[393c] Ib. ii. 713.
[393d] A younger brother, Richard, was apprenticed to a stationer, Martin Ensor, for seven years from August 24, 1596, but he disappeared before gaining the freedom of the company, either dying young or seeking another occupation (cf. Arber’s Transcript, ii. 213).
[393e] Cf. Bibliographica, i. 474-98, where I have given an account of Blount’s professional career in a paper called ‘An Elizabethan Bookseller.’
[394a] Thorpe gives a sarcastic description of a typical patron, and amply attests the purely commercial relations ordinarily subsisting between dedicator and dedicatee. ‘When I bring you the book,’ he advises Blount, ‘take physic and keep state. Assign me a time by your man to come again. . . . Censure scornfully enough and somewhat like a traveller. Commend nothing lest you discredit your (that which you would seem to have) judgment. . . . One special virtue in our patrons of these days I have promised myself you shall fit excellently, which is to give nothing.’ Finally Thorpe, changing his tone, challenges his patron’s love ‘both in this and, I hope, many more succeeding offices.’
[394b] One gave an account of the East India Company’s fleet; the other reported a speech delivered by Richard Martin, M.P., to James I at Stamford Hill during the royal progress to London.
[395a] Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1635, p. 527.
[395b] Two bore his name on the title-page in 1603; one in 1604; two in 1605; two in 1606; two in 1607; three in 1608; one in 1609 (i.e. the Sonnets); three in 1610 (i.e. Histrio-mastix, or the Playwright, as well as Healey’s translations); two in 1611; one in 1612; three in 1613; two in 1614; two in 1616; one in 1618; and finally one in 1624. The last was a new edition of George Chapman’s Conspiracie and Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron, which Thorpe first published in 1608.
[395c] They were Wits A.B.C. or a centurie of Epigrams (anon.), by R. West of Magdalen College, Oxford (a copy is in the Bodleian Library); Chapman’s Byron, and Jonson’s Masques of Blackness and Beauty.
[395d] Chapman and Jonson were very voluminous authors, and their works were sought after by almost all the publishers of London, many of whom were successful in launching one or two with or without the author’s sanction. Thorpe seems to have taken particular care with Jonson’s books, but none of Jonson’s works fell into Thorpe’s hands before 1605 or after 1608, a minute fraction of Jonson’s literary life. It is significant that the author’s dedication—the one certain mark of publication with the author’s sanction—appears in only one of the three plays by Chapman that Thorpe issued, viz. in Byron. One or two copies of Thorpe’s impression of All Fools have a dedication by the author, but it is absent from most of them. No known copy of Thorpe’s edition of Chapman’s Gentleman Usher has any dedication.
[397] Many other instances of initials figuring in dedications under slightly different circumstances will occur to bibliographers, but all, on examination, point to the existence of a close intimacy between dedicator and dedicatee. R. S.’s [i.e. possibly Richard Stafford’s] ‘Epistle dedicatorie’ before his Heraclitus (Oxford, 1609) was inscribed ‘to his much honoured father S. F. S.’ An Apologie for Women, or an Opposition to Mr. D. G. his assertion . . . by W. H. of Ex. in Ox. (Oxford, 1609), was dedicated to ‘the honourable and right vertuous ladie, the Ladie M. H.’ This volume, published in the same year as Shakespeare’s Sonnets, offers a pertinent example of the generous freedom with which initials were scattered over the preliminary pages of books of the day.