All Art [is] to a certain degree a mode of acting, an attempt to realise one’s own personality on some imaginative plane out of reach of the trammelling accidents and limitations of real life.

In the 1880s the young and unknown Oscar Wilde (born in 1854) was supporting himself and his young family through literary journalism, writing book reviews and essays. Towards the end of the decade i.e. as he entered his 30s, Wilde tried longer works, including a number of critical essays and experiments with the dialogue form. In 1891 he collected four of these together in a volume titled Intentions (1891). Another work which dates from this period is The Portrait of Mr. W. H., a semi-scholarly investigation into the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s Sonnets which is also a beguiling experiment in prose form: part fictional detective story, part critical essay, all Oscar.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the mystery of W.H.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published in 1609. There are 154 of them. When they first appeared, they were not gathered at random but seemed to be arranged to tell a story or describe incidents in the life of the author.

The series starts with a set of 17 poems, traditionally called the ‘procreation sonnets’. These appear to be addressed to a young man (never named) encouraging him to get married, have children and carry on the line of a distinguished family. Scholars speculate that these early sonnets were actually commissioned from Shakespeare by an aristocratic family for just that purpose.

But with sonnet 18 the tone changes and becomes increasingly personal, as the poet appears to fall in love with the young man he had previously been directing these pretty factual poems to. After sonnet 18 the poems change in tone to become more and more passionate and committed – and then broaden out to consider themes of love and life, the poet sometimes expressing joy, sometimes jealousy, sometimes despair, sometimes the melancholy of ageing.

In total the first 126 sonnets appear to be addressed to, or inspired by, this unnamed young man. Late in the sequence there is the appearance of a woman, also unnamed and referred to only as ‘the Dark Lady’. Progressive critics have always liked to think she was actually Black, but maybe she just had a dark complexion or simply black hair. The poet appears to be in love with her, too — i.e. bisexual, in love with a handsome young man and a raven-haired woman – and the sonnets to her are among the most beautiful love poems ever written. The last 28 poems are either addressed to, or refer to, this unnamed woman.

At some point in the sequence some undefined disaster seems to take place in which the poet discovers his male friend and the Dark Lady are having an affair behind his back (?). There are obscure references to an incident in which he seems to have been humiliated, either sexually or psychologically or both. This is indicated by a sequence of sonnets expressing intense despair and disgust with love and sex.

And then, toward the end, the poet seems to accept the situation, which appears to be that the young man has taken the Dark Lady away from him i.e. they have both betrayed his love, and the poems become sad, resigned but accepting.

To summarise: no names are ever given, the other ‘characters’ in this psychodrama never speak (unlike in Shakespeare’s famous plays), but nonetheless the sequence as a whole moves through some highly dramatic events and expresses a kaleidoscope of emotions around the ideas of love and sex and death in wonderfully expressive verse.

For the last 400 years readers and critics have speculated endlessly about who the young man was and who the Dark Lady was and what the devil went on between this star-crossed trio. The original edition of the poems, the only one during Shakespeare’s lifetime, gives a hint which is just vague enough to have sparked a thousand theories without being concrete enough to provide decisive proof. It’s given in the dedication of the First Edition, which reads thus:

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.

T.T.

The T.T. who appears to be the author of this dedication is almost certainly Thomas Thorpe who was the volume’s publisher. Why on earth was he writing it? Well, most books of the time were dedicated to an aristocratic patron, so maybe Shakespeare was too busy to provide a dedication and Thorpe knocked one out for him.

But the big question raised by this brief dedication is – who the devil is W.H? Over the years scholars and critics have suggested a wide range of possible candidates including:

• William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke: Pembroke was to be the dedicatee of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1623
• Henry Wriothesley (the Earl of Southampton), with his initials reversed in a typical piece of Elizabethan wordplay. Southampton had been the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s long narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, published back in 1593 and was known for his good looks, a prominent characteristic of the young man addressed in the sonnets.
• Maybe it was a printing error for Shakespeare’s own initials, W.S. or W. Sh.
• or William Hall, a printer who had worked with Thorpe
• or Sir William Harvey, Southampton’s stepfather
• or William Haughton, a contemporary dramatist

Those are the most popular suspects. You get the idea. There are numerous theories, each becoming steadily more implausible and stretching the slender evidence of this dedication and the murky hints within the sonnets themselves to breaking point.

