TWO IMPORTANT FINDS

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 274, 9 February 1928, Page 10

TWO IMPORTANT FINDS

THE month of February has already provided two thrills for bibliophiles and students of letters. First, the discovery of the manuscript of a commonplace hook which throws light on the vexed question of “Mr. W.H.” and, second, the finding of 600 books, belonging to the library of Sir Isaac Newton, in a house in Gloucestershire where they have been stored since 1727. The greater interest will be centred in the commonplace book for, if we except the eternal Baeon-Shakespeare controversy, scarcely any debate has been carried on longer or farther afield than that on the apparently simple question: “Who was Mr. W.H. ?” The mysterious owner of these initials has been sought and found in Heaven knows how many guises—as the Earl of Pembroke, as an unknown Will Hughes, as William Hall, a publisher’s agent, and even (in Germany) as “Mr. William Himself.” Now we are invited to meet him as William Holgate, son of the innkeeper at the Rose and Crown, Saffron-Walden. The mystery arose when Thomas Thorpe, a piratical publisher, somehow laid hands on an MS. of Shakespeare’s sonnets and printed it, in 1609, with a dedication plain enough to himself, plain enough to Mr. W.H., plain enough, probably, to a great many others then alive, hut a dark riddle to later ages: “To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets Mr. W.H. all happinesse and that etemitie promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth, T.T.” And did the piratical Thorpe, the wordy “adventurer” who thus “set forth” a handful of the loveliest English poetry, mean by their “onlie begetter” one who was, in part at least, their inspiration and theme —or the shrewd and lucky agent who procured the manuscript copy for the printer? Cautious Sir Sidney Lee looked no further for his answer than William Hall, a publisher’s assistant who had already been successful in securing copy for the rattling Elizabethan presses. The more romantically-inclined critics have struggled to find deeper significance in the dedication by identifying Mr. W.H. with the person to whom certain sonnets were addressed.

It is not quite clear whether William Holgate is supposed to unite both characters, to have been the subject of Shakespeare’s verse and the source of Thorpe’s copy. This, perhaps, will become the new bone of contention. And what difference does it make? Whether A or B or C fed Thorpe’s presses makes little difference; but if the discovery is genuine and if the commonplace hook helps to settle the question: “Are the sonnets documents in Shakespeare’s personal history?”—then the magnitude of the difference needs no proof. Wordsworth thought that Shakespeare “unlocked his heart” in the sonnets: Browning retorted, “If so, the less Shakespeare he.” We may be on the eve of knowing how far each of them was right.