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# SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
title-pages as printed for him by one stationer and sold for him by another, and when any address found mention at all, it was the shopkeeper’s address, and not his own. He merely traded in the ‘copy’, which he procured how he could—in a few cases by purchase from the author, but in more cases through the irregular acquisition of a ‘private’ transcript of a work that was circulating at large and was not under the author’s ‘protection’. He never enjoyed in permanence the profits or dignity of printing his ‘copy’ at a press of his own, or selling books on premises of his own. In this homeless fashion he pursued the well-understood profession of procurer of ‘dispersed transcripts’ for a longer period than any other known member of the Stationers’ Company.
Besides Thorpe, there were actively engaged in the publication of the first edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets the printer George Eld and two booksellers, John Wright and William Aspley, who undertook the sale of the impression. The booksellers arranged that one-half of the copies should bear one of their names in the imprint, and the other half should bear the other’s name. The even distribution of the two names on the extant copies suggests that the edition was precisely halved between the two. The practice was not uncommon. In 1606 the bookseller Blount acquired the MS. of the long unpublished *A Discourse of Civill Life*, by Lodowick
1 Very few of his wares does Thorpe appear to have procured direct from the authors. It is true that between 1607 and 1611 there were issued under his auspices some eight volumes of genuinely literary value, including, besides Shakespeare’s sonnets, three plays by Chapman (of which the text is very bad), four works of Ben Jonson (which his old friend Blount seems to have procured for him), and Coryat’s *Odcombian Banquet*, a piratical excerpt from Coryat’s *Crudities*. Blount acquired the copyright of Ben Jonson’s *Sejanus* on November 2, 1604, and assigned it to Thorpe on August 6, 1607. Thorpe did not retain the property long. He transferred his right in *Sejanus*, as well as in Jonson’s *Volpone*, to Walter Burre on October 3, 1610.
The printer
George Eld.
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