The Sun.
London, England, 1866-04-17 00:00:00

The Mystery

EXPLAINED BY ROBERT H. GILES.

to gentleman, of the mere fact of whose existence
we were not aware until we happened to see his
name mentioned for the first time in the Examiner
of last Saturday, has just now put forth, through
the columns of our contemporary, a long-cherished
theory of his own in explanation of that hitherto
utterly bewildering enigma, the Book of the Son-
nets of Shakspere. And the suggestion thns set
forth in this most ingenious theory certainly does
appear to us to bo not only, as we have here pro-
nounced it to be, most ingenious, but, intrinsically,
in the root idea of it, in the very nature and
form of it, of such really exquisite beauty that we
are tempted here to give the bulk, or at any rate
the gist of the charming paper propounding it, a
paper which we would suggest, moreover, that the
more curious would do well to examine for them-
selves in its entirety, as it is given with all due pro-
minence and at full length in the pages of the
Examiner.

The author of this new and very startling com-
mentary on one of the most remarkable works ever
penned by Shakspere, signs his name Robert 11.
Giless, and dates his communication on the 10th of
April, 1866, from No. 68, Guildford-street, Russ-ill-

•
square.]
He prefaces his argument by remarking, that—
" The question to whom the sonnets were ad-
dressed has given employment to several ingenious
minds. The Woman has ever remained a complete
mystery, but three or four names have been put for-
ward as candidates for the representation of the
Man. Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton,
had a supporter in Drake. Mr. Boaden and others
have taken considerable pains to impose the sonnets
on William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. A [certain]
W. Hughes has been wildly suggested; and still more
wildly Shakspere's own nephew, W. Hart. From
one quarter we are deliberately informed that the
sonnets arc a heterogeneous medley of unconnected
love verses, from another that they are not sonnets
at all, but distinct poems. Mr. Armitage Brown
was the author of this theory, but his classification
of the poems is so loose as to defeat itself. For
instance he tells us that us that stanzas one
to twenty-six are written by Shakespere to
his friend persuading him to marry—but all
persuasion to anything of the kind stops
at the seventeenth verse. In fact, Mr. Armitage
Brown was working in a mist. Another and a new
theory some four years ago reached us from Ger-
many, entitled a Key to Shakspere's Sonnets,'
wherein, by an analysis of nearly every verse, the
author endeavoured to prove Shakspere's own Genius
to be the subject of the poem ; this was treated as
a German idea,' but I strongly suspect the only
fault of the German lay in the simply confounding
of Shakspere's Poetic with his Dramatic Genius."
Then comes the writer's, that is Mr. Robert Giles's
own suggestion : the new Shaksperian commen-
tator expressing his notion in the manner fol-

lowing :
" My own theory," he writes, is that the so-called
sonnets are an entire poem, in two parts—that the
Boy is the Personification of Poetry or Poetic
Genius ; and that the Woman is the Personification
of the Drama or Dramatic Genius. The first
part of the poem is the expression of Shakspere's
religious love of Poetry. The second of his more
familiar but not less absorbing love of the Drama.
The whole is a Psychological Hymn, dedicated to the
Genius which inspired it.
" For those who argue from a material point of
view, and for the sake of argument, we will suppose
William Herbert, Henry Wriothesley, W. Hughes,
and W. Hart combined in the person of one indivi-
dual, whom we will designate by the initials in the
dedication, Mr. W. H., beautiful and accomplished,

but thoroughly mortal; and placing him in perspec-
tive before us ["Tis distance lends enchantment
to the view'] we will open in the middle of the
first part of the poem, and choosing the fifty-third
sonnet or verse, read as addressed to him these lines
of our ever true and wise-speaking poet
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend,
Since every one hath every one one shade
And you but ono can every shadow lend.'
Millions of strange shadows do not tend on ordi-
dinary persons,,but they do upon the imagination
of a Poet. Addressed to Mr. IV. IL these lines
have no meaning. Let us substitute the Genius of
Poetry, and read them once more :
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend,
Since every one hath every one one shade,
And you but one can every shadow lend.'
The lines become luminous, more than that, they
become Shaksperian. Now apply the same test to
a verse which to me appears to end the first divi-
sion of a two-part poem. We commence with Mr.
W. :

