The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde

by Oscar Wilde

  “But that is exactly what we don’t know,” said Erskine. “It is quite true that his name does not occur in the list given in the first folio; but, as Cyril pointed out, that is rather a proof in favour of the existence of Willie Hughes than against it, if we remember his treacherous desertion of Shakespeare for a rival dramatist.”

  We argued the matter over for hours, but nothing that I could say could make Erskine surrender his faith in Cyril Graham’s interpretation. He told me that he intended to devote his life to proving the theory, and that he was determined to do justice to Cyril Graham’s memory. I entreated him, laughed at him, begged of him, but it was of no use. Finally we parted, not exactly in anger, but certainly with a shadow between us. He thought me shallow, I thought him foolish. When I called on him again, his servant told me that he had gone to Germany.

  Two years afterwards, as I was going into my club, the hall-porter handed me a letter with a foreign postmark. It was from Erskine, and written at the Hotel d’Angleterre, Cannes.66 When I had read it I was filled with horror, though I did not quite believe that he would be so mad as to carry his resolve into execution. The gist of the letter was that he had tried in every way to verify the Willie Hughes theory, and had failed, and that as Cyril Graham had given his life for this theory, he himself had determined to give his own life also to the same cause. The concluding words of the letter were these: “I still believe in Willie Hughes; and by the time you receive this, I shall have died by my own hand for Willie Hughes’s sake: for his sake, and for the sake of Cyril Graham, whom I drove to his death by my shallow scepticism and ignorant lack of faith. The truth was once revealed to you, and you rejected it. It comes to you now stained with the blood of two lives,—do not turn away from it.”67

  It was a horrible moment. I felt sick with misery, and yet I could not believe it. To die for one’s theological beliefs is the worst use a man can make of his life, but to die for a literary theory! It seemed impossible.

  I looked at the date. The letter was a week old. Some unfortunate chance had prevented my going to the club for several days, or I might have got it in time to save him. Perhaps it was not too late. I drove off to my rooms, packed up my things, and started by the night-mail from Charing Cross.68 The journey was intolerable. I thought I would never arrive.

  As soon as I did I drove to the Hotel d’Angleterre. They told me that Erskine had been buried two days before, in the English cemetery. There was something horribly grotesque about the whole tragedy. I said all kinds of wild things, and the people in the hall looked curiously at me.

  Suddenly Lady Erskine, in deep mourning, passed across the vestibule. When she saw me she came up to me, murmured something about her poor son, and burst into tears. I led her into her sitting-room. An elderly gentleman was there waiting for her. It was the English doctor.

  We talked a great deal about Erskine, but I said nothing about his motive for committing suicide. It was evident that he had not told his mother anything about the reason that had driven him to so fatal, so mad an act. Finally Lady Erskine rose and said, “George left yon something as a memento. It was a thing he prized very much. I will get it for you.”

  As soon as she had left the room I turned to the doctor and said, “What a dreadful shock it must have been to Lady Erskine! I wonder that she bears it as well as she does.”

  “Oh, she knew for months past that it was coming,” he answered.

  “Knew it for months past!” I cried. “But why didn’t she stop him? Why didn’t she have him watched? He must have been mad.”

  The doctor stared at me. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “Well,” I cried, “if a mother knows that her son is going to commit suicide—”

  “Suicide!” he answered. “Poor Erskine did not commit suicide. He died of consumption. He came here to die.69 The moment I saw him I knew that there was no hope. One lung was almost gone, and the other was very much affected. Three days before he died he asked me was there any hope. I told him frankly that there was none, and that he had only a few days to live. He wrote some letters, and was quite resigned, retaining his senses to the last.”70

  At that moment Lady Erskine entered the room with the fatal picture of Willie Hughes in her hand. “When George was dying he begged me to give you this,” she said. As I took it from her, her tears fell on my hand.

