BOOKS: The Portrait Of W.H.

In 1609 just whom was Shakespeare addressing in those “love sonnets?” Was it William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke as many have theorized? Hmm. And was it he who is the subject of that mysterious dedication to Mr. W.H.? Speculation has run rampart for the past 400 years. Who really was the fair youth with whom Shakespeare was so smitten? Scholars are no where near certain although many assert otherwise. Well… leave it to Oscar Wilde to venture a guess. Wilde throws his “literary opinion” in the ring with a wonderful and little read fictional work called, “The Portrait of W.H. In a clever and twisting plot Wilde theorizes that W.H., the actual subject of the first 120 sonnets was not Pembroke, but a beautiful boy actor named Will Hughes. In Wilde’s story a young Cambridge scholar and actor Cyril Graham makes this startling discovery. However no one else shares his conviction, but Graham is so convinced that he forges a portrait of Will Hughes who he depicts as leaning on an edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets and the plot moves on from there…No spoilers here. However, The Portrait of W.H. is more than a clever story. Wilde uses it as a thinly veiled declaration of his own love of beautiful young men. Every line drips with suggestion and innuendo and it’s fascinating to see Wilde become so bold in his declarations in what was considered at the time a scandalous work. “Portrait” is a quintessential read for understanding the Aesthetic movement of the 19^th century, the love of art and the literary life with its opium like obsession that it can cause. Wilde worked on it while he was incarcerated and the manuscript disappeared for many years and then turned up in 1921 in a personal collection. (Original NY Times article, published on June 17^th 1921) of its discovery. Hesparus Classics printed a nice edition in 2003 and it can be found on Amazon for about $14.00 or if you’re cheap for free on the Internet.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,

Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.