Four hundred years ago this year, a book of poems appeared in quarto (which is to say in a small edition about the size of a modern paperback), probably without the author’s knowledge and almost certainly without his consent. This book, which is often referred to as Q, consisted of 154 sonnets and bore an oblique dedication or inscription: TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF THESE INSUING SONNETS MR W.H. ALL HAPPINESSE AND THAT ETERNITIE PROMISED BY OUR EVER-LIVING POET WISHETH THE WELL-WISHING ADVENTURER IN SETTING FORTH. This dedication is signed T.T., for Thomas Thorpe, the publisher. About the identity of Mr W.H. there has been much informed conjecture, and not a little wild speculation. About the author of the poems, however, there is very little disagreement. He, of course, is William Shakespeare. Or, as the printer prefers, Shake-Spear. 

Even before one gets to the poems, a number of mysteries present themselves. Who was Mr W.H.? William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke? Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton? William Harvey, Southampton’s stepfather? And what did ‘onlie begetter’ mean? Inspiration for? Procurer of? Even ‘ever-living poet’ isn’t without its difficulties, as it wasn’t customary to refer to a living poet as ‘ever-living’. Might it refer to Ovid, or to Horace? Many academics have built their careers on attempting to answer such questions as these—more, it seems, than have built their careers on an appreciation of the sonnets themselves. As Michael Schmidt writes in Lives of the Poets, ‘no title page in history has been more pored over’.