New Candidate for Sonnets Dedication

Once in a while, but with a certain regularity, there is another story in the news about a new discovery that sheds light on the life of Shakespeare or even claims to answer once and for all one of the several unresolved questions about it. They can often be dismissed as the work of an academic with too much time on their hands and the need to publish something, anything, to fulfil their remit.
I can remember the discovery of a pipe with traces of drugs on it proving that Shakespeare was a user; that the use of French in a history play proved that the author had been to France and was thus identified as Sir Henry Neville and that Shakespeare was not the father of Hamnet and Judith, the twins attributed to him. (Actually, although that last theory wasn't mine, it appears on this website with further ideas in support of it and I still subscribe to it).
One might have thought the field had by now been exhausted of possible new discoveries and that nothing new would be found worth adding, that all that remains uncertain will remain uncertain forever. But yesterday's Observer featured a piece on new research, by Geoffrey Caveney, that is plausible, useful and could quite possibly cut out and simplify a whole area of debate. His contention is that Mr W.H., the dedicatee of the Sonnets, is the publisher William Holme, who died in 1607, who might have had some involvement in procuring the poems for publication or to whom their publication was a memorial.
Thus far, the main candidates, in order of likelihood, have been the two main candidates for the role of the 'fair youth', William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, whose initials have the advantage of being in the right order; Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, whose initials need to be reversed for the sake of making them fit, and then it is also suggested in more imaginative theories that the compositor missed out the S in a dedication to Mr. W. SH. Compositors seem to take an undue amount of blame in the cause of explaining away the pet manifestos of scholars who came later. Whenever a spelling is convenient, it is readily thought to be wrong whereas the rest of the text is apparently trusted implicitly.
As so often in the documentary evidence left to those trying to trace Shakespeare's life through it, like the will, the text is mysterious and can be read a number of ways by those with a mission to prove a point. In this dedication, the word 'begetter' is both complex and unfathomable. Surely, the poet begets a sonnet but, there again, the muse that inspires them could also be said to do so, which is roughly as far as the debate has gone until now. But the new suggestion, identifying a publisher, though not the one who put them through the press, might seem like an outside chance at first but gains credibility in the light of contemporary attitudes to copyright and ownership of texts. Whereas now the author asserts their right as such and puts a © with a date next to it on their work to say as much, the texts of Shakespeare's plays belonged firstly to the theatre company and most writers, it seems, were less proprietorial about their work. Ben Jonson oversees the publication of his plays for posterity and Shakespeare possibly puts his theatre friends in charge of the posthumous first folio but actual ownership of the text resides more with the businessman printer/publisher than the mere composer.
Thus, the candidacy of William Holme looks strong and will deserve the attention of the scholars involved in Shakespeare biography and not only I, for my marginal part, but also the doyen, Stanley Wells, look favourably upon it.
Taking up this theory as a genuine contribution to the biography doesn't discount or undermine the cases for either Herbert or Southampton as the 'fair youth'. In the first eighteen sonnets, a handsome young man is being encouraged to marry and reproduce his good looks and that isn't going to be Holme but the new differentiation of Holme and William Holmes, a publisher but not the same, makes him an attractive candidate for the dedication not only because it cuts out all the unresolvable speculation about which aristocrat Shakespeare was flattering but mainly because it has a solider look about it, we don't have to read it as a dedication from the poet and, as is explained in the article, to address Herbert or Wriothesley as 'Mr.' would have been an insult to their social standing rather than a fawning compliment.
And so, for once, I might have begun reading the latest revelation with a world-weary shrug and wondered 'what have they come up with now', but this time, I'm prepared to buy it and, you never know, perhaps one day it might be widely accepted that Shakespeare fathered one daughter, Susannah, but his wife was also mother to twins, Hamnet and Judith, whose father was in Stratford when Shakespeare might not have been.