The Portrait of Mr. W. H. Chapter 1

To cut to the chase, Wilde thought the dedication 1) was to the same young man to whom the poems were addressed, and 2) that he was Willie Hughes, a young actor who played female roles in Shakespeare’s plays. Hence the older man-writing-to-very young man tone and the gender-bending jokes which recur throughout the sonnets.

But what is very distinctive about Wilde’s text is that he doesn’t present his evidence in a critical essay, but instead embeds it in a short story, in fictional form. He creates a fictional narrator who has a fictional friend, Erskine, and concocts a series of meetings and discussions between the narrator and Erskine in which the latter mentions and describes a friend of his, one Cyril Graham, who espouses the theory Wilde wants to promote. Quite a round-the-houses way of doing things.

There’s a load of background on this Cyril Graham character, who was at Eton with Erskine, during which Wilde takes the time to mock the Victorian values of hard work:

It is always an advantage not to have received a sound commercial education.

And to emphasise Graham’s attractiveness in blatantly homoerotic terms at very great length:

He was effeminate, I suppose, in some things, though he was a very good rider and a capital fencer…But he was very languid in his manner, and not a little vain of his good looks, and had a strong objection to football…he always set an absurdly high value on personal appearance, and once read a paper before our debating society to prove that it was better to be good-looking than to be good. He certainly was wonderfully handsome…I think he was the most splendid creature I ever saw, and nothing could exceed the grace of his movements, the charm of his manner. He fascinated everybody who was worth fascinating, and a great many people who were not. He was often wilful and petulant, and I used to think him dreadfully insincere…He was horribly spoiled. All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.

This prime slice of Wilde homoeroticism contributes nothing whatsoever to the theory but serves to create a gay ambience as a sort of aesthetic foundation for the actual theory. Erskine goes on to explain how Cyril Graham’s androgynous beauty made him a particularly effective actor of the women’s parts in Shakespeare’s plays. Ah.

Cyril was always cast for the girls’ parts, and when As You Like It was produced he played Rosalind. It was a marvellous performance. In fact, Cyril Graham was the only perfect Rosalind I have ever seen. It would be impossible to describe to you the beauty, the delicacy, the refinement of the whole thing. It made an immense sensation…

In the story Cyril Graham left university and settled in London but failed to get a job and devoted his days to reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets and his nights to the theatre. Finally (Erskine tells the narrator) this Graham character invited him (Erskine) one evening, round to his rooms in Piccadilly overlooking Green Park (nobody but Russian mafia or Arab sheiks could afford a flat in that area nowadays) and gets round to making – after all this fictional preamble – Wilde’s actual points.

Against the Earl of Pembroke

First he dismisses the claim of the Earl of Pembroke to be Mr W.H:

One: he thinks the dedicatee must be someone who played a key role in the development of Shakespeare’s dramatic art, so this disqualifies the two usual suspects, Pembroke and Southampton.

Two: also, the sonnets themselves emphasise that the target of his passion was not high-born or aristocratic: sonnet 25 contrasts the author with those who are “great princes’ favourites,”

Three: We know from one or two other scattered references that the sonnets had been written before 1598, and sonnet 104 informs us that Shakespeare’s friendship for the young man had been already in existence for three years i.e. since 1595. Now, Lord Pembroke was born in 1580 and didn’t come to London till he was eighteen years of age i.e. in 1598. Thus Shakespeare could not have known Lord Pembroke till after the Sonnets had been written.

Four: one sonnet refers to the young man’s father being dead but Pembroke’s father didn’t die till 1601.

