"Mr. W.H.” and the Well-Wishing Adventurer by Peter Farey

Around this time last year, in an answer to one of Carlo's questions on this blog, I briefly referred to the question of who the “Mr. W.H.” of the Sonnets really must have been, and the implications this might have for the Marlovian theory. Although this is covered fairly fully in my essay “Hoffman and the Authorship” (from which I have unashamedly cut and pasted some of what appears below) it occurs to me that it might be helpful if I say a bit more on that question here.

The book of Shake-speares Sonnets was registered with the Stationers' Company on 20th May 1609: “Tho. Thorpe. Entred for his copie under the hands of master Wilson and master Lownes Wardenes,” and was printed “By G.Eld for T.T.,” who is naturally assumed to be the Thomas Thorpe who registered it, and also the “T.T.” who signed the well-wishing message printed after the title page, as shown below.


Calvin Hoffman took the “only begetter ... Mr. W.H.” to be the inspirer of the Sonnets, claiming that it was Thomas Walsingham—the “W.H.” coming from the, if hyphenated, name "Walsing-Ham." This wasn’t all that improbable if it is assumed (as E.A. Webb’s Walsingham pedigree has it)¹ that Walsingham was a few years younger than Marlowe. As is now clear, however, Thomas was born in 1560/61, and was therefore some three or four years older than the Sonnets' author.²

Yet throughout the Sonnets before the “Dark Lady” ones (i.e. all those up to Sonnet 126), there are references to how much older the writer is to the man he is addressing, such as:

How can I then be elder then thou art? (S 22)

T'is thee (my selfe) that for my selfe I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy daies, (S 62)

Against my loue shall be as I am now
With times iniurious hand chrusht and ore-worne, (S 63)

Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonesse,
Some say thy grace is youth and gentle sport, (S 96)

O thou my louely Boy who in thy power,
Doest hould times fickle glasse, his fickle, hower: (S 126)

By far the most popular candidates for the “W.H.” mantle have been either the third Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley (born between nine and ten years after the author), or the third Earl of Pembroke, William Herbert (born some sixteen years after him), both of whom seem far more suitable because of the age factor. This assumes that what Thorpe calls

THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.
THESE.INSVING.SONNETS.
must be the inspirer of them, and therefore the person to whom at least most of them must have been addressed. Opponents of this theory have pointed out that to address a belted earl as “Mr.” at that time would have been inconceivable, and that Wriothesley's initials were the wrong way round anyway.

This Gordian knot was cut by Donald Foster, however, in his “Master W.H., R.I.P.”, where he made the following comments concerning the phrase “to the only begetter”:

As it happens, Thorpe's contemporaries had precise notions of what constituted “begetting” a text. According to this popular conceit, only the (pro)creative author may be called a “begetter,” and then only if the textual offspring was self-begotten, upon the author's own “Fancy” or “Mind” or “Brain” or “Invention.” Translators do not qualify—nor do commentators, publishers, patrons, paramours, scribes, inspirers of poetry, or purloiners of manuscripts. With but one unremarkable exception, nowhere do I find the word begetter, father, parent, or sire used to denote anyone but the person who wrote the work.³

As far as I can discover, nobody has ever challenged this actual statement, or managed to find a single example of an exception other than one he had discussed. Subsequent editors tend to have either rejected or ignored it, presumably because it is difficult to see how “Shakespeare's Sonnets” could have been written by a “Mr W.H.” Most of the commentators, as is clear, also take the meaning to be that of “inspirer” instead.

G. Blakemore Evans⁴ does take issue with Donald Foster's solution (that the “W.H.” is a misprint), and makes much of that one exception (from Samuel Daniel's Delia), even though Foster made it quite clear that the normal usage is being consciously reversed by claiming that the inspirer rather than Daniel himself was the real author. As far as I can discover, however, his is the only objection to Foster’s claim. So Thorpe must really be saying that the one and only author of the Sonnets is “Mr W.H.”

