with which the dedicator in the early years of the seventeenth century
besought his patron's favour on the first page of his book. But Thorpe
was too self-assertive to be a slavish imitator. His addiction to
bombast and his elementary appreciation of literature recommended to him
the practice of incorporating in his dedicatory salutation some
high-sounding embellishments of the accepted formula suggested by his
author's writing. {399a} In his dedication of the 'Sonnets' to 'Mr. W.
H.' he grafted on the common formula a reference to the immortality which
Shakespeare, after the habit of contemporary sonnetteers, promised the
hero of his sonnets in the pages that succeeded. With characteristic
magniloquence, Thorpe added the decorative and supererogatory phrase,
'promised by our ever-living poet,' to the conventional dedicatory wish
for his patron's 'all happiness' and 'eternitie.' {399b}

Five dedications by Thorpe.

Thorpe, as far as is known, penned only one dedication before that to
Shakespeare's 'Sonnets.' His dedicatory experience was previously
limited to the inscription of Marlowe's 'Lucan' in 1600 to Blount, his
friend in the trade. Three dedications by Thorpe survive of a date
subsequent to the issue of the 'Sonnets.' One of these is addressed to
John Florio, and the other two to the Earl of Pembroke. {400a} But these
three dedications all prefaced volumes of translations by one John
Healey, whose manuscripts had become Thorpe's prey after the author had
emigrated to Virginia, where he died shortly after landing. Thorpe
chose, he tells us, Florio and the Earl of Pembroke as patrons of
Healey's unprinted manuscripts because they had been patrons of Healey
before his expatriation and death. There is evidence to prove that in
choosing a patron for the 'Sonnets,' and penning a dedication for the
second time, he pursued the exact procedure that he had
followed--deliberately and for reasons that he fully stated--in his first
and only preceding dedicatory venture. He chose his patron from the
circle of his trade associates, and it must have been because his patron
was a personal friend that he addressed him by his initials, 'W. H.'

'W. H.' signs dedication of Southwell's poems in 1606.

Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' is not the only volume of the period in the
introductory pages of which the initials 'W. H.' play a prominent part.
In 1606 one who concealed himself under the same letters performed for 'A