Five: it is inconceivable that any publisher would address a dedication to such a notable and highly placed aristocrat as the Earl of Pembroke simply as ‘Mr W.H.’ Not giving him his proper title and referring to him as ‘my lord’ would cause more offence than good feeling and ruin the book’s chances.

Against the Earl of Southampton

Graham moves on to dismiss the claim of Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, born 1573.

One: Southampton became at a very early age the lover of Elizabeth Vernon, so he needed no entreaties to marry.

Two: he was not beautiful, as the addressee of the poems is.

Three: he did not resemble his mother, as, according to Sonnet 3, Mr. W. H. did:

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;

Four: his Christian name was Henry, whereas the punning sonnets 135 and 143 show that the Christian name of Shakespeare’s friend was the same as his own — Will.

Against various other candidates

Wilde’s fictional mouthpiece doesn’t even bother to present evidence about the other possible candidates, he simply mocks them as ridiculous candidates, including the notions:

• that ‘Mr. W. H.’ is a misprint for ‘Mr. W. S.’, meaning Mr. William Shakespeare
• that ‘Mr. W. H. all’ should be read ‘Mr. W. Hall’
• that ‘Mr. W. H.’ is ‘Mr. William Hathaway (Shakespeare’s brother-in-law, his wife being Anne Hathaway)
• that ‘a full stop should be placed after “wisheth,” making Mr. W. H. the writer and not the subject of the dedication’
• that ‘Mr W.H.’ stands for ‘Mr. William Himself’

In his excellent notes to the Penguin edition of Wilde’s short stories and essays, Ian Small points out that all these theories had been proposed in the 1850s and ’60s. Wilde was in fact indebted for all these theories to Edmund Dowden’s 1881 scholarly book about the Sonnets.

Abstract theories

He also dismisses the theory of some critics that the sonnets are addressed not to real people but to philosophical or religious abstractions such as his own ‘Ideal Self’, or ‘Ideal Manhood’, or ‘the Spirit of Beauty’, or the Divine Logos, or the Catholic Church.

Graham’s case

Wilde has Erskine tell the narrator that Graham thought the sonnets are themselves secondary, that the figure Shakespeare addressed was the inspiration for his whole art i.e. his playwriting.

Who was he whose physical beauty was such that it became the very corner-stone of Shakespeare’s art; the very source of Shakespeare’s inspiration; the very incarnation of Shakespeare’s dreams? To look upon him as simply the object of certain love-poems is to miss the whole meaning of the poems: for the art of which Shakespeare talks in the Sonnets is not the art of the Sonnets themselves, which indeed were to him but slight and secret things — it is the art of the dramatist to which he is always alluding.

And this is the basis of Graham’s argument that the addressee of the sonnets

was surely none other than the boy-actor for whom he created Viola and Imogen, Juliet and Rosalind, Portia and Desdemona, and Cleopatra herself.

Graham deduces the addressee’s name from the poems themselves. Sonnets 135 and 143 pun on the name Will, playing games with the fact that poet and beloved share the same name. On this reading, we have Will as the addressee’s first name. And Graham deduces the last name from sonnet 20 where Mr. W. H. is described as:

A man in hew, all Hews in his controwling

where Hews is given in italics, clearly indicating a play on the name. A shrewd objection would be, Why doesn’t this name appear in the complete list of actors in Shakespeare’s company given in the First Folio of 1623? Precisely because Willie had left the company and that this is one of the betrayals the sonnets describe. It also adds point to the handful of sonnets which describe his rivalry with another or other poets of Shakespeare’s day, if his lover and muse abandoned Shakespeare’s company and defected to a rival one.

All this was told to Erskine on one long evening at Graham’s flat overlooking Green Park. Erskine tells the narrator he thoroughly enjoyed the evening but said the weakness in the theory was the lack of independent documentary evidence that any boy actor named Willie Hughes ever even existed. Find that, Erskine tells Graham, and he’ll believe his theory.

