By Oscar Wilde, 1889
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.