0 thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power
Dost hold Time's fickle glass, his sickle, hour.'
If Shakspere is addressing a Mr. W. H. of flesh
and blood, then is Shakspere not to be depended on.
If, on the contrary, he is addressing a conception of
the Genius of Poetry, then still is Shakspere true
to himself. For poetry can truly be said to hold
in its power Time's glass, sickle, and hour.
Poetry triply shows, reaps, and endures. It shows
the changes of men and manners, it reaps the
beauty of all things past or present, and it endures
when other things have long decayed. It is the
last survivor of a realm destroyed—the ono thing
not oblivious.
Who bast by waning grown and therein show'st,
Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow'st,'
Addressed to Mr. IV. H. this is without meaning ;
addressed to Poetic Genius, it is a time-embracing
truth.
If Nature, sovereign mistress, over wrack,
As thou goest onward still will pluck thee back,
She keeps thee to this purpose that her skill
May time disgrace and wretched minutes kill.
Yet fear her, 0 thou minion of her pleasure,
She may detain but yet not keep her treasure ;
Her audit, though delayed, answer'd must be,
And her quietus is to render thee.'
Mr. W. H., or Poetry Personified ? Shakspere the
the Poet, or Shakspere the writer of hyperbolical
and meaningless love-verses? What shall it be ?
" In what manner of estimation [our theorist
next considers] was the drama in Shakspere's time :
and [he almost asks point-blank] whether Dramatic
Works were considered as much a part of Literature
asPoeticWorks. Referringto thehistory of the time,
we find that they were not. Against the one poem
of the Faery Queen,' as recognised literature, all
Shaksperes plays were for naught. Dramatic writ-
ings depended on the stage for perpetuation, for
continual approval, or for public neglect. The stage
at the same time made their fame and was their

condemnation.
" How then if Shakspere, knowing himself [to be]
as great as a Poet as he was a Dramatist, and feeling
assured of the non-durability of his plays, should have
contemplated writing a poem which would live, and
adequately represent to future times how true a
Genius his was ? How if in these lines he is speak-
ing to his Poetic Genius as contra-distinguished from
his Dramatic Genius? How if this all beautiful, all
accomplished ' Boy' be the personification of his
Poetic Genius? Would such a conception be beyond
Shakspere,:or is it not such as a great poet like Shak-
spere, whose sole hope to be remembered with
Spenser rested upon his earliest productions, the
' Venus and Adonis,' and the Rape of Lucrece'
Tould conceive?

Thou which art now the world's fresh ornament.'
Was not the Elizabethan Poetry, the world's fresh
ornament, is it not now the cause of wonder and
admiration? Might not Shakspere, knowing the
divinity within him, have embodied his Genius with
Poetry and Poetry with his Genius ? Was such a
conception too great for him, who was all Poet as
well as Dramatist? Is it not possible he may have
experienced a bitter remorse at having expended
all his genius on the possibly perishable Drama, and
neglected the imperishable and higher-estimated
Poetry. Read in this light, does not the first sonnet
read as worthy of our poet?
" In the second sonnet we read
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field, &c.'
Might not forty years have exhausted the fame of
his dramas, or have exhausted their popularity ?
Did it not nearly ? Have they not been preserved
to Ile almost by a miracle ? Did be not well

to fortify himself, or .the beauty of his picte'd his Genius Poetic, and contrasted it with his
own Genius, against oblivion by a Poem ? Genius Dramatic—holding himself between the two
And taking this combination of sonnets, this poem, —bending in love, which is almost idolatry, before
as the 'fair child' of his Genius, will it not be the one; and, utterly against his conviction, yield-
found worthy of it? I have called it a poem, and ing in love to the other—is food for long astonish-
a poem complete I shall prove it to be. meat.
" Having his plays as proof of his capacity, we "Not Hamlet, unstable, between the slow move-
can well understand his meaning. meats of his awfully invoked moral purpose and the
"I take the first sixteen verses to be inductive to the incessant activity of his mental abstractions—not
poem. It is his own exhortation to his Poetic Genius to Anthony, all human, between his dominions, and
beget by marriage with a subject or verse—or, in his honour; and his love for the Egyptian, are more
poetic signification, with his muse—a true and faith remarkable contemplations than the knowledge this
ful likeness of itself, which likeness will be found poem reveals to us of how the mind of Shakspere
in the poem. was tortured between his life-deep love of Poetry
" But how about the Woman ? and his helpless passionate fondnesS for the Drama•.
" The ' lovely Boy' is the personirication of Poe- ' Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
try—the Woman the personification of the Drama ! Which like two spirits do suggest me still ;
What but Poetry could Shakspere so seriously love? The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill ; _
What but the Drama could he, against his reason, so
To win me soon to hell my female evil
passionately pursue ? How but in its love for the Tompteth my better angel from my side,
Drama could Shakspere's Poetic Genius have been And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,

