page after the title page, in all capital letters with a full stop between each word:

TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.
THESE.INSVING.SONNETS.
Mr. W. H. ALL.HAPPINESSE.
AND.THAT.ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OUR.EVER-LIVING.POET.
WISHETH.
THE.WELL-WISHING.
ADVENTVRER.IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.
T. T.

What everybody can agree on is that the initials 'T. T.' stand for Thomas Thorpe, which means that it was the publisher, not the author who wrote and signed the dedication.

This in itself is unusual but not unheard of. There are a handful of other instances in which Thomas Thorpe penned dedications for books he published, and a simple explanation could ordinarily be that the author was either dead – patently not the case here: Shakespeare in 1609 is very much alive and to quite some extent still metaphorically kicking – or away from London and too busy to send one by messenger from wherever he happened to be.

This here sounds unlikely though because of the decidedly odd way in which the dedication is phrased: it makes reference to "our ever-living poet" but does not speak in his voice or on his behalf, nor does it address itself to him, or if it does, then in the most peculiar fashion.

The dedication is addressed "To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr. W. H." which of course first and foremost begs the question: who is Mr. W. H.? Tied into which is the question: what is meant by "the only begetter"?

A 'begetter' literally is a father, someone who begets someone else, in the most basic, biological sense, a child. Metaphorically it is therefore someone who creates or initiates something or someone who causes the creation or initiation of something.

Significantly, though, 'to beget' in the early 17th century also has the meaning of "to get, acquire, especially by effort," as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it.

And so here then we have four options. This 'only begetter' is either:

1) The person who wrote these ensuing sonnets. That's William Shakespeare, as the title page clearly and unambiguously states: "Shakespeare's Sonnets, Never Before Imprinted."

2) The person who inspired these ensuing sonnets. That, allowing for the Dark Lady to be of secondary significance, is the Fair Youth.

3) A person who caused these ensuing sonnets to be composed – someone who commissioned them or paid for them or even just encouraged the poet to write them.

4) A person who knew the collection of these ensuing poems existed and procured them for publication by whatever means available to him.

All of these are to a greater or lesser extent problematic and burdened with various issues.

1) William Shakespeare is not Mr. W. H. but Mr. W. S. This has led some people to suggest that "Mr. W. H." is simply a misprint: a typesetting error that crept in early on and was not caught before printing was done.

This, while, not absolutely impossible, is extremely unlikely. The Quarto – as we just noted – is for the period of an unusually high standard where textual fidelity is concerned, with remarkably few misprints. Also the way the dedication is set, with its eye-catching capitals and full stops suggests that someone took special care to present it in exactly that way. A clanger of this magnitude is therefore almost, though perhaps not wholly, inconceivable. 

Furthermore, why would you dedicate a book to the author, misspell his initials and then wish him "all happiness" that is promised by him himself? It makes no sense. On our Sonnetcast probability scale, this must rank as low as a 2 or a 2.5 out of 12.

2) If by 'begetter' is meant the Fair Youth who inspired the majority of these sonnets, then that makes him a Mr. W. H., which at first glance would appear to point towards William Herbert.

William Herbert is one of our two principal candidates for the Fair Youth and his initials at least match. What doesn't match is the title. By 1609, he has succeeded his father Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, and become William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, and you do not call an Earl 'Mister', unless you want to gravely insult him, or have absolutely no clue what you are doing. 

A possible explanation for what would appear to be such a major gaffe might be that Thomas Thorpe was aware that the majority of these sonnets were composed between ten and twelve years earlier, that is before Henry Herbert's death in 1601, at which time William Herbert was not yet the Earl of Pembroke. He was born in 1580 and might, until he reaches maturity in 1601 – coincidentally the year he also inherits the title – be thought of as Master William Herbert, which could perhaps slip into 'Mr' as an abbreviation. It would still be a gross error of etiquette though, since the first born son of an Earl would, even as a young man or teenager, be addressed as 'Lord', in this case Lord Pembroke.

Still, that doesn't rule out Thorpe making a mistake or making deliberate mischief, and it has been noted that Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare's friend and at times friendly critic, in 1616, so seven years after the Quarto and in the year of Shakespeare's death, publishes a collection of Epigrams, with a dedication to William Herbert that reads:

TO THE GREAT EXAMPLE OF HONOUR AND VIRTUE
THE MOST NOBLE WILLIAM, EARL OF PEMBROKE, LORD CHAMBERLAIN, etc.