  The picture hangs now in my library, where it is very much admired by my artistic friends.71 They have decided that it is not a Clouet, but an Ouvry.72 I have never cared to tell them its true history. But sometimes, when I look at it, I think that there is really a great deal to be said for the Willie Hughes theory of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

  *   First published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1889. Wilde heavily revised the story after publication and by 1893 plans were in place for an expanded book-length edition with a frontispiece consisting of an etched “portrait” of Willie Hughes by Charles Ricketts, whom Wilde called “the subtle and fantastic decorator” of his books. See also n.3 and n.71 below. The planned book-length edition never appeared in Wilde’s lifetime, although as late as 1897 Wilde was still endeavoring to get it published. The manuscript on which it was to have been based, which disappeared for many years, was finally published in 1921. It is over twice the length of the Blackwood’s version printed here. For its key differences from the Blackwood’s text, see “A Note on the Texts,” p. 35 above. A selection of Wilde’s most important additions to the story can be found in the Appendix.

  “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” is on one level an imaginative attempt to make sense of the dedication that appears in the only edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets published in Shakespeare’s own lifetime (see p. 208 below): “to the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets Mr. W. H.” The primary contexts for understanding Wilde’s story are the author’s emerging consciousness of his own homosexuality, the cultural weight attached by Victorians to the form of the sonnet, and the growing centrality of Shakespeare to the concept of English literature. Wilde was familiar with the considerable body of scholarship that had developed around Shakespeare’s sonnets by his own day. The idea that the sonnets’ “onlie begetter,” as well as the “fair youth” to whom most of them are addressed, was a young man named Will Hughes had first been advanced in 1780 by Edmond Malone, on the suggestion of Thomas Tyrwhitt. But early Victorian critics reacted contemptuously to the suggestion that the sonnets were addressed to a man (“It is impossible not to wish Shakespeare had never written them,” remarked Henry Hallam in 1839) and by the mid-1880s critical attention had turned to identifying the dark lady of the last twenty-eight sonnets. Wilde’s story may be considered an attempt to give new life to Malone’s theory and, as Wilde put it, to correct “the shameful perversion put on Shakespeare’s sonnets by Hallam and a great many French critics” (Merlin Holland, The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde [New York: Harper Perennial, 2003], 93).

  1   Elegant street on the south side of London’s St. James’s Park, containing mansions (now apartments and offices) facing the Park, named after the aviary maintained there during the era of Charles II.

  2   James Macpherson, William Henry Ireland, and Thomas Chatterton were literary forgers of the late-eighteenth century. All three created literary works that purported to be transcriptions or translations of documents from earlier periods. Although discredited by many in their own day, their works are much admired now. Chatterton, who took his own life in 1770 at the age of 17, was a hero to Wilde (he lectured on Chatterton in 1886), as well as to the Romantic Poets. See Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell, Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).

  3   We are told later that Erskine and Cyril Graham planned on having this portrait “etched or facsimilied, and placed as the frontispiece to Cyril’s edition of the Sonnets” (p. 197). In late 1889 Wilde’s friend the artist Charles Ricketts painted a similar faked portrait �
�upon a decaying piece of oak and framed it in a fragment of worm-eaten moulding” (CL 412, n.2), eliciting from Wilde the comment that “it is not a forgery at all: it is authentic Clouet of the highest artistic value.” This doubly forged portrait was later intended to be used as the etched frontispiece to Wilde’s projected book-length edition of “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” Regrettably Ricketts’s faked portrait disappeared at the sale of Wilde’s effects on 24 April 1895. For the importance of portraiture to Wilde’s fiction, as well as echoes of the full-length portrait of Mr. W. H. in Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, see Nicholas Frankel, “Portraiture in Oscar Wilde’s Fiction,” Études Anglaises 69, no. 1 (Jan.–Mar. 2016), 49–61.

  4   French court painter (c. 1516–1572), famed for his portraits of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth of Austria (Queen of France) among others. Though his family was Flemish by origin, Clouet was French by birth.

