Thomas Thorpe

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Thorpe published Shakespeare's sonnets in 1609, and Sidney Lee's verdict on the man was blunt: "predatory and irresponsible." That label followed Thorpe through centuries of literary history. He had no printing press and no bookshop, and his origins were modest. Yet he positioned himself at the center of Elizabethan and Jacobean publishing. Whether he obtained Shakespeare's manuscript through legitimate means has never been settled. Somewhere in that uncertainty lives a more intriguing question: who exactly was "Mr. W. H.," the mysterious figure to whom his edition was dedicated?

• 2. A Career Without a Shop

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  Thorpe's father was an innkeeper in Barnet, Middlesex. That background offered no natural route into London's book trade. Thorpe found one anyway: nine years as an apprentice to Richard Watkins in a small shop. In 1594 he obtained his publishing rights, though printing rights remained out of reach.

  George Eld printed Thorpe's 1609 sonnets, and William Aspley and William Wright sold the copies. Thorpe commissioned and arranged the whole enterprise without doing either himself. His arrangement with Aspley had a peculiar quality beyond this typical pattern. Together the two men entered plays into the Stationers' Register. The Malcontent was registered on the 5th of July 1604, and Eastward Ho on the 4th of September 1605. When those plays appeared in print, Aspley issued them alone. Thorpe registered the titles but vanished from the published editions. His survival in the trade rested on a partnership formed far earlier, at the very start of his career.

• 3. The Blount Connection

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  Edward Blount transferred the copyright of Marlowe's Pharsalia translation to Thorpe, giving him his first published book. That book, The First Book of Lucan, appeared in 1600. Thorpe's response was to dedicate the volume back to Blount. Publications of the era went to noblemen, aristocrats, royalty, and other figures of distinction. Blount was none of those. He was a fellow stationer. The gesture was deeply unorthodox, and it reflected a loyalty that would define the rest of Thorpe's career.

  Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall also reached Thorpe through Blount, in 1605. That same year Thorpe published George Chapman's All Fools, and his career suddenly had momentum. The Sejanus edition became notable for its production precision. Critic Jonas Barish highlighted three telling details: exact marginal annotations, typography that closely followed Jonson's metrical intentions, and careful proof corrections. All three, Barish wrote, "suggest that Jonson oversaw the printing himself." If Jonson was personally involved, Thorpe had drawn one of the era's most demanding literary minds into his operation.

  In 1624, Thorpe and Blount jointly transferred the copyright of Marlowe's Hero and Leander to a fellow stationer, Simon Vicars. Katherine Duncan-Jones drew on the friendship itself as evidence of Thorpe's character. A man as amiable and admirable as Blount, she reasoned, would not maintain such a lasting association with a genuine scoundrel.

• 4. Shakespeare's Sonnets

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  Wells and Taylor offered the sharpest modern verdict. Thorpe, they wrote, was "a reputable publisher, and there is nothing intrinsically irregular about his publication." One seldom-explored possibility is that Shakespeare himself consented to the sale. Ben Jonson may have recommended Thorpe as a trustworthy publisher, given that Shakespeare had acted in Sejanus.

  Whether Thorpe or Shakespeare composed the dedication to "Mr. W. H." has never been established. The possibility that W. H. himself supplied the manuscript has seldom been explored. He may have been a needy figure selling poems he had originally received as their recipient. Thorpe was probably responsible for the arrangement of the 154 sonnets. Sonnets 1-17 form what critics call the "procreation sonnets." Numbers 18-126 are love poems addressed, for the most part, to the Fair Youth. Sonnets 127-154 take up a range of subjects including politics, sex, and the Dark Lady.

  Dorcas Thorpe of St. Olave Southwark was granted administration of her late husband's estate on the 30th of July 1625. His pension from the Stationers' Company also ceased that year. The debate over his arrangement of those 154 sonnets, never settled by critics, continues in the editions that retain his sequence today.