Welcome to The Annotated Portrait of Mr. W.H. Online

This project attempts to use the emerging tools of the digital humanities in order to create an online edition of Oscar Wilde’s short story “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” which will help readers and scholars be able to better understand this confounding text.

For background information on “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” and a full explanation of this project, please see the Introduction.

For an explanation of how this online edition works, see How to Use This Text.

For additional resources related to “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” and this project, see the Annotated Bibliography.

To begin reading, select Section I below.

I

I had been dining with Erskine in his pretty little house in Birdcage Walk, and we were sitting in the library over our coffee and cigarettes, when the question of literary forgeries happened to turn up in conversation.

II

It was past twelve o’clock when I awoke, and the sun was streaming in through the curtains of my room in long dusty beams of tremulous gold. I told my servant that I would not be at home to any one, and after I had discussed a cup of chocolate and a petit-pain, I took out of the library my copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, [and Mr Tyler’s facsimile edition of the Quarto,] and began to go carefully through them. Each poem seemed to me to corroborate Cyril Graham’s theory. I felt as if I had my hand upon Shakespeare’s heart, and was counting each separate throb and pulse of passion. I thought of the wonderful boy- actor, and saw his face in every line.

III

One evening I thought that I had really discovered Willie Hughes in Elizabethan literature. In a wonderfully graphic account of the last days of the great Earl of Essex, his chaplain, Thomas Knell, tells us that the night before the Earl died, “he called William Hewes, which was his musician, to play upon the virginals and to sing. ‘Play,’ said he, ‘my song. Will Hewes, and I will sing it myself.’ So he did it most joyfully, not as the howling swan, which, still looking down, waileth her end, but as a sweet lark, lifting up his hands and casting up his eyes to his God, with this mounted the crystal skies, and reached with his unwearied tongue the top of highest heavens.” Surely the boy who played on the virginals to the dying father of Sidney’s Stella was none other than the Will Hews to whom Shakespeare dedicated the Sonnets, and who he tells us was himself sweet “music to hear.” Yet Lord Essex died in 1576, when Shakespeare was but twelve years of age. It was impossible that his musician could have been the Mr W. H. of the Sonnets. Perhaps Shakespeare’s young friend was the son of the player upon the virginals? It was at least something to have discovered that Will Hews was an Elizabethan name. Indeed the name Hews seemed to have been closely connected with music and the stage. The first English actress was the lovely Margaret Hews, whom Prince Rupert so madly adored. What more probable than that between her andLord Essex’ musician had come the boy-actor of Shakespeare’s plays? [In 1587 a certain Thomas Hews brought out at Gray’s Inn a Euripidean tragedy entitled “The Misfortunes of Arthur,” receiving much assistance in the arrangement of the dumb shows from one Francis Bacon, then a student of law. Surely he was some near kinsman of the lad to whom Shakespeare said —

IV

[It was not for some weeks after I had begun my study of the subject that I ventured to approach the curious group of Sonnets (CXXVII-CLII) that deal with the dark woman who, like a shadow or thing of evil omen, came across Shakespeare’s great romance, and for a season stood between him and Willie Hughes. They were obviously printed out of their proper place and should have been inserted between Sonnets XXXIII and XL. Psychological and artistic reasons necessitated this change, a change which I hope will be adopted by all future editors, as without it an entirely false impression is conveyed of the nature and final issue of this noble friendship.

V

[A young Elizabethan, who was enamoured of a girl so white that he named her Alba, has left on record the impression produced on him by one of the first performances of “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” Admirable though the actors were, and they played “in cunning wise,” he tells us, especially those who took the lovers’ parts, he was conscious that everything was “feigned,” that nothing came “from the heart,” that though they appeared to grieve they “felt no care,” and were merely presenting “a show in jest.” Yet, suddenly, this fanciful comedy of unreal romance became to him, as he sat in the audience, the real tragedy of his life. The moods of his own soul seemed to have taken shape and substance, and to be moving before him. His grief had a mask that smiled, and his sorrow wore gay raiment. Behind the bright and quickly-changing pageant of the stage, he saw himself, as one sees one’s image in a fantastic glass. The very words that came to the actors’ lips were wrung out of his pain. Their false tears were of his shedding.