I 'Believe in Willie Hughes': The Portrait of Mr W.H.

I 'Believe in Willie Hughes': The Portrait of Mr W.H.

Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr W. H. positions itself at the site of one of Literary History’s great mysteries: the identity of the young man of William Shakespeare’s sonnets. Framing the narrator’s obsessive pursuit of the young man is the title’s portrait of Willie Hughes, which is presented from the very start in the context of a discussion of literary forgeries. In fact, the portrait is a doubled lie: the name of Shakespeare’s boy-actor, Willie Hughes, is created from the fabric of the sonnets themselves, while the portrait is revealed as the work of a print shop in Holborn. Nevertheless, the forgery exists not to conceal the lie of Willie Hughes, but rather to reveal a truth. This chapter contextualise this unusual and often overlooked text within Wilde’s oeuvre. While it is often the question of the forgery that draws the attention of critics here we focus not on the way it spotlights the factitious passions of the “inexpert” reader and the way this then authorises Shakespeare’s, and ultimately Wilde’s, male-centred desire.