![]() He agrees that the fact that it’s a person who was in the publishing trade, linked with Thorpe, and who had recently died all helps to explain the dedication’s funerary form, “which has always also been a mystery”.īut he commented that it will be “less attractive to some people if it’s not an aristocrat”. That has always been a stumbling block for the attempts to identify him with ,” said Wells. “That it’s not an aristocrat fits in with the fact that it’s Mr WH. It’s very interesting.” That it is nobody well known, he added, is “one of the strengths”. He described the theory as “better than any other suggestion so far. People have spilled an enormous quantity of ink trying to identify this figure.” Professor Stanley Wells, the leading British Shakespeare scholar, said: “If it were agreed by scholars, this would be pretty momentous. “Seeing the dedication as a memorial makes a lot of sense.” His research will be published this month by Oxford University Press in its academic journal, Notes & Queries. “Nobody was aware that there was a publisher of that name who had died in 1607,” said Caveney. He concludes that Holme had previously been overlooked because he was confused with a stationer, William Holmes, who was known to be publishing up to 1615. Caveney discovered that Holme died in 1607, two years before the Sonnets were published. He now believes the dedication’s printed page was designed to resemble an inscription on a Roman funerary monument – a memorial tribute to Holme. Some people have even said that WH is just a misprint for William Shakespeare and it should have been a WSH.” Candidates have included Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, a noted patron, and William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, with whom Shakespeare is believed to have had some link.īut as aristocrats they would never have been addressed as “Mr”, Caveney said. Some argue that WH was also the “fair youth” to whom many of the 154 sonnets are addressed, or that he was someone thanked for bringing the manuscript to Thorpe. All happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth. The Sonnets’ dedication reads: “To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets Mr WH. Both came from prominent Chester families, were publishing apprentices in 1580s London and had strong connections with theatres through publishing major playwrights such as Ben Jonson and George Chapman. Geoffrey Caveney, an American researcher, has unearthed possible evidence to link the initials with William Holme, who had both personal and professional connections to Thorpe. Now fresh research suggests that the mysterious Mr WH, to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets were dedicated, was not, as had been thought, a contemporary English nobleman, but a recently deceased associate of the Sonnets’ publisher, Thomas Thorpe, which would explain the dedication’s strangely funereal form. Some of the finest, most quoted verses in the English language were dedicated to him, and for centuries literary scholars have tried to establish his identity.
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