So this prompts Graham, in the weeks that follow, to go quarrying the registers of City churches, the manuscripts of the noted Shakespearian actor Edward Alleyn, held at Dulwich, the Record Office, the papers of the Elizabethan Lord Chamberlain (who had to approve plays for performance) and so on.

The faked portrait

There then comes a development so convenient as to be more fairy tale than plausible. Graham goes to stay with his people in Warwickshire and happens across an old Elizabethan chest in a farmhouse. He notices it has the initials W.H. carved on the front panel so he promptly buys it. A few days later he notices a bulge on the inside and discovers a hidden Elizabethan portrait of…a young man standing next to a small table, so that his hand is placed on an open copy of the Sonnets and next to the name ‘Master Will. Hews’, while two masks of Tragedy and Comedy hang somewhat formally from the marble pedestal of the table.

Graham contacts Erskine and tells him all about his exciting discovery and swears that it is true. But a few months later, by another fabulous coincidence, Erskine happens to see some beautiful etchings in a print shop in Holborn. The shop-keeper tells him they are by an impoverished artist named Edward Merton, so Erskine pays Merton a visit. The poor man shows him his portfolio and in it Graham is startled to see a drawing exactly like the alleged Elizabethan miniature Graham had showed him. As soon as he asks about it, the artist’s wife mentions it’s a sketch of a work he did recently for a Mr Cyril Graham. In other words, the portrait of Will Hews is a forgery and Graham had it commissioned, before spinning his cock and bull story to his friend.

Erskine goes straight round to Graham’s house and confronts him with the truth. They have a furious row, ‘high words passed between them’ and… next morning Graham is dead! He shot himself!! First scribbled an agitated letter defending the truth of his theory despite the forgery, claiming he only made the forgery because of Erskine, because he demanded physical proof. Now his dying wish is that Erskine make his theory known to the wider world.

At this point Erskine’s narration of past events ends and we are back in his rooms, in the present, as the text’s narrator asks him why he hasn’t carried out Graham’s last wishes. We learn for the first time that all this – Erskine and Graham’s wild enthusiasm for the theory, the presentation of the forged portrait and then the night of angry arguments and Graham’s suicide – all happened years and years ago.

Erskine is still very upset by it so that when the narrator announces that he will publish Graham’s theory to the world, he becomes quite cross, saying the whole thing was always a pack of nonsense, no reputable scholar would ever believe it, and anyway everyone thinks Graham’s death was an accident, he (Erskine) never revealed the suicide note, it would wreck his reputation and the lives of his family, and so on.

This time it’s the narrator and Erskine who have ‘high words’ in an eerie repetition of the earlier argument. They part on bad terms, the narrator now committed to doing whatever he can to validate ‘the most subtle Shakespearean critic of our day’ i.e. dead Graham.

The Portrait of Mr. W. H. Chapter 2

As the heading suggests, the text is divided into three chapters like a fiction, like a novella. Chapter II opens on the morning of the day after the narrator had his argument with Erskine, a day he devotes to rereading the Sonnets. In doing so he finds everywhere proofs of Graham’s theory. So many of the sonnets make sense if addressed to an actor, the epitome of Shakespeare’s own craft, and a person by profession paid to act many parts, at his most moving when least himself i.e. a boy acting the part of women, acting the opposite of himself, and yet making audiences weep with the power of his untruths, one of those:

That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone.

Solution to the procreation sonnets

The narrator admits to being puzzled about the first 17 sonnets, the so-called ‘procreation sonnets’. Shakespeare himself married young and it made him unhappy, why would he wish that on his beloved? Suddenly it dawns on him that a metaphorical marriage is referred to; Shakespeare is urging the addressee to marry his Muse, to take to the stage. The children he urges him to have are the dramatic roles he will play. They will outlive him in everyone’s memory, just as children outlive their parents. Clever.

