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- SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE 29
of the manner in which they reached the printing-press or to a right apprehension of the order in which they were presented to the reading public. The story has many points of resemblance with that of William Jaggard’s publication of *The Passionate Pilgrim* in 1599.
Thorpe, a native of Barnet in Middlesex, where his father kept an inn, was at Midsummer, 1584, apprenticed for nine years to an old-established London printer and stationer, Richard Watkins, whose business premises were at the sign of Love and Death in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Nearly ten years later he took up the freedom of the Stationers’ Company. He seems to have become a stationer’s assistant. Fortune rarely favoured him, and he held his own with difficulty for some thirty years in the lowest ranks of the London publishing trade.
In 1600 there fell into his hands a ‘private’ written copy of Marlowe’s unprinted translation of the first book of *Lucan*. Thorpe, who was not destitute of a taste for literature—he knew scraps of Latin and recognized a good MS. when he saw one—interested in his find Edward Blount¹, then a stationer’s assistant like himself, but with better prospects. Through Blount’s good offices, Peter Short printed Thorpe’s MS. of Marlowe’s *Lucan*, and Walter Burre sold it at his shop in St. Paul’s Churchyard.
As owner of the MS., Thorpe chose his patron and supplied the dedicatory epistle. The patron of his choice was his friend Blount. The style of the dedication was somewhat flamboyant, but Thorpe showed a literary sense
Thorpe’s early life.
His ownership of the manuscript of Marlowe’s *Lucan*.
His dedicatory address to Edward Blount in 1600.
¹ Blount had already achieved a modest success in the same capacity of procurer or picker-up of neglected ‘copy’. In 1598 he became proprietor of Marlowe’s unfinished and unpublished *Hero and Leander*, and found among better-equipped friends in the trade both a printer and a publisher for his treasure-trove.
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