{"id":"01KG6S6RAG9N5WM4K48AJCNVDK","cid":"bafkreiaujveppo6jmzfe22kzw3aoii72m52bwpcrki5pcbuxcvskk2lkqm","type":"chunk","properties":{"end_line":9323,"extracted_at":"2026-01-30T06:24:48.293Z","extracted_by":"structure-extraction-lambda","label":"Chunk 1","source_file":"01KG6S2X2EBB305ENM00G16GWA","start_line":9307,"text":"John Wright, bookseller.\n\nthere that half of Thorpe’s edition of Shakespeare’s *Sonnets* was offered for sale in 1609. Aspley had already speculated in Shakespeare’s work. He and a partner, Andrew Wise, acquired in 1600 copyrights of both the *Second Part of Henry IV* and *Much Ado about Nothing*, and published jointly quarto editions of the two. In the grant to Aspley and his friend of the licence for publication of these two plays, the titles of the books are followed by the words ‘Wrytten by master Shakespere’. There is no earlier entry of the dramatist’s name in the Stationers’ Company Registers. In 1623 Aspley joined the syndicate which William Jaggard inaugurated for printing the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays, and he lived long enough to be a member of the new syndicate which was formed in 1632 to publish the Second Folio. Aspley had business relations with Thorpe, and with Thorpe’s friend Blount, long before the issue of the *Sonnets*, and probably supplied Thorpe with capital.¹\n\nJohn Wright, the youngest of the associates in the enterprise of the *Sonnets*, had been admitted a freeman *per patrimonium* on June 28, 1602. His business was largely concerned with chap-books and ballads, but he was fortunate enough to acquire a few plays of interest. The most interesting publication in which he took part before the *Sonnets*, was the pre-Shakesperean play on the subject of *Kjng Lear*, the copyright of which he took over from a printer (Simon Stafford) on May 8, 1605, on condition that he employed\n\n¹ On June 23, 1600, Thorpe and Aspley were granted jointly a provisional licence for the publication of ‘A leter written to ye governors and assistantes of ye E[a]st Indian Merchantes in London Concerning the estat[e] of ye e[a]st Indian ilete etc.’ The licence was endorsed: ‘This is to be their copy gettinge aucthority for [it].’ The book was ultimately published by Thorpe, and was the earliest publication on the title-page of which his name figured. A similar provisional licence, granted to the two men on the same day, came to nothing, being afterwards cancelled owing to the official recognition of another publisher’s claim to the copy concerned (cf. Arber’s *Registers*, iii. 37).\n\nE\n\n<!-- [Page 445](arke:01KG6QHPV802GHPG6YFZGJ4BYP) -->\n34 SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE\n\nStafford to print it, which he did. In 1611 he published a new edition of Marlowe’s *Faustus*, which came from Eld’s press, and bore the same imprint as his impression of Shakespeare’s sonnets. At a later period—on May 7, 1626—he joined the printer, John Haviland, in purchasing the copyright of Shakespeare’s *Venus and Adonis*. His residence, described as ‘at Christ Church Gate’, was near Newgate. After 1612 he removed to the sign of ‘the Bible without Newgate’.\n\nThere are many signs, apart from the state of the text, which awaits our inquiry, that Shakespeare had no more direct concern in Thorpe’s issue of his 154 sonnets in 1609, than in Jaggard’s issue of his two sonnets, with the other miscellaneous contents of *The Passionate Pilgrim*, ten years before. The exceptionally brusque and commercial description of the poems, both in the entry of the licence in the Stationers’s Company Register, and on the title-page, as ‘Shakespeares Sonnets’ (instead of ‘Sonnets by William Shakespeare’), is good evidence that the author was no party to the transaction.¹ The testimony afforded by the dedication to ‘Mr. W. H.’, which Thorpe signed with his initials on the leaf following the title-page, is even more conclusive.² Only when the stationer owned the copyright and controlled the publication, did he choose the patron and sign the dedication. Francis Newman, the stationer who printed ‘dispersed transcripts’ of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets for the first time in 1591, exercised the customary privilege. Thorpe had already done so himself when issuing Marlowe’s *Lucan* in 1600.\n","title":"Chunk 1"},"relationships":[{"peer":"01KG6S5HRETFS3Z2KSH30T9PMS","peer_type":"section","predicate":"in"},{"peer":"01KG6S2X2EBB305ENM00G16GWA","peer_type":"file","predicate":"extractedFrom"},{"peer":"01KG6NWQ2H2K4PGG7H4ZHYCZ3Y","peer_type":"collection","predicate":"collection"},{"peer":"01KG6S6RAME1TSZ58QN3JPQGJT","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"next"}],"ver":2,"created_at":"2026-01-30T06:24:48.464Z","ts":"2026-01-30T06:24:58.707Z","edited_by":{"method":"manual","user_id":"01KFF0H3YRP9ZSM033AM0QJ47H"}}