in
their own social circle. At times the publisher, slightly extending the
field of choice, selected a personal friend or mercantile acquaintance
who had rendered him some service in trade or private life, and was
likely to appreciate such general expressions of good will as were the
accepted topic of dedications. Nothing that was fantastic or mysterious
entered into the Elizabethan or the Jacobean publishers' shrewd schemes
of business, and it may be asserted with confidence that it was under the
everyday prosaic conditions of current literary traffic that the
publisher Thorpe selected 'Mr. W. H.' as the patron of the original
edition of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets.'

Thorpe's early life.

A study of Thorpe's character and career clears the point of doubt.
Thorpe has been described as a native of Warwickshire, Shakespeare's
county, and a man eminent in his profession. He was neither of these
things. He was a native of Barnet in Middlesex, where his father kept an
inn, and he himself through thirty years' experience of the book trade
held his own with difficulty in its humblest ranks. He enjoyed the
customary preliminary training. {393a} At midsummer 1584 he was
apprenticed for nine years to a reputable printer and stationer, Richard
Watkins. {393b} Nearly ten years later he took up the freedom of the
Stationers' Company, and was thereby qualified to set up as a publisher
on his own account. {393c} He was not destitute of a taste for
literature; he knew scraps of Latin, and recognised a good manuscript
when he saw one. But the ranks of London publishers were overcrowded,
and such accomplishments as Thorpe possessed were poor compensation for a
lack of capital or of family connections among those already established
in the trade. {393d} For many years he contented himself with an obscure
situation as assistant or clerk to a stationer more favourably placed.

His ownership of the manuscript of Marlowe's 'Lucan.' His dedicatory
address to Edward Blount in 1600.

It was as the self-appointed procurer and owner of an unprinted
manuscript--a recognised role for novices to fill in the book trade of
the period--that Thorpe made his first distinguishable appearance on the
stage of literary history. In 1600 there fell into his hands in an
unexplained manner a written copy of Marlowe's unprinted translation of
the first book of 'Lucan.' Thorpe confided his good fortune to Edward
Blount, then a stationer's assis