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- SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE 37
‘the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth’, and thereby claimed sole and exclusive responsibility for the undertaking. His fellow-publisher, William Barley, called himself his patron’s ‘faithful well-willer’ when, in 1595, he dedicated a book, the manuscript of which he had picked up without communication with the author, to Richard Stapar, a Turkey merchant of his acquaintance.’ Similarly, when the dramatist John Marston in 1606 undertook to issue for himself his play named ‘Parasitaster or the Fawne’, he pointed out in a prose preface that he (the author) was the sole controller of the publication, and was on this occasion his own ‘setter out’: ‘Let it therefore stand with good excuse that I have been my own setter out.’
To the title which Thorpe bestows on Mr. W. H., ‘the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets,’ a like professional significance attaches. In this phrase Thorpe acknowledges the services of ‘Mr. W. H.’ in ‘procuring’ and collecting in his behalf the ‘private’ transcripts, from which the volume was printed. To ‘Mr. W. H.’s’ sole exertions the birth of the publication may be attributed. ‘Mr. W. H.’ filled a part which is familiarly known in the history of Elizabethan publishing as ‘procurer of the copy’. In Elizabethan English there was no irregularity in the use of ‘begetter’ in its primary sense of ‘getter’ or ‘procurer’, without any implica-
‘Barley saluted his patron (before Richard Haskton’s report of his ‘Ten years’ Travels in foreign countries’) thus: ‘Your worship’s faithful well-willer, W[illiam] Barley, wisheth all fortunate and happy success in all your enterprises, with increase of worldly worship; and, after death, the joys unspeakable.’ A rare copy of the tract is at Britwell. It is reprinted in Arber’s Garner. The stationer Thomas Walkley in 1622, in his preface to the Second Quarto of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster, wrote that ‘he had adventured to issue a revised edition knowing how many well-wishers it had abroad’. Another ‘stationer’, Richard Hawkins, who published on his own account the third edition of the same play in 1628, described himself in the preliminary page as ‘acting the merchant adventurer’s part’.
The onlie begetter.
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