Wilde begins ‘The Portrait of Mr. W.H.’ in a fictional setting: the three main characters are the un-named Narrator, his older friend Erskine and the deceased Cyril Graham who Erskine speaks about, introducing the theory about the identity of Mr. W.H.
Wilde sees the Sonnets as autobiographical and Erskine recalls:
To him, as indeed to me, they were poems of serious and tragic import, wrung out of the bitterness of Shakespeare’s heart, and made sweet by the honey of his lips
and he describes Cyril Graham’s theory in outline:
He told me that he had at last discovered the true secret of Shakespeare’s Sonnets; that all the scholars and critics had been entirely on the wrong track; and that he was the first who, working purely by internal evidence, had found out who Mr W. H. really was. He was perfectly wild with delight, and for a long time would not tell me his theory. Finally, he … sat down and gave me a long lecture on the whole subject…
…he went through all the Sonnets carefully, and showed, or fancied that he showed, that, according to his new explanation of their meaning, things that had seemed obscure, or evil, or exaggerated, became clear and rational, and of high artistic import, illustrating Shakespeare’s conception of the true relations between the art of the actor and the art of the dramatist.
“It is of course evident that there must have been in Shakespeare’s company some wonderful boy-actor of great beauty, to whom he intrusted the presentation of his noble heroines…
….the Sonnets are addressed… to a particular young man whose personality for some reason seems to have filled the soul of Shakespeare with terrible joy and no less terrible despair.
Who was that young man of Shakespeare’s day who, without being of noble birth or even of noble nature, was addressed by him in terms of such passionate adoration that we can but wonder at the strange worship, and are almost afraid to turn the key that unlocks the mystery of the poet’s heart? Who was he whose physical beauty was such that it became the very cornerstone 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 was 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…
Inspired by Erskine’s recounting of Cyril Graham’s theory, the Narrator begins his own research the next day. And this is where the bulk of Wilde’s analysis of the Sonnets begins in detail.
I intend to go through Shakespeare's Sonnets here, sonnet by sonnet, to see what Wilde says about each one.
'Oscar Wilde & Shakespeare's Sonnets' is available at: https://amzn.eu/d/0eJNYAeJ
