Author Archives: David Boyles

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 … Continue reading →

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.

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

[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 … Continue reading →

[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, … Continue reading →