The original quarto edition of Shake-speares Sonnets is comprised of 40 leaves without numbering. Signature A (of two leaves) contains the variant title pages and dedication. Sig. B1r starts the sequence of sonnets ending with Sonnet 154 on sig. K1r. Sig. K1v begins “A Louers Complaint By William Shake-speare,” which concludes on sig. L2 v. Thirteen copies of the edition are extant: Bodleian Library, Oxford (Wright and Aspley); Fondation Bodmer, Geneva (Wright); British Library, London (Wright and Aspley); Elizabethan Club, Yale (Wright); Huntingdon Library (Wright and Aspley); Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington (Wright and Aspley); John Rylands Library, Manchester (Wright); and two further copies at Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge, and Harvard University Library, which lack a title page.
If the initial sheets of Sig. A are put aside, each sheet in both the Wright and Aspley imprints bears either of two watermarks, Watermark A, which is an apex of circles on top of each other, a single circle, a single circle, a row of two circles, and rows of three circles and four circles, much like a bunch of grapes and Watermark B, a more complex watermark, being a replica of a coat-of-arms or the top of a vessel or chalice or the bottom of a chalice (most evident in Sig. E4). The possibility exists that each sheet bears a single watermark, the two watermarks being combined into a vessel with grapes separated by binding and cutting, but the possibility can only be confirmed by disassembling the volumes. (An exception is Sheet E which has a large discursive watermark after the manner of a babewyne in both imprints.)
The watermarks suggest two separate stocks of paper which have then been bound indiscriminately. The watermarks also confirm that the sheets were laid down on the printing frame or skeleton indiscriminately with the top and bottom of the sheet sometimes reversed: the Folger Wright imprint, for example, has B1 with Watermark B and B4 with Watermark A; the Folger Aspley imprint has B2 with Watermark A and B3 with Watermark B. As well, the sheets have sometimes not only been reversed top to bottom but sometimes the paper has been turned over before it was laid down: the Folger Wright imprint has C2 with Watermark A and C3 with Watermark B, while the Folger Aspley has C1 with Watermark A and C4 with Watermark B. The printer, then, has taken the sheets from the stack provided and has laid them on the skeleton variously: straight, reversed upside down, and reversed back to front. As well, all sheets other than Sheet A are laid paper with seven parallel horizontal ribs across a sheet, the marks of the wires from the paper-making, dividing the quarto’s sheets into eighths (occasionally an 8th rib can be seen on the top or bottom verge).
The printing can be examined by looking through a page at the various positions of the printing on either side of the page. A comparison between sheets in various imprints show a near exact positioning of the lines and words in relation to the front and back of the page. Sheets F and I, for example, in both the Folger Wright and Folger Aspley imprints are identical or nearly identical – the positioning of the watermarks on sheets F and I also coincide suggesting that they result from the same impression, from an identical laying down of the sheet on the frame, and from the same pulling off. Sheet H in the two Folger imprints is interesting: the same stack of sheets has been used, but the sides have been reversed as has the top and bottom. When the printing on each side of the sheet is correlated, it is seen as the most irregular of all the delineations found in the imprints – and contains the most mistakes, possibly indicating a different compositor. Both the Wright imprint and the Aspley imprint, therefore, draw on similar stacks of sheets bearing identical watermarks and with almost identical correlations between the printings on the recto and verso sides of the sheets.
The Title Page and Dedication page, A1 and A2, however, differ from the subsequent sheets. Firstly they are a little thicker and heavier. Secondly the printing is different at the bottom of the sheet because different spacing is required to accommodate the names, John Wright and William Aspley: the Aspley imprint required four lines and the Wright five. Thirdly the watermarks also vary, which is crucial: the sheets of both printings display not only the horizontal ribs from the paper-making evident in the remainder of the volume, but also a series of five vertical lines: presumably, because of the sheets heavier texture, both horizontal and vertical wires were required. In the Wright imprint’s A1 and A2 the watermark is the same watermark found in the rest of the volume (Watermark B). This is not the case with the watermark found on the Aspley imprint which is, strikingly, a large parrot. Since Aspley sold under the “Sign of the Parrot,” the probability is that the paper was provided by one source for both booksellers, but that for those copies sold by Aspley a single sheet for the introductory two pages was provided by him and bound into the volume. 8
MacD. Jackson has established that the volume was set by two principal compositors, each with their own idiosyncracies and with one more prone to mistakes. 9 A comparison of the major, variant errors in printing reveals the following: the catchword at F3r is an incorrect, “The,” in all copies other than the Bodleian Aspley, which has the correct “Speake.” Similarly at 39.7 the Bodleian Aspley has, “giue,” while all others have an incorrect, “giue:”. The Bodmer has an incorrect catchword at C3r, “To”, which should read “Thou”. At Sonnet 89.11 the Folger Wright and Yale Wright have, “proface”, all others have a correct, “prophane”. All copies at Sonnet 47.10 have, “seife”; only the Bodmer has a corrected “selfe”. All copies at Sonnet 116 have the number “119” (an inverted 6), except for the Bodleian Wright, which has been corrected to “116”. (The question marks have either been omitted or not taken in the Folger Aspley copy at 76.2, 4, 8, but are present in all other copies.) No doubt the corrections were made as sheets were pulled, but earlier-pulled, uncorrected sheets were not discarded and stacks of sheets before binding contained both corrected and uncorrected sheets. Volumes were then bound using a mix of both corrected and uncorrected. All this suggests that they were not bound under close authorial supervision.