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 Lordship the ripest of my studies, my Epigrams; which, though they carry danger in the sound,
do not therefore seek your shelter.

This, it has been suggested, may be a barbed comment on the dedication of the Sonnets which, if that was indeed the case, did 'dare' to change the Earl's title. It's not unattractive a supposition, but it is pure conjecture.

Still, Jonson is considered to be someone who pays great attention to social standards, and so we can't rule this out. Also, why would someone like Ben Jonson make such a deliberate point about using the correct title in his dedication? Most people would take that as read, and so the question as to what prompts Jonson to even think and speak of changing it would here remain.

Also possible, of course, at least in theory, is that Jonson thought that the dedication in the Quarto was addressed to William Herbert, when in fact it wasn't, although that, considering he continued to have direct albeit intermittent access to Shakespeare more or less right until Shakespeare's death and could have clarified this question, seems spurious.

Beyond that we have to, under this line of inquiry, allow for the possibility that Mr. W. H. is indeed the person who inspired the sonnets, but not William Herbert.

Some people put forward the idea that Thorpe deliberately inverts the initials H. W. which would then correspond with Henry Wriothesley, but he is the 3rd Earl of Southampton from the age of eight onwards and would not – on all the evidence we have – look kindly on being called 'Mr' at any time in his life.

Then again, it may be someone else entirely, a young gentleman who is not of noble birth, who could therefore legitimately be addressed as 'Mr. W. H.'

A charming but wholly conjectural idea pursued, among others, by Oscar Wilde, imagines a most likely fictional William Hughes, Hughe, or Hews, arrived at somewhat adventurously by interpreting the phrase "A man in hue all hues in his controlling" in Sonnet 20 as a pun on such a name, because the Quarto spells it "A man in hew all Hews in his controwling," with 'Hews' capitalised and italicised.

There is, however, no evidence of such a Mr Hughes, Hughe, or Hews, ever living in the orbit of William Shakespeare and so we cannot consider this to be highly plausible. And as we have seen and noted, the use of both capitals and italics in the Quarto is haphazard and follows no discernible pattern, apart from differing between the two identifiable compositors. And spelling generally at the time is something of a free for all. So typesetting in the Quarto does not form a reliable basis from which to read clues.

You may also come across the name William Hart, a weaver and actor, and purportedly a nephew of Shakespeare's, but there is no evidence to support the claim that he was even related to Shakespeare, and if he were one would have to seriously wonder why Shakespeare would compose so many sonnets to his nephew, of all people.

This of course, as you notice, is taking us down the avenue of 'minor candidates' for the Fair Youth, and those we have effectively dealt with as highly unlikely in our episode on the Fair Youth.

Overall then, the 'inspirer' theory probably settles somewhere around a tentative 3 on a scale of probability from 1 to 12.

Which brings us to 3) the 'commissioner' interpretation of 'begetter'.

It too has serious flaws. It presupposes that there is such a person to begin with: someone who either caused the sonnets to be composed, or at least initiated their phase of composition, and who by 1609 is in possession of them, either already in the form of a carefully collated manuscript, or in a form that he himself is able to carefully collate and then pass on to Thorpe for publication.

That in itself is a stretch of, but not beyond, the imagination. 

Something of an outside possibility and minority view in this type of scenario is that Mr. W. H. may be William Harvey or Hervey. I, as it happens, partly pursue this in my play The Sonneteer, because it makes for an interesting dramatic constellation, rather than on the grounds of any strong evidence, since there is none.

William Harvey was born approximately 1565, which makes him almost the same age as Shakespeare, who was born in April 1564, and what connects him to Shakespeare is principally his marriage in late 1598 or early 1599 to Mary Wriothesley, Countess of Southampton, the young Earl's mother.

Henry's father, Henry Wriothesley, 2nd Earl of Southampton dies in October 1581, two days before their son's eighth birthday and Mary eventually remarries in 1594, but her second husband only lives for another five months after their wedding and so William Harvey, four years later, becomes her third husband, in what is his second marriage.

When Mary Wriothesley herself dies in 1607, he inherits most of her belongings and these may have included the collection of sonnets, if this somehow made it into the possession of Mary, which conceivably it might have done, perhaps during her son's imprisonment for his participation in the Essex Rebellion, in 1601.

The line I pursue in my play does not concern itself with the publication of the sonnets or who handed the manuscript to Thorpe, but proposes a possibility that William Harvey had a connection to Mary long before they got married and possibly even was in a relationship with her as early as 1592/93, around the time it would make sense for the Procreation Sonnets to have been commissioned from Shakespeare to the then 17/18-year old Henry, and that it was him who did so on behalf of Henry's mother.

