THE TWO LETTERS W.H. IN THE DEDICATION TO W. SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS AND THE CUMULATIVE EFFECT OF DIRECT AND CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE IN SHAKESPEAROLOGY

Abstract

William Shakespeare’s works had been written more than 4 centuries ago; since then scholars had enough time to subject his texts and the facts of his biography to the interpretations which are so numerous and so diversified that many Shakespearologists have come to believe that it is simply impossible to give indisputable answers to quite a number of highly significant questions. To these unsolvable problems one might attribute the identification of the addressee of Shakespeare’s sonnets and of Mr W.H. who is mentioned in the dedication to these poetic texts. Syntactically the text of the dedication may be interpreted either as one sentence with “Mr W.H.” acting in the capacity of an indirect object or as a subject in the first of the two independent clauses. The choice of either of these two variants of reading (in the article the second variant is accepted as the only possible one) influences the direction of the further discussion of the sonnets. The article is aimed at showing that through studying the literary texts by Shakespeare and his contemporaries and through closely analyzing the relevant direct and circumstantial evidence one may arrive at the inherently sound and noncontroversial interpretations of Shakespeare’s life and work. When applied to Shakespeare’s sonnets, such an approach allows one 1) to corroborate certain theories concerning the time when most of the sonnets were created and 2) to prove that the addressee of the sonnets and Mr W.H. were two different people who may be identified with a fair degree of certainty.