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SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
tion of that common secondary meaning of ‘breed’ or ‘generate’, which in modern speech has altogether displaced the earlier signification.¹
‘Beget’ came into being as an intensive form of ‘get’, and was mainly employed in Anglo-Saxon and Mediaeval English in the sense of ‘obtain’. It acquired the specialized signification of ‘breed’ at a slightly later stage of development, and until the end of the seventeenth century it bore concurrently the alternative meanings of ‘procure’ (or ‘obtain’) and ‘breed’ (or ‘produce’). Seventeenth-century literature and lexicography recognized these two senses of the word and no other. ‘Begetter’ might mean ‘father’ (or ‘author’) or it might mean ‘procurer’ (or ‘acquirer’). There is no suggestion that Thorpe meant that Mr. W. H. was ‘author’ of the sonnets. Consequently doubt that he meant ‘procurer’ or ‘acquirer’ is barely justifiable. The following are six examples of the Elizabethan use of the word in its primary significance of ‘procure’:—
(1) The mightier [sc. the] man, the mightier is the thing
That makes him honour’d, or begets [i.e. procures] him hate.
(Lucrace, 1004–5.)
(2) We could at once put us in readiness,
And take a lodging fit to entertain
Such friends as Time in Padua shall beget [i.e. procure].
(Taming of the Shrew, i. 1. 43–5.)
(3) ‘In the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion . . . acquire and beget a temperance.’ (Hamlet, iii. 2. 6.) Hamlet in this sentence colloquially seeks emphasis by repetition, and the distinction of meaning to be drawn between ‘acquire’ and ‘beget’ is no more than that to be drawn between the preceding ‘torrent’ and ‘tempest.’
(4) ‘I have some cousins german at Court [that] shall beget you (i.e. procure for you) the reversion of the Master of the King’s Revels.’ (Dekker’s Satiromastix, 1602; cf. Hawkins’ Origin of English Drama, iii. 156.)
(5) ‘[This play] hath beget itself (i.e. procured for itself or obtained) a greater favour than he (i.e. Sejanus) lost, the love of good men.’ (Ben Jonson’s dedication before Sejanus, 1605, which was published by Thorpe.)
(6) [A spectator wishes to see a hero on the stage] ‘kill Paynims, wild boars, dun cows, and other monsters; beget him (i.e. get him) a reputation, and marry an Emperor’s daughter for his mistress’. (Ben Jonson’s Magnetic Lady (1632), Act i, Epilogue.)
It should be borne in mind that in the Variorum edition of 1821 James Boswell the younger, who there incorporated Malone’s unpublished collections, appended to T. T.’s dedication the note: ‘The word begetter is merely the person who gets or procures a thing, with the common prehx be added to it.’ After quoting Dekker’s use of the word as above (No. 4), Boswell adds that W. H. probably ‘furnished the printer with his copy’. Neither Steevens nor Malone, who were singularly well versed in Elizabethan bibliography,
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