The Portrait of Mr W.H.

Wilde takes on a critical voice in this short story about Shakespeare's sonnets. It's a well known fact that Wilde was a fan of the Bard for a multitude of reasons, and so this short story feels like a fan letter to his favourite writer. A number of Shakespeare's sonnets are analysed in the short story. The premise is that the sonnets were written for Willie Hughes, a boy-actor from Elizabethan times. The traditional interpretation of the intended recipient of the sonnets is usually the Earl of Pembroke or the Earl of Southampton, so the theory that a boy-actor was in fact the true muse behind the sonnets is enticing although farfetched.

I felt as if I had my hand upon Shakespeare's heart, and was counting each separate throb and pulse of passion.

His true tomb, as Shakespeare saw, was the poet's verse, his true monument the permanence of the drama. So had it been with others whose beauty had given a new creative impulse to their age. The ivory body of the Bithynian slave rots in the green ooze of the Nile, and on the yellow hills of the Cerameicus is strewn the dust of the young Athenian; but Antinous lives in sculpture, and Charmides in philosophy.