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.

This Penguin 60 contains two short stories taken from The Complete Short Fiction of Oscar Wilde. The first is the titular story, the second is The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

The Portrait of Mr. W. H. tells the story of the “Mr. W.H” to which Shakespeare's Sonnets are dedicated. And is a story woven around a hoax by a third party where a painting is produced with a portrait of a Mr Willie Hughes, and a copy of the sonnets open on the dedication page.

Contains the line: “...and once read a paper before our debating society to prove that it was better to be good-looking than to be good.”

The Ballad of Reading Gaol was written by Wilde just after his release from Reading Gaol, where he had served a two year hard labour sentence for gross indecency with other men in 1895.
During his imprisonment, a hanging took place - Charles Thomas Wooldridge had been a trooper in the Royal Horse Guards. He was convicted of cutting the throat of his wife, Laura Ellen. He was aged 30 when executed.

I am not one for poetry, so skimmed over it fairly quickly.

3 stars.