Whether the manuscript Eld, the printer, was given was authorial or not remains unclear, opinion being divided between an older view that it wasn’t (and that the manuscript was therefore pirated) and more recent enquiry, which has argued that Shakespeare entrusted or even sold the manuscript to Thorpe. (The possibility that the manuscript was provided to Thomas Thorpe by a needy “MR. W. H.,” the dedicatee of the volume and the poems’ possible receipient, seems seldom to have been explored.) Shakespeare’s hand in the production will always remain shrouded, but some evidence can be gleaned from the probity and practices of the publisher, Thorpe, and the printer, Eld. Thorpe was an unusual figure in the early 17th century book trade: he was neither a printer nor a bookseller, but an entrepreneur who obtained manuscripts, had them printed, then moved the printed copies on to booksellers. Apart from two dubious ventures of a minor nature he seems to have been a respectable enough businessman.10 Ben Jonson entrusted him with the publishing of Sejanus his Fall (1605), recent editors observing that Eld, the printer, “discharged his difficult task with a high degree of accuracy,” and that “a watchful eye supervised the printing.” 11 In 1607 Jonson gave him the rights to publish Volpone, which he also commissioned Eld to print. The volume again was so carefully produced that it has been thought that Jonson himself may have overseen its printing. 12 Thorpe often signed himself “T. T.,” about which there was nothing unusual or underhand, and later changed his initials to “Th. Th.,” possibly to differentiate himself from Thomas Taylor and Thomas Tuke, authors who also signed themselves, “T. T.”
Thorpe’s first publishing venture was Marlowe’s translation of Lucans First Book of the Pharsalia of 1600; he introduced the work with a witty “Epistle Dedicatorie” to Edward Blunt who had granted him its rights. 13 In 1604 his publishing career began in earnest with two works by Thomas Wright, A Succinct Philosophicall declaration of the nature of Clymactericall yeeres (cited above) and The Passions of the minde in generall, both printed by Valentine Sims, whom he also used to print Ben Jonson’s Hymenaei and Chapman’s The Gentleman Vsher in 1606. His collaboration with George Eld began in 1605 with Chapman’s Al Fooles and Jonson’s Seianus His Fall and he used Eld almost exclusively from 1607 onwards with Jonson’s Volpone and Marston’s What You Will in 1607, Jonson’s The Characters of Two royall Masques, Chapman’s The Conspiracie And Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron and Richard West’s Wits A. B. C. Or A Centurie of Epigrams in 1608, and Shake-speares Sonnets in 1609. Eld published the 1609 quarto of Troilus and Cressida, a production however of lesser quality. (The uneven quality of his work seems due either to inadequate typesetting or to faulty manuscripts produced faithfully.) He also produced the second quarto of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus for John Wright in 1609, one of a number of collaborations with Wright, and printed for William Aspley in 1605 the contentious Eastward Hoe.
