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- SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE 39
A very few years earlier a cognomen almost identical with ‘begetter’ (in the sense of procurer) was conferred in a popular anthology, entitled *Belvedere or the Garden of the Muses*, on one who rendered its publisher the like service that Mr. W. H. seems to have rendered Thorpe, the publisher of Shakespeare’s *Sonnets*. One John Bodenham, filling much the same rôle as that assigned to Mr. W. H., brought together in 1600 a number of brief extracts ransacked from the unpublished, as well as from the published, writings of contemporary poets. Bodenham’s collections fell into the hands of an enterprising ‘stationer’, one Hugh Astley, who published them under the title *Belvedere or The Garden of the Muses*. After an unsigned address from the publisher ‘To the Reader’ in explanation of the undertaking, there follows immediately a dedicatory sonnet inscribed to John Bodenham, who had brought the material for the volume together, and had committed it to the publisher’s charge. The lines are signed in the publisher’s behalf, by A. M. (probably the well-known writer, Anthony Munday). Bodenham was there apostrophized as
First causer and collector of these figures.
In another address to the reader at the end of the book, which is headed ‘The Conclusion’, the publisher again refers more prosaically to Bodenham, as ‘The Gentleman who recognized that ‘begetter’ could be interpreted as ‘inspirer’—an interpretation of which no example has been adduced. Daniel used the word ‘begotten’, in the common sense of ‘produced’, in the dedicatory Sonnet to the Countess of Pembroke, before his collection of sonnets called *Delia* (1592). He bids his patroness regard his poems as her own, as ‘begotten by thy hand and my desire’; she is asked to treat them as if they were literally produced by, or born of, her hand or pen, at the writer’s request. The countess was herself a writer of poetry, a circumstance which gives point to Daniel’s compliment. The passage is deprived of sense if ‘begotten by thy hand’ be accorded any other meaning.
‘First causer and collector of these figures.’
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