Sonnets not referring to themselves but to the plays

The narrator makes an important distinction. He claims most commentators read the Sonnets’ many references to mighty lines and verse and ‘these lines’ and so on as referring to the sonnets themselves, for example:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

But the narrator says NO, this is a mistake. Shakespeare didn’t think much of the Sonnets themselves which, as we know from a contemporary source, he originally intended to be circulated only among a select few friends. The narrator insists these references be reinterpreted to refer to Shakespeare’s plays. If we take all the references to ‘these lines’ to refer not to the Sonnets but to his plays then many of the Sonnets can be reinterpreted to fit the Willie Hughes theory, as addressing Willie as the Muse not of the Sonnets but of his entire career of playwriting.

Metaphors for the stage

This is reinforced by the number of times the poet offers Willie a form of immortality which will last in men’s eyes i.e. on the stage, not between the covers of a book.

Elsewhere, the references to the beloved’s power over his audience — the ‘gazers,’ as Shakespeare calls them.

He also throws in the idea that actors are, as a caste, often histrionic and greedy for the approval and applause of others and that this emotional instability or over-wroughtness features in descriptions of the beloved.

In his ‘inconstant mind’ and his ‘false heart,’ it was easy to recognise the insincerity and treachery that somehow seem inseparable from the artistic nature, as in his love of praise that desire for immediate recognition that characterises all actors.

The rival poet

The narrator tells us that he then devoted a lot of time to identifying the unnamed rival poet who features in the middle of the sequence and who, it is implied, has stolen Willie away. The conventional view was this referred to rival playwright George Chapman but the narrator decides it can’t have been Chapman and must have been Christopher Marlowe.

Hints and fragments

He is excited to discover the existence of a ‘William Hewes’ in an account of the last days of the great Earl of Essex by his chaplain, Thomas Knell, who tells us that the night before the Earl died, he called his musician William Hewes to play upon the virginals and to sing. Admittedly this happened in 1576, but could the Willie Hewes of the Sonnets have been the son of the great Earl’s musician?

Seventy odd years later, the first English actress was ‘the lovely Margaret Hews, whom Prince Rupert so madly loved’ and who appeared in the role of Desdemona in 1660.

What if the 1576 William Hewes was the father, and Margaret Hews the daughter, of our Willie Hews? What if he was the central figure in an acting and performing dynasty?

(Without checking, I suspect both these references are forgeries by Wilde, which is appropriate enough in a text all about forgeries. Whether true or not, they partake of Wilde’s favourite kind of ‘fact’, something more like a hint or a suspicion, trembling on the brink of clarity without ever quite reaching it. On numerous occasions Wilde described ‘the aesthetic emotion’ is that intense trembling on the brink of meaning or revelation.)

Chapter II closes with an extended passage of purple prose in which Wilde’s narrator gives way to extended fantasy, speculating that young Willie may have been one of the English actors who took Shakespeare’s plays on tour to Germany and thus planted the seeds of the new drama there. Possibly he was one of the itinerant actors killed in an uprising in Nuremberg. Maybe he played before the great Duke Henry Julius of Brunswick.

Well, yes, maybe. Part II ends with a little hymn to the enduring beauty of the stage for, no matter where Willie died:

His true tomb, as Shakespeare saw, was the poet’s verse, his true monument the permanence of the drama. So had it been with others whose beauty had given a new creative impulse to their age. The ivory body of the Bithynian slave rots in the green ooze of the Nile, and on the yellow hills of the Cerameicus is strewn the dust of the young Athenian; but Antinous lives in sculpture, and Charmides in philosophy.

The Portrait of Mr. W. H. Chapter 3

In the third and final chapter the narrator writes a long, impassioned letter to Erskine bringing together all the fruits of his research and arguing forcefully for the Willie theory. Then a funny thing happens. He feels suddenly deflated and indifferent.

