There was nothing exceptional in the words of greeting which Thorpe addressed to his patron ‘Mr. W. H.’ They
followed a widely adopted formula. Dedications of the time usually consisted of two distinct parts. There was a dedicatory epistle, which might touch at any length, in either verse or prose, on the subject of the book and the writer’s relations with his patron. But there was usually, in addition, a preliminary salutation confined to such a single sentence as Thorpe displayed on the first page of his edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In that preliminary sentence the dedicator habitually ‘wisheth’ his patron one or more of such blessings as health, long life, happiness, and eternity. ‘Al perseverance with soules happiness’ Thomas Powell ‘wisheth’ the Countess of Kildare on the first page of his ‘Passionate Poet’ in 1601. ‘All happines’ is the greeting of Thomas Watson, the sonnetteer, to his patron, the Earl of Oxford, on the threshold of Watson’s ‘Passionate Century of Love.’ There is hardly a book published by Robert Greene between 1580 and 1592 that does not open with an adjuration before the dedicatory epistle in the form: ‘To --- --- Robert Greene wisheth increase of honour with the full fruition of perfect felicity.’
Thorpe in Shakespeare’s sonnets left the salutation to stand alone, and omitted the supplement of a dedicatory epistle; but this, too, was not unusual. There exists an abundance of contemporary examples of the dedicatory salutation without the sequel of the dedicatory epistle. Edmund Spenser’s dedication of the ‘Faerie Queene’ to Elizabeth consists solely of the salutation in the form of an assurance that the writer ‘consecrates these his labours to live with the eternitie of her fame.’ Michael Drayton both in his ‘Idea, The Shepheard’s Garland’ (1593), and in his ‘Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall’ (1609), confined his address to his patron to a single sentence of salutation. [398] Richard Brathwaite in 1611 exclusively saluted the patron of his ‘Golden Fleece’ with ‘the continuance of God’s temporall blessings in this life, with the crowne of immortalitie in the world to come;’ while in like manner he greeted the patron of his ‘Sonnets and Madrigals’
in the same year with ‘the prosperitie of times successe in this life, with the reward of eternitie in the world to come.’ It is ‘happiness’ and ‘eternity,’ or an equivalent paraphrase, that had the widest vogue among the good wishes with which the dedicator in the early years of the seventeenth century besought his patron’s favour on the first page of his book. But Thorpe was too self-assertive to be a slavish imitator. His addiction to bombast and his elementary appreciation of literature recommended to him the practice of incorporating in his dedicatory salutation some high-sounding embellishments of the accepted formula suggested by his author’s writing. [399a] In his dedication of the ‘Sonnets’ to ‘Mr. W. H.’ he grafted on the common formula a reference to the immortality which Shakespeare, after the habit of contemporary sonnetteers, promised the hero of his sonnets in the pages that succeeded. With characteristic magniloquence, Thorpe added the decorative and supererogatory phrase, ‘promised by our ever-living poet,’ to the conventional dedicatory wish for his patron’s ‘all happiness’ and ‘eternitie.’ [399b]
Five dedications by Thorpe.
Thorpe, as far as is known, penned only one dedication before that to Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets.’ His dedicatory experience was previously limited to the inscription of Marlowe’s ‘Lucan’ in 1600 to Blount, his friend in the trade. Three dedications by Thorpe survive
of a date subsequent to the issue of the ‘Sonnets.’ One of these is addressed to John Florio, and the other two to the Earl of Pembroke. [400a] But these three dedications all prefaced volumes of translations by one John Healey, whose manuscripts had become Thorpe’s prey after the author had emigrated to Virginia, where he died shortly after landing. Thorpe chose, he tells us, Florio and the Earl of Pembroke as patrons of Healey’s unprinted manuscripts because they had been patrons of Healey before his expatriation and death. There is evidence to prove that in choosing a patron for the ‘Sonnets,’ and penning a dedication for the second time, he pursued the exact procedure that he had followed—deliberately and for reasons that he fully stated—in his first and only preceding dedicatory venture. He chose his patron from the circle of his trade associates, and it must have been because his patron was a personal friend that he addressed him by his initials, ‘W. H.’
‘W. H.’ signs dedication of Southwell’s poems in 1606.
Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ is not the only volume of the period in the introductory pages of which the initials ‘W. H.’ play a prominent part. In 1606 one who concealed himself under the same letters performed for ‘A Foure-fould Meditation’ (a collection of pious poems which the Jesuit Robert Southwell left in manuscript at his death) the identical service that Thorpe performed for Marlowe’s ‘Lucan’ in 1600, and for Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ in 1609. In 1606 Southwell’s manuscript fell into the hands of this ‘W. H.,’ and he published it through the agency of the printer, George Eld, and of an insignificant bookseller, Francis Burton. [400b] ‘W. H.,’ in his capacity of owner, supplied the dedication with his own pen under his initials. Of the Jesuit’s newly recovered poems ‘W. H.’ wrote, ‘Long have they lien hidden
in obscuritie, and haply had never scene the light, had not a meere accident conveyed them to my hands. But, having seriously perused them, loath I was that any who are religiously affected, should be deprived of so great a comfort, as the due consideration thereof may bring unto them.’ ‘W. H.’ chose as patron of his venture one Mathew Saunders, Esq., and to the dedicatory epistle prefixed a conventional salutation wishing Saunders long life and prosperity. The greeting was printed in large and bold type thus:—