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- 34 SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
Stafford to print it, which he did. In 1611 he published a new edition of Marlowe’s *Faustus*, which came from Eld’s press, and bore the same imprint as his impression of Shakespeare’s sonnets. At a later period—on May 7, 1626—he joined the printer, John Haviland, in purchasing the copyright of Shakespeare’s *Venus and Adonis*. His residence, described as ‘at Christ Church Gate’, was near Newgate. After 1612 he removed to the sign of ‘the Bible without Newgate’.
There are many signs, apart from the state of the text, which awaits our inquiry, that Shakespeare had no more direct concern in Thorpe’s issue of his 154 sonnets in 1609, than in Jaggard’s issue of his two sonnets, with the other miscellaneous contents of *The Passionate Pilgrim*, ten years before. The exceptionally brusque and commercial description of the poems, both in the entry of the licence in the Stationers’s Company Register, and on the title-page, as ‘Shakespeares Sonnets’ (instead of ‘Sonnets by William Shakespeare’), is good evidence that the author was no party to the transaction.¹ The testimony afforded by the dedication to ‘Mr. W. H.’, which Thorpe signed with his initials on the leaf following the title-page, is even more conclusive.² Only when the stationer owned the copyright and controlled the publication, did he choose the patron and sign the dedication. Francis Newman, the stationer who printed ‘dispersed transcripts’ of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets for the first time in 1591, exercised the customary privilege. Thorpe had already done so himself when issuing Marlowe’s *Lucan* in 1600.
¹ The nearest parallel is in the title of *Brittous Bowre of Delights* (1591), a poetic miscellany piratically assigned to the poet Nicholas Breton by the publisher Richard Jones. See *Passionate Pilgrim*, Introduction, p. 16.
² Initials, instead of full names, were commonly employed when the dedicatee was a private and undistinguished friend of the dedicator.
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