false to him ?
" And how is it that, by reading the poem in this
light, it not only becomes lucid throughout, but
takes the shape of the finest Psychological Poem in
our language, even to the last two discarded son-
nets, which become an apt and necessary ending.
" But [it may be objected] some of these
Sonnets r had been written long before 1609,
the year in which they were published. True ;
and so long had Shakspere contemplated this poem,
so long had the dramatist known and bitterly felt
in what estimation the world held him. For all the
appreciation his astounding merit had created—he
knew the scarlet brand of Dramatist and Actor to be
upon him. The vulgar impurities of the stage
dragged even him, in the intellectual opinion of the
world, to a kindred level. But why did he not,
cognisant as he was of all this, give his attention
to the composition of a Great Poem ?
"The Puritans were bitter against the stage, and
not without cause. But to Shakspere, who wrote
with a great and good object, and than whom Mil-
ton was not more spiritual, the knowledge of being
classed with vicious and false writers must have
been most galling. As bad as the invective of the
Puritans, to a noble and excelling mind must have
been the familiarity of the vulgar. And the abbre-
viation of his name into Will' by unthinking
fools was as much an insult to Shakspere as it would
have been to Milton to have heard himself desig-
nated Jack' by an illiterate cobbler. But Shak-
spere, knowing his blamelessness, found solace in
communing with his Friend—his only true Friend
—and that was his Genius.
Your love and pity doth the impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow,
For what care I who calls me well or ill
So you o'ergreen my bad, my good allow.
You are my all the world, and I must strive
To know my shame and praises from your tongue,
None else to me nor I to none alive.
That my steel'd sense or changes right or wrong.
In so profound Abysm I throw all care
Of others' voices, that my adders' ears
To critic and to flatterer stopped are.
Mark how with my neglect I do dispense :
You are so strongly to my purpose wed
That all the world besides methinks are dead.'
No biography—though it chronicled him to the
daily lacing of his shoes— could yield us such a
knowledge of Shakspere as this one Poem. But let
us come to the Second Part. In the first fuur lines
we find him contrasting the opinion of his
own times regarding the Drama with the
estimation in which it was held of oldby the Greeks,
and more than that we read in a sonnet a vindication
of his own originality.
In the old time black was not counted fair,
Or if it were it bore not beauty's name ;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame;
For since each hand bath put on nature's power,
Fairing the foul with art's false borrow'd face,
• Sweet beauty bath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited; and they mourners seem
At such who sot born fair no beauty lack,
Slandering oreation with a false esteem.
Yet so they mourn becoming of their woe
That every tongue says beauty should look so.'
Shakspere—no copyist, no disciple of other men, bu
a free and absolute master of his own art—is here
thinking with his own mind and unreserved judg-
ment. As an original mind, he is on a level with
Sophocles; and equally capable of furnishing'a stan-
dard of dramatic excellence. His judgment tells him
that his dramas are good, great, and original. His
critics tell him that they are irregular, not after the
Greek models ; in fact, that they are bastard composi-
tions. Weighing his critics' condemnation against his
own right estimation of his works, he says :
In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were it bore not beauty's name ;
•
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slander'd with a bastard shame.'
In the construction of his plays Shakspere fol-
lowed the dictates of his own judgment; he pur-
posely discarded the ancient form of the drama,
and chose to be original. Had he pleased he could
have constructed his plots with as exact a regard to
the unities as the Greeks themselves. He wanted
greater space. The Greeli had their own ideas of
excellence. Shakspere, like all great masters,
had his. It was not from ignorance, but from abso-
lute choice that he so constructed his pieces. The
Greeks chose narrowness of space and time, Shaks-
pere breadth and length. The Greeks, art.
Shakspere both art and nature. That his contem-
poraries did not understand him we can well
imagine. It is only now that his independence
and excellence are beginning to receive a proper
acknowledgment. Ho was not only in ad-
vance of his own time, bnt ho is of ours also.
His plays could not be otherwise than pleasing
but they were not understood. It is only the other
day that Hamlet' was comprehended,. and possi-
bly the failure of its being appreciated in his own
day as a great masterpiece gave birth to the ninety-
third sonnet :
Then hate me`when thou wilt, if ever now,
Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross, &c.'
Leaving the hundred and twenty-eighth sonnet,
which is a wonderfully written allusion to the Stage
and Actors, we will pause at sonnets cxxxv. and
the one in which Shakspere alludes to his faniiliar
title of The sonnets are good-humoured,
and probably were written after a dramatic success,
but there is still expressed in them a sense of to
what familiarity his vocation doomed him.
" Wonderfully popular as a Dramatist we know
him to have been, but c-Hticism, though it awarded
him many excellences, was against him as a Supreme
Artist. It was his own knowledge of his own great-
ness which struck out lines like these :
In so profound ilbyssni I throw all care
Of others' voices, that my adders' ears
To flatterer and to critic stopped are.'
This feeling is obvious in many stanzas of the poem,
and a deep and bitter feeling it was too. The know-
ing that he had abandoned Poetry for the Drama, and
that his Poetic Genius was only truly represented iu
his dramas, caused him deep regret. He represents
his Genius, in the form of his Friend, as altogether in
the Woman's (the Drama's) power :
That thou bast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I loved her dearly,
That she hath thee is of my' wailing chief—
A loss in love touches me more nearly.
But his consolation is, that in having his Genius the
Drama hath him (Shakspere) also :
'But here's the joy ; my friend and I aro one,
Sweet flattery shows she loves but me alone.'
"The second part of the poem, after fully reveal-
ing in what manner he estimated and how tho-
roughly he loves the Drama, concludes with two
stanzas, leaving him still her Lover and her Ser-
vant.

