ceship forthcoming, they would throw no light on Thorpe's
'Mr. W. H.' The Earl of Pembroke was, from his birth to the date of his
succession to the earldom in 1601, known by the courtesy title of Lord
Herbert and by no other name, and he could not have been designated at
any period of his life by the symbols 'Mr. W. H.' In 1609 Pembroke was a
high officer of state, and numerous books were dedicated to him in all
the splendour of his many titles. Star-Chamber penalties would have been
exacted of any publisher or author who denied him in print his titular
distinctions. Thorpe had occasion to dedicate two books to the earl in
later years, and he there showed not merely that he was fully acquainted
with the compulsory etiquette, but that his sycophantic temperament
rendered him only eager to improve on the conventional formulas of
servility. Any further consideration of Thorpe's address to 'Mr. W. H.'
belongs to the biographies of Thorpe and his friend; it lies outside the
scope of Shakespeare's biography. {95a}

The form of Shakespeare's Sonnets.

Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' ignore the somewhat complex scheme of rhyme
adopted by Petrarch, whom the Elizabethan sonnetteers, like the French
sonnetteers of the sixteenth century, recognised to be in most respects
their master. Following the example originally set by Surrey and Wyatt,
and generally pursued by Shakespeare's contemporaries, his sonnets aim at
far greater metrical simplicity than the Italian or the French. They
consist of three decasyllabic quatrains with a concluding couplet, and
the quatrains rhyme alternately. {95b} A single sonnet does not always
form an independent poem. As in the French and Italian sonnets of the
period, and in those of Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton, the same
train of thought is at times pursued continuously through two or more.
The collection of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets thus presents the appearance
of an extended series of independent poems, many in a varying number of
fourteen-line stanzas. The longest sequence (i.-xvii.) numbers seventeen
sonnets, and in Thorpe's edition opens the volume.

Want of continuity. The two 'groups.'

It is unlikely that the order in which the poems were printed follows the
order in which they were written. Fantastic endeavours have been made to
detect in the original arrangement of the poems a closely connected
narrative, but the thread is on any showing constantly interrupted. {96}