This, I emphasise, is pure conjecture and not a widely held scholarly view, nor is it a scenario I here mean to defend. In the play it serves a particular purpose, but that play is, as it must be, a fiction.

What further complicates matters is that William Harvey in 1603 gets knighted, which makes him a Sir, and so for him too, by 1609, the address as 'Mr. W. H.' would be inappropriate, even if he had been involved in the commission of the Procreation Sonnets, which after all does remain as a separate possibility.

There may of course be a figure other than William Harvey who has played a similar role, but we don't know of anyone who directly fits the brief, and so all of this makes the 'begetter' as 'instigator or commissioner' interpretation also rather unlikely. Probably as low, again, as 2 to 2.5 on our scale from 1 to 12.

Which leaves us with 4) the 'procurer' theory.

This is in some ways the most prosaic of the four, because it takes a fundamentally bibliographical approach to the dedication, rather than a biographical one and it hinges on this crucial detail mentioned a moment ago: that a 'begetter' at the time may also be an 'acquirer' or indeed, as we might put it, a 'procurer'.

It frees Mr. W. H. from having to have any direct meaningful connection to William Shakespeare, let alone having to be the Fair Youth, and allows for a far more pragmatic reading of the dedication from a publisher to someone who has helped him get this book to market. An otherwise largely insignificant middleman, who would, however, be known in the trade.

Conveniently, such a person exists in Mr William Hall. He is active as stationers' and printers' agent at that time, and he is known to have worked with George Eld, the printer of this volume. Although we don't know any details, it is possible that he somehow was able to get access to the collection and procured it for Thorpe. No proof of this exists, but some scholars accept this as the most likely, or if not exactly likely, then perhaps least implausible, since down-to-earth and readily imaginable, explanation.

And it gets an additional nudge with the observation made by some scholars that the odd phrasing of the dedication may contain a hint:

TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.
THESE.INSVING.SONNETS.
Mr.W.H. ALL.HAPPINESSE.

There may be nothing to it, but the way this is set it appears to almost spell out the name Mr. W. HALL to whom happiness is wished by the "well-wishing adventurer" who is turned such "in setting forth these ensuing sonnets." 

It is still also a conjecture, of course, and still a weak one at that: I would give it a 3.5 or maybe, mostly for want of any better explanation, a 4 to 4.5 on our Sonnetcast probability scale.

But this in itself, the fact that Thomas Thorpe acknowledges that he is being something of a literary chancer with this undertaking would appear to also support the view that he was thus 'setting forth' without the approval of "our ever-living poet."


All of this leaves us, in all seriousness, really if not none the wiser then not much better positioned to make any pronouncement about any of the principal questions that persist surrounding the Quarto of 1609. 

We can't say with anything approaching certainty or even just acceptably high likelihood who or what exactly the 'begetter' is of the dedication, and we cannot categorically say that Shakespeare did or did not authorise the publication by Thorpe in this way at this time, although the balance of probabilities somewhat tips in favour of the assumption that he didn't.

What we can say with some confidence is that the collection was authoritatively put together and appears to stem from a high quality manuscript, which lends the contention that its collation is in fact also authorial a fair amount of weight, and we know that it did not sell particularly well, because there were no reprints of this first edition.

We mentioned once or twice before, but should reiterate here in an episode about the Quarto, that following its publication in 1609 it took 31 years, until 1640 – 26 years after William Shakespeare's death – for a new edition to come about, and this was the actively corrupted, wantonly reorganised, and deliberately incomplete edition by John Benson. It dominated people's therefore severely distorted understanding of the Sonnets for the next 140 years, until Edmond Malone in 1780 restored them to their original order and text.

What we can also say with absolute certainty though is that these sonnets exist and that they continue to do so because of the Quarto. And for that alone we may and shall be eternally grateful, to all these three men: first and foremost, obviously, to our poet, William Shakespeare, but also to the 'adventurer' Thomas Thorpe for thus setting forth and ensuring that, much as the sonnets themselves predict, they will live for as long as there are human beings who breathe and have eyes to see, and also to this 'only begetter', Mr W. H. whoever, whatever, he may be, for providing the apparently otherwise missing link.

Because without them and the confluence of their actions, we would not have these poems and for that our world would be immeasurably poorer and so, therefore, would we. 

---

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