An enjoyable little book. The blurb on the back cover says "... Wilde tells the intriguing and tragic story of a young man's quest to prove the identity of 'the onlie Begetter' of Shakespeare's Sonnets. The 'Ballad of Reading Gaol', which was Wilde's last work, was written as a result of his imprisonment after losing a libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry in 1895." Both are good bedtime reading although , in my view, the poem is much better read out aloud - and what a great poem it is! ( )

“Art … can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance,” Oscar Wilde’s narrator says in this book. As Wilde so often does, he captures intriguing insight in an epigram. What you see in art says more about you than about the subject.
The subject of Wilde’s novella is simple (though the telling is convoluted). The narrator describes a talk with his friend Erskine, who explains a theory created by another young man that Shakespeare wrote his sonnets for Mr W.H., an imagined “boy actor” from Shakespeare’s troupe at the Globe Theatre. Erskine says the story is a fraud, but the narrator becomes obsessed with the idea and analyzes many of the sonnets to show how they support the theory. This part is an interesting reading of the sonnets, giving a way of understanding them that was completely missing in my long-ago reading of the sonnets. In my own reading, the sonnets themselves are often difficult and obscure because the twisted syntax and allusions make many sentences hard to follow, but the story got me to go back and re-read some of them.
I was interested to read the narrator’s (that is, Wilde’s) analysis because I like the idea of Shakespeare having what Wilde calls an intimate male friendship and writing impassioned poetry to his friend. (Although I wonder if the boy actor would understand the poems any better than I did.) And I read the novella as Wilde’s own interest in the notion of an artist falling for a beautiful young male lover, as he did later in his own life. This novella looks like a disguised way to bring homoerotic attraction to the late-Victorian society that later convicted Wilde for the crime of expressing that love physically. So this is me liking the idea of Wilde liking the idea of the narrator’s obsession about Shakespeare being drawn to an inspiring male muse.
As the story advances, the narrator develops a fascination with the imagined boy actor, his life and the so-called “dark lady” of one group of sonnets. He proposes a re-ordering of the Sonnets to support his reading. He writes up his theory and shares it with his friend Erskine. Erskine reverses his own initial scepticism and declares he is convinced, but the narrator suddenly decides it was a foolish and nonsensical obsession. Erskine adopts the obsession and pursues it further to a tragic but ambiguous end.
This is where Wilde’s epigram on art comes in. Wilde’s narrator reflects on it in after he rejects the boy-actor theory, suggesting that the narrator didn’t want to acknowledge what he saw in the theory. The narrator could not accept his own attraction to Shakespeare’s passion because he recognized that it revealed too much about himself. Erskine initially rejected that same recognition, but then followed it to a tragic result (presaging Wilde’s tragic result for the same obsession).
The story has a further reflexive turn at the end, as readers then have to ask what their own response to the story says about themselves. While this self-recognition seems unproblematic for most modern readers, I wonder if Victorian readers were open to it. The story was published only in a shorter magazine form, but Wilde was unsuccessful in publishing the longer version that is available here. ( )

How had I never heard of this book? No idea, but I was delighted to find it in a bookshop and give it a read. A fascinating study of forgery and literary interpretation. ( )

The fact that William Shakespeare’s Sonnets are dedicated to one Mr W.H. has been the source of much speculation. Eighteenth century critic Thomas Tyrwhitt suggests that the sonnets are written for a person known as William Hughes. He bases this theory on his interpretation of the Sonnets, lines like “A man in hue, all Hues in his controlling” (the 20th sonnet) where the word ‘Hue’ is capitalised and italicised and the multiple puns on the name ‘Will’ found in the sonnets.

The Portrait of Mr. W.H. is a short story by Oscar Wilde; it only took me about twenty minutes so I don’t think I’ll say much about it but it was a story I wanted to review. Yes, it was required reading for university but it was an interesting enough piece that getting my thoughts down seemed like a good idea. I remember reading The Picture of Dorian Gray a long time ago and not getting on with it; maybe I wasn’t for me or maybe I just hadn’t had the literary knowledge to get something out of it. In any case, I’m curious enough that maybe Dorian Gray will be a reread in the future.

I want to compare The Portrait of Mr. W.H. with My Life as a Fake because they both seem to talk about a similar topic. While My Life as a Fake covered a literary hoax, The Portrait of Mr. W.H. looks at a piece of literary criticism that has been around for a long time and is often talked about. I don’t agree with this theory and it is important to know that Oscar Wilde didn’t either, although by the end he almost did. What I really liked about this story is the fact that Wilde took a differing view of the Sonnets and tried to explore it. This is an excellent example of literary criticism because it got me looking at the Sonnets in another way, even if I didn’t agree with it.

The fact that Oscar Wilde managed to write this literary criticism in a form of a story was equally impressive. The whole story has this real gothic feel about it and the character of Willie Hughes showed vampiric characteristics in the way he destroyed lives, in particular Cyril’s. Yet another similarity to My Life as a Fake is the whole idea that literature or the author can be portrayed as a monster.

I read this story as social criticism, looking at the homo-eroticism of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and question if a particular piece of text has any effect on the value of the art form. I don’t know many people complaining about the homoerotic nature of Shakespeare but I’ve heard complaints about it when referring to Oscar Wilde. Wilde was a big believer in celebrating art as being art and not letting the opinion of the artist affect it. This means The Portrait of Mr. W.H. is a satirical look at the art, where you have to take a more literal approach and explore the life of William Shakespeare as an artist and its connection to the Sonnets.

Oscar Wilde tantalises the reader with his literary and social criticism, mix in the satirical nature of this story and the wit of the author and you have a compelling read. One thing I’ve been thinking about is the connection between this story and The Picture of Dorian Gray which I would like to leave you with. They both share very similar titles but in Dorian Gray you have a portrait that ages and the reader see the truth, of Gray and all his sins. While in The Portrait of Mr. W.H. the picture of Willie Hughes is a lie and I have to wonder the meaning behind this imagery when comparing the two.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2014/02/27/the-portrait-of-mr-w-h-by-oscar-wilde... ( )

A mini-book containing a short story and a poem by Oscar Wilde.

The Portrait of Mr W.H.
A story of three men's obsession with the identity of the man to whom Shakespeare's sonnets were dedicated.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol
The famous poem about a guardsman under sentence of death, written while Wilde was himself in prison.

I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All we know who lie in gaol
Is that the walls are strong;
And that each day is like a year
A year whose days are long. ( )