[398] In the volume of 1593 the words run: ‘To the noble and valorous gentleman Master Robert Dudley, enriched with all vertues of the minde and worthy of all honorable desert. Your most affectionate and devoted Michael Drayton.’
[399a] In 1610, in dedicating St. Augustine, Of the Citie of God to the Earl of Pembroke, Thorpe awkwardly describes the subject-matter as ‘a desired citie sure in heaven,’ and assigns to ‘St. Augustine and his commentator Vives’ a ‘savour of the secular.’ In the same year, in dedicating Epictetus his Manuall to Florio, he bombastically pronounces the book to be ‘the hand to philosophy; the instrument of instruments; as Nature greatest in the least; as Homer’s Ilias in a nutshell; in lesse compasse more cunning.’ For other examples of Thorpe’s pretentious, half-educated and ungrammatical style, see p. 403, note 2.
[399b] The suggestion is often made that the only parallel to Thorpe’s salutation of happiness is met with in George Wither’s Abuses Whipt and Stript (London, 1613). There the dedicatory epistle is prefaced by the ironical salutation ‘To himselfe G. W. wisheth all happinesse.’ It is further asserted that Wither had probably Thorpe’s dedication to ‘Mr. W. H.’ in view when he wrote that satirical sentence. It will now be recognised that Wither aimed very gently at no identifiable book, but at a feature common to scores of books. Since his Abuses was printed by George Eld and sold by Francis Burton—the printer and publisher concerned in 1606 in the publication of ‘W. H.’s’ Southwell manuscript—there is a bare chance that Wither had in mind ‘W. H.’s’ greeting of Mathew Saunders, but fifty recently published volumes would have supplied him with similar hints.
[400a] Thorpe dedicated to Florio Epictetus his Manuall, and Cebes his Table, out of Greek originall by Io. Healey, 1610. He dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke St. Augustine, Of the Citie of God . . . Englished by I. H., 1610, and a second edition of Healey’s Epictetus, 1616.
[400b] Southwell’s Foure-fould Meditation of 1606 is a book of excessive rarity, only one complete printed copy having been met with in our time. A fragment of the only other printed copy known is now in the British Museum. The work was reprinted in 1895, chiefly from an early copy in manuscript, by Mr. Charles Edmonds, the accomplished bibliographer, who in a letter to the Athenæum, on November 1, 1873, suggested for the first time the identity of ‘W. H.,’ the dedicator of Southwell’s poem, with Thorpe’s ‘Mr. W. H.’
[401] A manuscript volume at Oscott College contains a contemporary copy of those poems by Southwell which ‘unfained affectionate W.H.’ first gave to the printing press. The owner of the Oscott volume, Peter Mowle or Moulde (as he indifferently spells his name), entered on the first page of the manuscript in his own handwriting an ‘epistel dedicatorie’ which he confined to the conventional greeting of happiness here and hereafter. The words ran: ‘To the right worshipfull Mr. Thomas Knevett Esquire, Peter Mowle wisheth the perpetuytie of true felysitie, the health of bodie and soule with continwance of worshipp in this worlde. And after Death the participation of Heavenlie happiness dewringe all worldes for ever.’
[403a] A bookseller (not a printer), William Holmes, who was in business for himself between 1590 and 1615, was the only other member of the Stationers’ Company bearing at the required dates the initials of ‘W. H.’ But he was ordinarily known by his full name, and there is no indication that he had either professional or private relations with Thorpe.
[403b] Most of his dedications are penned in a loose diction of pretentious bombast which it is difficult to interpret exactly. When dedicating in 1610—the year after the issue of the Sonnets—Healey’s Epictetus his Manuall ‘to a true fauorer of forward spirits, Maister John Florio,’ Thorpe writes of Epictetus’s work: ‘In all languages, ages, by all persons high prized, imbraced, yea inbosomed. It filles not the hand with leaues, but fills ye head with lessons: nor would bee held in hand but had by harte to boote. He is more senceless than a stocke that hath no good sence of this stoick.’ In the same year, when dedicating Healey’s translation of St. Augustine’s Citie of God to the Earl of Pembroke, Thorpe clumsily refers to Pembroke’s patronage of Healey’s earlier efforts in translation thus: ‘He that against detraction beyond expectation, then found your sweete patronage in a matter of small moment without distrust or disturbance, in this work of more weight, as he approoued his more abilitie, so would not but expect your Honours more acceptance.’
[405] This is the sense allotted to the word in the great Variorum edition of 1821 by Malone’s disciple, James Boswell the younger, who, like his master, was a bibliographical expert of the highest authority. The fact that the eighteenth-century commentators—men like Malone and Steevens—who were thoroughly well versed in the literary history of the sixteenth century, should have failed to recognise any connection between ‘Mr. W. H.’ and Shakespeare’s personal history is in itself a very strong argument against the interpretation foisted on the dedication during the present century by writers who have no pretensions to be reckoned the equals of Malone and Steevens as literary archæologists.
[406] James Boaden, a journalist and the biographer of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, was the first to suggest the Pembroke theory in a letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1832. A few months later Mr. James Heywood Bright wrote to the magazine claiming to have reached the same conclusion as early as 1819, although he had not published it. Boaden re-stated the Pembroke theory in a volume on Shakespeare’s Sonnets which he published in 1837. C. Armitage Brown adopted it in 1838 in his Shakespeare’s Autobiographical Poems. The Rev. Joseph Hunter, who accepted the theory without qualification, significantly pointed out in his New Illustrations of Shakespeare in 1845 (ii. 346) that it had not occurred to any of the writers in the great Variorum editions of Shakespeare, nor to critics so acute in matters of literary history as Malone or George Chalmers. The theory is treated as proved fact in many recent literary manuals. Of its supporters at the date of writing the most ardent is Mr. Thomas Tyler, who published an edition of the sonnets in 1890, and there further advanced a claim to identify the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets with Mary Fitton, a lady of the Court and the Earl of Pembroke’s mistress. Mr. Tyler has endeavoured to substantiate both the Pembroke and the Fitton theories, by merely repeating his original arguments, in a pamphlet which appeared in April of this year under the title of The Herbert-Fitton Theory: a Reply [i.e. to criticisms of the theories by Lady Newdegate and by myself]. The Pembroke theory, whose adherents have dwindled of late, will henceforth be relegated, I trust, to the category of popular delusions.