This is of course not the problem for Marlovians that it would be for others. As Foster puts it,⁵ “One hypothesis, which I leave for others to expound, is that Shakespeare was not the author of Shake-speare's Sonnets.” If Marlowe had indeed survived and was now living under an assumed identity, then there is no reason at all why his name could not have had the initials “W.H.”, even with the first name "Will." As Sonnet 135 puts it:

Who euer hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will too boote, and Will in ouer-plus,

Nor need there be any problem with “our ever-living poet” either. As Foster points out, “In a fairly extensive search, I have not found any instance of ever-living in a Renaissance text to describe a living mortal.”⁶ To use it to describe someone whom the world believed to be dead, but who in fact was not, would therefore be nicely ironic. What this is doing is wishing the poet not eternal bliss, but the same immortality he has promised to the addressee in sonnets such as Sonnet 81:

Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall ore-read,
And toungs to be, your beeing shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead,
You still shall liue (such vertue hath my Pen)
Where breath most breaths, euen in the mouths of men.

All of this may seem rather over the top if it is Thomas Thorpe actually writing it, however. His being the adventurer who is “setting forth” also depends upon a rather awkward requirement that the transitive meaning, “publishing,” be used without any object. But is he the actual well-wisher, or could he instead be just passing the message on for someone else?

Seldom mentioned in this context is the fact that the Sonnets were entered in the Stationers' Company Register on Saturday 20th May 1609, and just three days later, Tuesday 23rd May, the second Virginia Charter was granted:

...and that suche counsellors and other officers maie be appointed amonngest them to manage and direct their affaires are willinge and readie to adventure with them; as also whose dwellings are not so farr remote from the cittye of London but that they maie at convenient tymes be readie at hande to give advice and assistance upon all occacions requisite.... And further wee establishe and ordaine that Henrie, Earl of Southampton, William, Earl of Pembrooke, [followed by fifty other named people] shalbe oure Counsell for the said Companie of Adventurers and Planters in Virginia.”⁷

Note those "adventurers." This must have been quite big news, and it seems most unlikely that anyone other than those members or the voyagers themselves would, without good reason, have spoken of himself as an “adventurer ...setting forth” that May.

Given that the two most popular candidates for the Sonnets' “fair youth” are the first two names on that list, might not the “well-wishing adventurer” in fact be one of them? If we take it, as seems quite likely, that the poet had been sending them to his friend over many years, is it not possible for the latter to have had them published as a gift to him now, whilst taking care to protect his own identity? The strange order of the dedication makes it look as if the adventurer is Thorpe, but with the poem split at the only space there is, between “W.H.” and “ALL," and the blocks of text before and after “WISHETH” swapped to the more usual order that Foster indicated,⁸ the true message is clarified.

TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.
THESE.INSVING.SONNETS.
Mr.W.H.

THE.WELL-WISHING.
ADVENTVRER.IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.
WISHETH.
ALL.HAPPINESSE.
AND.THAT.ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OVR.EVER-LIVING.POET.
I am not saying that this is something that is necessary to do, only that it makes the meaning clearer. In which case a message is being sent via Thorpe to the “onlie begetter” (author) Marlowe, on behalf of “the well-wishing adventurer” — the Sonnets’ original addressee. You know it makes sense!

Peter Farey

© Peter Farey, 2009

Peter Farey's essay “Hoffman and the Authorship” is the 2007 recipient of the Calvin & Rose G. Hoffman Prize, administered annually by The King's School in Canterbury for a "distinguished publication on Christopher Marlowe." He is a founding member of the International Marlowe-Shakespeare Society.

¹See A.D. Wraight & Virginia F. Stern, In Search of Christopher Marlowe. McDonald & Co., 1965. p.280.
²Ibid., p.282.
³Foster, Donald W. "Master W. H., R. I. P." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 102, 1987. p.44.
⁴Evans, Gwynne Blakemore. The Sonnets. New Cambridge Shakespeare, 1996. p.115.
⁵Foster, op. cit., p.48.
⁶Ibid., p.46.
⁷Text from http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~tmetrvlr/hd4a.html.
⁸Foster, op. cit., p.44.

Click here for the blog's home page and recent content.