SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

Evening Star, Issue 19782, 4 February 1928, Page 5

SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

WHO WAS “MR W. H.?" REPORTED DISCOVERY Press Association —By Telegraph—CopyrightLONDON, February 3. (Received February 4, at 10 a.m.) The discovery is announced by the ‘Daily Telegraph’ of the manuscript of a commonplace hook which is likely to solve the age-long mystery of the identity of “Mr W.H.”, to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets were dedicated by Thomas Thorpe, the publisher.,, A well-know bibliophile, Mr Edmund Rung, came into possession of the book and sent it to America for examination by the most erudite authorities of the universities there.

“The book,” says the ‘Daily Telegraph,’ “is indubitably that of William Holgate, the seventeen-year-old son of the wealthy proprietor of the Rose and'Crown Inn at Saffron, Walden. It is known that Shakespeare and his travelling company visited the town in 1607, two years before the publication of the sonnet. Those interested will study sonnets 104 and 135.

The hoy’s interest in Shakespeare was proved by his copying a favorite sonnet, as well as by current references to Shakespeare, including a rhyming letter, revealed for the first time, from Francis Beaumont to Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare was proclaimed as a deathless genius.

Sir Sidney Leo writes: —“The most important of Shakespeare’s nondramatic compositions are his Sonnets, which were not published till 1609, though both internal and external evidence shows that the majority of them were written at a far earlier date for circulation in M.S. . . . Thomas Thorpe, the original publisher, who habitually acquired dispersed manuscripts, as he could, and published them without authority, dedicated Shakespeare’s Sonnets (above his initials T.T.) in a conventional formula to a friend in the trade, ‘Mr W.H., the onelie begetter [i.e., procurer] of these insuing sonnets.’ With Thorpe’s arrangement of the poems the poet had small concern. Of the sonnets some eighty are addressed in terms deep affection to a young man. Twenty of these describe the youth as a patron of the poet’s verse, and especially complain that his favors have been for a time alienated by a rival poet. The young patron was clearly the Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare had already dedicated his narrative poems. The rival poet would seem to Rave been some obscure protege of Southampton.” Other conjectures have been that “Mr W.H.” was no other than Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (the initials reversed), also that he was the young Earl 'of Pembroke, who was a patron of Shakespeare.