Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Genevan Marginalia

Abstract

THE 1609 QUARTO of Shakespeare's sonnets presents them to the reading public in a form which fosters the privacy that printing violates.1 Foremost among the bibliographic features which locate the sonnets on the axis between the public and private is ‘T.T.’s cryptic dedication to ‘Mr W.H’. The initials appear to invite the reader into a charmed circle of private knowledge, and yet through their conventional anonymity they remain inscrutable. Modern readers have been fascinated by the mystery of ‘Mr W.H.’, and early modern readers were likewise intrigued by such dedicatory initials. The prefatory matter to Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), for example, bristles with inviting initials (including a certain ‘Master H.W.’). The epistle proclaims that the volume contains ‘the adventures passed by master F.J. whome the reader may name Freeman Jones’, and in the Bodleian copy a seventeenth century reader, Mary Wood, underlined ‘Freeman Jones’ when she read this passage. Her son Anthony likewise acceded to the invitation and wrote ‘Freeman Jones’ beside the title ‘A discourse of the adventures passed by Master F.J.’.2