Thorpe was given to prolix dedications, which often lapsed into the ungrammatical, a fault evident in his dedication to Shake-speares Sonnets. In his dedication to John Florio in the 1610 edition of John Healey’s translation of Epictetus he presents Healey as a “poor friend” and just as Maecenas advanced Horace’s cause before Augustus asks that so Florio might promote Healey’s interests (”So this your poore friend though he haue found much of you, yet doth still follow you for as much more: that as his Mecaenas you would write to Augustus, Bee as mindefull of Horace, as you would bee of my selfe.) Florio is “both patterne and patron of translators,” a nicety common to Jacobean dedications, playing on the recent division of the two words; ‘pattern’ until the latter half of the 17th century was spelt ‘patron.’ 14 He also dedicated Healey’s 1610 translation of St. Augustine’s The Citie of God to the Earl of Pembroke, entitling him properly and fully, and effusively seeking his patronage, because “your sweete patronage in a matter of small moment, without distrust or disturbance in this worke of more worth, more weight, as he approoued his more abilitie, so would not but expect your Honours more acceptance.” He concludes, “Wherefore his legacie laide at your Honours feete, is rather here deliuered to your Honours humbly thrise-kissed hands by his poore delegate.” 15 In 1614 he wrote a dedication to Arthur Dent’s The Hand-Maid of Repentance, in which he writes “this so necessary and Christianlike a worke, penned by so singuler a Minister of the Gospell, and so much conducting to eternall blisse, hath by Gods goodnes come vnto my hands . . I held my selfe bound in Christian Charity, to communicate the same vnto my Brethren.” 16 Later he directed his dedication in the 1616 edition of Epictetus (Healey now being dead) to the Earl of Pembroke once again, addressing him properly as “Right Honorable,” apologizing for “this scribling age, wherein great persons are so pestered dayly with Dedications” and soliciting assistance of him with exaggerated self- abasement. 17
The dedication page to Shake-speares Sonnets was intended by Thorpe to attract buyers. Masking the identity of his addressee by using initials was intended to add intrigue. (Normal advertising of books involved displaying title-leaves on walls and posts or having them paraded about, held aloft on cleft-sticks.) 18 His style, too, was intended to catch the eye: his opening phrase, “THE. ONLIE. BEGETTER.” (Shakespeare never used the term ‘begetter’), would have struck the informed buyer as outrageous: the principal (and nearly sole) use of “onlie begetter” before 1609 was as an appellation of God the Father found in theological disquisitions on the Nicene phrase, “Filium Dei unigenitum,” rendered in the Book of Common Prayer’s “Order of Holy Communion” as “the onely begotten sonne of God, begotten of his father.” By transference the Father is the begetter of the only begotten. Commentaries such as that of Hugo of St. Victor were oft-quoted, “The father begetteth, the sonne is begotten, and because he that did beget, did beget from eternall, the father is eternall. And because, he that is begotten, is begotten from eternall, the sonne is coeternall with the father eternall . . he that is begotten, cannot be the same of whom he was begotten, neyther he that proceedeth from the begetter and the begotten can be, eyther the begetter or the begotten.” Similarly Thomas Roger in 1581 translates Augustine’s query, “what is more acceptable, than to cal vpon the begetter in the name of his onlie begotten Son,” while Philip Stubbes, reporting his wife’s final confession in 1592, affirms the Father to be, “the onely . . begetter,” in the phrase, “I beleeue and confesse that God the father . .. . is . . the onely maker, creator and begetter of all things whatsoeuer,” and William Cowper asks in 1609, “why should it be denyed that in the Creator, the begetter, and begotten are equall in eternitie?” 19 The god-like begetter of the sonnets, “MR. W. H.,” is thus the poet’s muse, who is the cause of that conceived by the poet (and of that which enables the sonnets to be published). Given the properties of the godhead, eternity such as that claimed by the monumental lettering is appropriate. The “WELL-WISHING. ADVENTURER” involved in “SETTING. FORTH” or publishing the volume is Thorpe himself, who wishes upon the begetter of the sonnets that happiness and immortality (“ETERNITIE”) promised by their ever-living poet. (Thorpe is perhaps imitating Thomas Newman’s Dedicatory Epistle to Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, “I [was] moued to sette it forth.”) 20 Finally as the “BEGETTER” of the sonnets, MR. W. H.,” is firmly identified with the youth, who is so often the poet’s muse in the sequence.
In summary the manuscript of Shake-speares Sonnets, given to Thorpe and Eld, may have had authorial warrant. Whether it was in Shakespeare’s or in a scribal hand with or without emendations cannot be determined. The setting of the type was done by two principal compositors, but the pulls were not likely overseen by Shakespeare, any emended sheets were mixed with the uncorrected, and the collation of sheets for binding drew indiscriminately on both kinds. If Shakespeare was absent from the printing and binding process (he may have been away from London because of the severity of the plague in 1609), 21 then the non-supervisory role would have repeated the practice that obtained for the publication of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece by Richard Field in 1593 and 1594 during outbreaks of the plague, which also seem not to have been authorially corrected during printing.