Wooing his purity with her foul pride
And whether that my angel be turned fiend
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell,
• But being both from me, both to each friend
I guess ono angel in another's hell.
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.'
As I have before stated, he has personified his
Poetic Genius in the form of Man, youthful, beauti-
ful, and all-accomplished.
"But, with doubtful attributes, the colouring of the
time, and in the form of Woman, he has personified
the Drama. Thoroughly to unfold the thousand
beauties of this work of ideas, would require a long
and complete analysis of nearly every line. Afore
real knowledge of Shakspere will be derived from
it eventually than all the labours of his lovers have
brought to light. Careful and most attentive study
is required to read it, and only those of peculiar
minds will ever understand it. I doubt if in the
world there is another poem at once so abstruse,
so beautiful, so delicate, or so difficult.
"Completed in his forty-fifth year—his very prime
—he left it as his masterpiece : so carefully veiling
under a material garb the faithful likeness of his
own Great Soul, that for nearly three centuries it
has passed before the eyes of curious men utterly
unobserved I I conclude with a verse addressed to
the Genius of Poetry as it existed in him, and as it
may in others be existing now :
Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written embassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit ;
Duty so great which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare in wanting words to show it ;
But that I hope some good conceit of thine,
In thy soul's thought all naked will bestow it ;
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving
Points on me graciously with fair aspect,
And puts apparel on my tatter'd loving
To show me worthy of my sweet respect ;
Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee ;
Till then, not show my head where thou waY'st
prove me.' "
[And so—with the sound of Shakspere's own words
ringing in our ears—we are left by Mr. Robert Giles
to meditate over the ingenuity, and, as it appears
to us also no less distinctly, the exquisite beauty
and self-evident reasonableness -of his expansion
or adaptation of the German theory he himself Las
frankly alluded to as having first indicated in any
way satisfactorily (but, even then, when left to itseal
but very dimly) the real inner hidden meaning '3'
these wonderful Sonnets. As affording an exPl3-
nation of a very lovely but (until now) inscrutable
enigma, this little essay of Mr. Robert Giles's might
henceforth, as it appears to us, be most judiciously.
prefixed to every new edition of the Sonnets that
may hereafter be published. For having merely
propounded his theory we feel almost under a Per-
sonal obligation to this true lover and most saga-
cious reader of Shakspere.]

"The poem was published in 1609, with an enig-
matical dedication to a Mr. W. ii. Those who
truly study this last poetic work of our foremost
man will easily understand that to none other than
himself could it have been dedicated. William and
Himself beyond all question are the. two words
indicated by the initials.
" But the poem is the most valuable in our lan-
guage. There is nothing like it in literature. Upon
its composition Shakspere has expended the trea-
sures of his most intricate thought, all his best com-
mand of language. From beginning to end there
is not one purposeless word. It is at the same time
the delineation and celebration of his Poetic Genius,
and the revelation of his moral associations with
the Drama.
" The inconceivable skill with which he has de-