ABSTRACT
In 1609 the London publisher Thomas Thorpe first registered and then published a quarto volume of 154 sonnets, entitled ‘SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS. Never before Imprinted’.1 In fact, two of them, numbers 138 and 144, had been printed before, in William Jaggard’s The Passionate Pilgrim of 1599; but the remainder had been unpublished until that date, well after the Elizabethan sonnet vogue was over. At the end of the volume was also a 329-line narrative poem in forty-seven stanzas called ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, in which the main speaker is a woman betrayed by a beautiful young man. No one disputed that Shakespeare had written what Thorpe published, and Shakespeare himself was still alive to object had the volume contained anything he wished to disavow. Nothing of that sort seems to have happened, and so it is very nearly certain that the sonnets in Thorpe’s quarto volume (Q) are by William Shakespeare.
