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- 40 SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
was *the cause* of this Collection’ (p. 235). When Thorpe called ‘Mr. W. H.’ ‘the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets’, he probably meant no more than the organizers of the publication of the book called *Belvedere*, in 1600, meant when they conferred the appellations ‘first causer’ and ‘the cause’ on John Bodenham, who was procurer for them of the copy for that enterprise.¹
IV
State of the text.
The corrupt state of the text of Thorpe’s edition of 1609 fully confirms the conclusion that the enterprise lacked authority, and was pursued throughout in that reckless spirit which infected publishing speculations of the day. The character of the numerous misreadings leaves little doubt that Thorpe had no means of access to the author’s MS. The procurer of the ‘copy’ had obviously brought together ‘dispersed transcripts’ of varying accuracy. Many had accumulated incoherences in their progress from pen to pen.² The ‘copy’ was constructed out of the papers circulating in private, and often gave only a hazy indication of the poet’s
¹ What was the name of which W. H. were the initials cannot be stated positively. I have given reasons for believing them to belong to one William Hall, a freeman of the Stationers’ Company, who seems to have dealt in unpublished poems or ‘dispersed transcripts’ in the early years of the seventeenth century and to have procured their publication; cf. *Life of Shakespeare*, p. 418 seq.
² Like Sidney’s sonnets, which long circulated in ‘private’ MSS., Shakespeare’s collection ‘being spread abroad in written copies, had gathered much corruption by ill writers (i.e. scriveners)’. Cf. the publisher Thomas Newman’s dedicatory epistle before the first (unauthorized) edition of Sidney’s *Astrothel and Stella* (1591). Thorpe’s bookselling friend, Edward Blount, when he gathered together, without the author’s aid, the scattered essays by John Earle, which Blount published in 1628 under the title of *Micro-cosmographie*, described them as ‘many sundry dispersed transcripts, some very imperfect and surreptitious’.
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