  5   As will be made explicit later, the first edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets (1609) was dedicated by its printer-publisher Thomas Thorpe to “the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets Mr. W. H.”

  6   For much of the Victorian period, it was believed that the “fair youth” addressed in sonnets 1–126, as well as the “onlie begetter” of the sonnets, was William Herbert (1580–1630), third Earl of Pembroke. Penshurst Castle, in Kent, is the ancestral seat of the Sidney family, but there is no known portrait of Pembroke there. Wilde was either thinking of Zucchero’s portrait of Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, at Penshurst, or else the portraits of Pembroke at Wilton, in Wiltshire, the Pembroke family seat.

  7   The narrator is echoing the theory concerning the identity of Shakespeare’s “dark lady” propounded by Thomas Tyler in the introduction to Charles Praetorius’s facsimile edition Shakespeare’s Sonnets: The First Quarto, 1609 (1886), xix-xxiii, which Wilde owned. Tyler developed his theory at greater length in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: David Nutt, 1890). Wilde built a reference to Tyler’s theory into the longer version of “Mr. W. H.” (see Appendix p. 302 below). See too n.28 below.

  8   See p. 46 n.11 above.

  9   Trinity College, Cambridge. The “A.D.C.” is Cambridge University’s “Amateur Dramatic Company.”

  10   Cyril is preparing to sit examinations for entry to the diplomatic corps.

  11   During the Victorian period, Henry Wrothesley, Earl of Southampton, was the other leading contender besides Pembroke for the “fair youth” addressed in the sonnets. See too n.6 above.

  12   In 1598, in his Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury, Francis Meres (1565–1647) refers to Shakespeare’s “sugred sonnets” and calls Shakespeare one of those “most passionate among us to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of love.” Shakespeare’s sonnets were still unpublished at this date.

  13   Sonnet 13.

  14   i.e., the dedication to the first quarto of 1609, signed by its publisher Thomas Thorpe. See pp. 207–208 below.

  15   Thomas Sackville (1536–1608), cowriter of the first English drama to be written in blank verse, was a poet who became Baron Buckhurst in 1567, one year after the death of his father Sir Richard Sackville, a cousin of Anne Boleyn. Sackville’s writings featured in England’s Parnassus (1600), an anthology published by the London bookseller Robert Allot. In 1604, four years before his death, Sackville became the first Earl of Dorset.

  16   Sonnet 3.

  17   Cyril’s skepticism about these theories is borrowed almost verbatim from William J. Rolfe’s introduction to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New York, 1883), 25. Rolfe refers disparagingly to the theories of, among others, Samuel Neil (“that Mr. W. H. is Mr. William Hathaway” [1863]), Ebenezer Forsyth (“that ‘Mr. W. H. all’ should be read ‘Mr. W. Hall’ ” [1867]), and D. Barnstorff, who had theorized “that Mr. W. H. was no less a person than ‘Mr. William Himself’ ” in his Schlüssel zu Shakespeare’s Sonnetten (1860; transl. as A Key to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1862).

  18   But see the long Neoplatonic digression (Appendix p. 293 below), added to the unpublished book-length version, in which Wilde writes “In Willie Hughes, Shakespeare found not merely a most delicate instrument for the presentation of his art, but the visible incarnation of his idea of beauty.”

  19   Sonnet 78.

  20   Sonnet 81.

  21   Sonnet 38.

  22   Sonnet 86.

  23   Upon his death, the eminent actor Edward Alleyn (1566–1626) left thousands of pages of manuscripts to Dulwich College in London, England, which he had founded in 1619. These manuscripts comprise the largest and most important extant archive of material on the professional theatre and dramatic performance in early modern England. The Public Record Office was established in 1838, in London’s Chancery Lane, to centralize and reform the keeping of government and court records. At first its archives were accessible to lawyers only. Public search rooms were opened in 1866, leading the authorities to restrict access only to visitors who were experienced in dealing with historical material. From Tudor times till 1968, the Lord Chamberlain was the official licensor of plays in London and elsewhere in England.

