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Dedication to Mr. W.H.

The only edition of the sonnets published in Shakespeare's lifetime, the 1609 Quarto, is dedicated to one "Mr. W.H.". The reality, identity and age of this person remain a mystery and have caused a great deal of speculation.

The dedication in full reads:

While it is generally believed that 'T.T.' stands for the publisher, Thomas Thorpe,^[3] it is not certain whether Thorpe, Shakespeare, or another editor wrote the dedication. The capital letters and periods following each word were probably intended to resemble an Ancient Roman inscription, thereby giving a sense of eternity and magnitude to the sonnets. In the sonnets, Shakespeare often declares that the sonnets will outlast such earthly things as stone monuments and inscriptions.^[4] Sonnet 55 states,

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this pow'rful rhyme,

126 of Shakespeare's sonnets are addressed to a young man (often called the "Fair Youth"). Broadly speaking, there are two branches of theories concerning the identity of Mr. W.H.^{[citation needed]}: those that take him to be identical to the youth, and those that assert him to be a separate person.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of contenders:

• William Herbert (the Earl of Pembroke). Herbert is seen by many as the most likely candidate, since he was also the dedicatee of the First Folio of Shakespeare's works. However the "obsequious" Thorpe would be unlikely to have addressed a lord as "Mr".^[5]
• Henry Wriothesley (the Earl of Southampton). Many have argued that 'W.H.' is Southampton's initials reversed, and that he is a likely candidate as he was the dedicatee of Shakespeare's poems Venus & Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Southampton was also known for his good looks, and has often been argued to be the 'fair youth' of the sonnets. The reservations about "Mr." also apply here. One author claims to have broken the code inherent in the dedication, and that the solution instructs the reader to "reverse" the letters "W.H.," which tends to support the notion that the dedicatee was in fact the Earl. The author also points out that, when the Earl was imprisoned in the Tower of London for having taken part in the Essex Rebellion against Queen Elizabeth, in fact he lost the use of his title, so that 'Mr.' would have been an appropriate form of address, especially when used by one who had been imprisoned alongside him. See Brenda James, Henry Neville and the Shakespeare Code (2008).
• Sir William Harvey, Southampton's stepfather. This theory assumes that the fair youth and Mr. W.H. are separate people, and that Southampton is the fair youth. Harvey would be the "begetter" of the Sonnets in the sense that it would be he who provided them to the publisher, after the death of Southampton's mother removed a obstacle to publication. The reservations about the use of "Mr" did not apply in the case of a knight.^[5][6]
• William Himself (i.e. Shakespeare). This theory was proposed by the German scholar D. Barnstorff, but has not found much support.^[5]
• A simple printing error for Shakespeare's initials, 'W.S.' or 'W. Sh'. This was suggested by Bertrand Russell in his memoirs, and also by Don Foster in "Master W.H., R.I.P." (PMLA 102, pp. 42-54) and by Jonathan Bate in The Genius of Shakespeare. Bate supports his point by reading 'onlie' as something like 'peerless', 'singular' and 'begetter' as 'maker', ie. 'writer'. The phrase 'Our Ever-Living Poet', according to Foster, refers to God, not Shakespeare. 'Poet' comes from the Greek 'poetes' which means 'maker', a fact remarked upon in various contemporary texts; also, in Elizabethan English the word 'maker' was used to mean 'poet'. These researcher believe the phrase 'our ever-living poet' might easily have been taken to mean 'our immortal maker' (God). The 'eternity' promised us by our immortal maker would then be the eternal life that is promised us by God, and the dedication would conform with the standard formula of the time, according to which one person wished another 'happiness [in this life] and eternal bliss [in heaven]'. Shakespeare himself, on this reading, is 'Mr. W. [S]H.' the 'onlie begetter', i.e., the sole author, of the sonnets, and the dedication is advertising the authenticity of the poems.
• William Hall. Hall was a printer who had been responsible for printing other work that Thorpe had published (according to this theory, the dedication is simply Thorpe's tribute to his colleague and has nothing to do with Shakespeare). This theory, started by Sir Sidney Lee in his A Life of William Shakespeare (1898), was continued by Colonel B.R. Ward in his The Mystery of Mr. W.H. (1923). Supporters of this theory point out that the full name "William Hall" appears if the word "all", immediately following the initials in the dedication, is added to them. Under his initials, William Hall had edited a collection of the poems of Robert Southwell that was published by George Eld, Thorpe's printer for the Sonnets volume.^[7] There is also documentary evidence of one William Hall of Hackney who signed himself 'WH' three years earlier, but it is not certain that this was the same man as the printer.
• Willie Hughes. The 18th century scholar Thomas Tyrwhitt first proposed the theory that the Mr. W.H. (and the Fair Youth) was one "William Hughes", based on presumed puns on the name in the sonnets. The argument was repeated in Edmund Malone's 1790 edition of the sonnets. The most famous exposition of the theory is in Oscar Wilde's short story "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.", in which Wilde, or rather the story's narrator, describes the puns on "will" and "hues" in the sonnets, (notably Sonnet 20 among others), and argues that they were written to a seductive young actor named Willie Hughes who played female roles in Shakespeare's plays. There is no evidence for the existence of any such person.
• William Haughton, a contemporary dramatist.^[8][9]
• William Hart, Shakespeare's nephew and male heir. Proposed by Richard Farmer, but Hart was nine years of age at the time of publication, and this suggestion is regarded as unlikely.^[10]

In his 2002 Oxford Shakespeare edition of the sonnets, Colin Burrow argues that the dedication is deliberately mysterious and ambiguous, possibly standing for "Who He", a conceit also used in a contemporary pamphlet. He suggests that it may have been created by Thorpe simply to encourage speculation and discussion (and hence, sales of the text).^[11]