No sooner, in fact, had I sent it off than a curious reaction came over me. It seemed to me that I had given away my capacity for belief in the Willie Hughes theory of the Sonnets, that something had gone out of me, as it were, and that I was perfectly indifferent to the whole subject. What was it that had happened? It is difficult to say. Perhaps, by finding perfect expression for a passion, I had exhausted the passion itself. Emotional forces, like the forces of physical life, have their positive limitations. Perhaps the mere effort to convert any one to a theory involves some form of renunciation of the power of credence. Perhaps I was simply tired of the whole thing, and, my enthusiasm having burnt out, my reason was left to its own unimpassioned judgment. However it came about, and I cannot pretend to explain it, there was no doubt that Willie Hughes suddenly became to me a mere myth, an idle dream, the boyish fancy of a young man who, like most ardent spirits, was more anxious to convince others than to be himself convinced.

Ian Small points out that this notion that, once something has become perfectly expressed, it is finished, that it loses interest, that the artist moves on, was a recurring one with Wilde.

Anyway, next day the narrator rides round to Erskine’s place in Birdcage Walk, St James’s, finds him in the library and asks him to forgive him his enthusiasm and the harsh words he said during their argument. To his astonishment Erskine says no forgiveness is necessary because the narrator’s letter convinced Erskine that Graham’s theory is right.

But there is no evidence at all except a forged picture, the narrator remonstrates. Erskine is astonished: why has he (the narrator) suddenly dropped belief in something he wrote so passionately about to him (Erskine)?

He told me that he intended to devote his life to proving the theory, and that he was determined to do justice to Cyril Graham’s memory. I entreated him, laughed at him, begged of him, but it was of no use. Finally we parted, not exactly in anger, but certainly with a shadow between us. He thought me shallow, I thought him foolish. When I called on him again his servant told me that he had gone to Germany.

Two years pass then the narrator is handed a letter sent to him from the Hotel Angoulême in Cannes.

The gist of the letter was that he had tried in every way to verify the Willie Hughes theory, and had failed, and that as Cyril Graham had given his life for this theory, he himself had determined to give his own life also to the same cause. The concluding words of the letter were these: ‘I still believe in Willie Hughes; and by the time you receive this, I shall have died by my own hand for Willie Hughes’s sake:

The narrator packs an overnight bag, catches the train to Dover, the ferry to Calais, then the train the length of France to Cannes, jumps into a hansom cab and hurries to the hotel… only to discover Monsieur Erskine was buried two days earlier!

So the ‘story’ ends with an explosion of melodrama, death and suicide!

In fact there is more, a wild, absurd Victorian melodramatic twist: for the narrator sees Erskine’s mother, Lady Erskine, at the funeral, in mourning and accompanied by the family doctor. When he introduces himself, Lady Erskine says her son had left something for the narrator and leaves to fetch it. The narrator asks about Erskine’s suicide and is astounded to learn there was no suicide; no, no, Erskine died of natural causes, of a long, lingering tuberculosis.

The narrator is speechless… but the…what about the suicide note??

At that moment Lady Erskine returns carrying Erskine’s bequest to the narrator. It is, of course, the fateful forged painting of Willie Hughes. After this hectic, last minute melodrama, the narrative ends with a rather bland conclusion:

The picture hangs now in my library, where it is very much admired by my artistic friends. They have decided that it is not a Clouet, but an Oudry. I have never cared to tell them its true history. But sometimes, when I look at it, I think that there is really a great deal to be said for the Willie Hughes theory of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

Bland enough but the Gothic melodrama of the last few pages suggests to the reader that there is something diabolical in the theory, some curse on it and in the damned painting which Graham had forged, and which killed him, which Erskine took everywhere, and which killed him. Will it, the reader is inclined to wonder, will it be the end of the narrator, as well?

Factual commentary

William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke was the patron of many poets and the dedicatee of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works. As he was born in 1580, he’d have been 18 when Francis Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, a history of English literature since Chaucer’s day published in 1598, made a tantalisingly brief mention of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. To quote the passage in Meres:

As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.

So the Sonnets, or some sonnets, existed and were known about by 1598, thus making Pembroke just the right age to have been the teenage boy who is their subject.