  24   See headnote and n.3 above; also n.71 below.

  25   The “martyrs of literature” include Chatterton (see n.2 above) and John Keats, the latter purportedly “killed” by what the poet Lord Byron called a “homicidal” review of his poem Endymion in the Quarterly Review.

  26   At this point Wilde inserted into the longer unpublished version three paragraphs concerning the narrator’s memories of this moment as well as the nature of memory itself. See Appendix, p. 283 below.

  27   St. James’s Park is surrounded by three palaces: Buckingham Palace, St. James’s Palace, and those parts of Whitehall Palace not destroyed by fire in 1698 (now incorporated into the government buildings of Whitehall). The narrator probably refers to St. James’s Palace.

  28   Wilde here inserted “and Mr. Tyler’s facsimile edition of the Quarto” into the longer unpublished version. See n.7 above.

  29   At this point Wilde inserted into the expanded version a new paragraph concerning the sonnets’ centrality to Shakespeare’s perfection as a dramatist. See Appendix, p. 284 below.

  30   Sonnet 54.

  31   A reference to Gerald Massey, Shakespeare’s Sonnets Never Before Interpreted: His Private Friends Identified (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1866), esp. pp. 416–435 (“Thomas Thorpe and His ‘Onlie Begetter’ of the Sonnets”). According to Charles Ricketts, Wilde disparaged Massey’s theory as an “assertion … made by a literary shopman in compliment to a nation of shopkeepers.”

  32   “I’ll grant” is a mistranscription (corrected in the expanded version) of “I grant”

  33   Sonnet 2.

  34   Sonnet 78.

  35   Sonnet 38.

  36   Sonnet 10.

  37   Sonnet 18.

  38   Sonnet xx. 2 (Wilde’s note). This annotation appeared as footnote 1 in 1889 but has been renumbered here.

  39   Sonnet xxvi. 1 (Wilde’s note). This annotation appeared as footnote 2 in 1889 but has been renumbered here.

  40   Sonnet cxxvi. 9 (Wilde’s note). This annotation appeared as footnote 3 in 1889 but has been renumbered here.

  41   Sonnet cix. 14 (Wilde’s note). This annotation appeared as footnote 4 in 1889 but has been renumbered here.

  42   Sonnet i. 10 (Wilde’s note). This annotation appeared as footnote 5 in 1889 but has been renumbered here.

  43   Sonnet ii. 3 (Wilde’s note). This annotation appeared as footnote 6 in 1889 but has been renumbered here.

  44   Sonnet viii. 1 (Wilde’s note). This annotation appeared as footnote 7 in 1889 but has been renumbered here.

  45   Sonnet xxii. 6 (Wilde’s note). This annotation appeared as footnote 8 in 1889 but has been renumbered here.

  46 �
� Sonnet xcv. 1 (Wilde’s note). This annotation appeared as footnote 9 in 1889 but has been renumbered here.

  47   The phrase “the proud full sail of his great verse” is taken from Sonnet 86. George Chapman (c. 1559–1634) became a successful playwright in the late 1590s, though his finest work was produced in the Jacobean Era, near the end of Shakespeare’s life. By contrast, Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) had found success as one of the greatest dramatists and poets of the Elizabethan Era before his death in 1593. Marlowe’s unfinished poem Hero and Leander was completed by Chapman in 1598.

  48   Sonnet 86.

  49   In 1942 Wilde’s lover, Alfred Douglas, discovered that a “William Hewes” had at onetime been apprenticed to John Marlowe, Christopher’s father. See Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 43. Piers Gaveston—moments later called “King Edward’s delicate minion”—was the male favorite and lover of Edward II, as dramatized in Marlowe’s play of 1593.

  50   Sonnet 94.

  51   Sonnet 93.

  52   Sonnet 93.