Wilde’s characters mention that Mary Fitton is the conventional identification of the ‘Dark Lady’. Born in 1578, she would also have been in her teens if the sonnets were largely written by 1598, and so is also around the right age. Mary was a maid of honour to Elizabeth I and mistress of the Earl of Pembroke, by whom she had a child. She was suggested as the Dark Lady by Thomas Tyler in 1886.

In his excellent notes Ian Small points out that the identification of Mr W.H. with Willie Hughes was far from original and had been originally suggested by the eighteenth century critic Thomas Tyrwhitt and recorded in 1780.

The notion that the rival poet mentioned in the Sonnets was Christopher Marlowe had been suggested by Robert Cartwright in 1859.

In other words, none of the central factual content of the essay and its primary ideas were original, most had been around for a generation, some for a century.

Style commentary

But if the content is nowhere original, you can see how The Portrait of Mr. W. H. is an experiment in form, combining a large amount of literary scholarship with the popular contemporary genre of the detective story and then suddenly, at the very end, diverting into the ripest Victorian melodrama. It is a hybrid, a mash-up.

Second, it is about a fake, a forgery, and thus sits squarely amid one of Wilde’s central preoccupations: the difference between reality and art, the way art or fiction may be more true, true to the inner imagination and spirit of man, than the tedious outer ‘reality’ of our day-to-day life. That the most contrived and artificial work may be the most authentic – an idea which recurs throughout the serious prose and plays.

The painting itself is the obvious forgery at the heart of the story, but the theory itself is by way of being a dubious fiction, a fiction which characters by turn believe passionately or dismiss with contempt.

And then there is the peculiar behaviour of Erskine who, at the end of his life, wrote a fake suicide note to persuade the narrator he was taking his own life, when the opposite was true i.e. he was dying of an incurable disease.

In a way, you can see that Wilde is trying to achieve the kind of maze-like whirling up of ideas of truth and fiction, forgery and authenticity, real versus pretend passion, which Shakespeare does in so many of the actual Sonnets. In this way it is a sort of homage paid in Victorian prose to Shakespeare’s masterpiece in Elizabethan verse.

Third, the notion that the central figure was a beautiful boy who played women’s roles has an obvious appeal to Wilde’s sensual homosexuality and the narrative is full of appreciations of the young male beauty of the figure in the (faked) painting and in the narrator’s imagination, a type of perfect young male beauty which Wilde goes out of his way to also attribute to Cyril Graham, the ‘tragic’ figure at the centre of the story. And a sensual appreciation of this specific pair is echoed in passages about the beautiful young men of the ancient world

Everywhere you look in the story, there are handsome young men.

Wilde’s homoerotic prose

The young man depicted in the portrait is described in the sensual homoerotic style which would cause Wilde so much trouble at his trial 6 years later.

He seemed about seventeen years of age, and was of quite extraordinary personal beauty, though evidently somewhat effeminate. Indeed, had it not been for the dress and the closely cropped hair, one would have said that the face with its dreamy wistful eyes, and its delicate scarlet lips, was the face of a girl.

And again:

Willie Hughes became to me a kind of spiritual presence, an ever-dominant personality. I could almost fancy that I saw him standing in the shadow of my room, so well had Shakespeare drawn him, with his golden hair, his tender flower-like grace, his dreamy deep-sunken eyes, his delicate mobile limbs, and his white lily hands.

That Wilde liked teenage boys, beautiful and svelte with fine profiles and dreamy eyes, comes over powerfully in all his prose pieces.

London

But leaving pretty boys out of the picture for a moment, the narrative includes one of Wilde’s brief poetic descriptions of an over-familiar London landmark which shows it in a completely new light, the kind of thing used to excite me when I was a boy. Here the narrator is walking through St James’s Park:

As I walked home through St. James’s Park the dawn was just breaking over London. The white swans were lying asleep on the polished lake, and the gaunt Palace looked purple against the pale-green sky…

If only hot, dirty, traffic-ridden London really were like that!

Related links

• The Portrait of Mr. W. H. online
• Oscar Wilde online

Related reviews

• Oscar Wilde reviews
• Fiction of the 1890s