140701 assembled Cambridge Companion essay 1997
Jerusha McCormack
WILDE'S FICTION(S)
FRAMING SHAKESPEARE
As is usual with Wilde's fictions, 'The Portrait of Mr W. H.' began as a recital. In his accustomed manner, one biographer remarked, Wilde 'turnedan idea into an anecdote, the anecdote into a story, embroidering as hewent along, and the freer play he gave to his imagination the deeperconviction he imparted to others and the more inclined was he to believe the story itself‟.[31]
What one believes in this story relies on the impact of itsperformance, forged in the heat of inspiration, and carrying conviction only within the context of its utterance. Its oral nature dictates the fiction‟s contingent and arbitrary nature and offers the premise of its own erasure:here lies a fiction writ in hot water.
By returning his own text to talk, Wilde subverts every authority. Thestory is narrated by a person unknown, reporting a conversation about(significantly) literary forgeries. (Who is the author of this tale? What are hiscredentials? We never know.) It proceeds to have a character namedErskine report a theory about Shakespeare's Sonnets advanced in turn byhis friend Cyril Graham. (Hearsay: wouldn't stand up in court. We alsoknow little about Cyril, other than the fact that he is 'effeminate' and was'always cast for the girl's parts' in Shakespeare's plays.) The report isprefaced by saying that Cyril, believing his theory, had a portrait forged inorder to authenticate it. (Theory discredited even before it is argued.)
Erskine then proceeds to tell how Cyril confided in him the 'secret' of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Released from any obligation to believe the theoryby Cyril's early admission of its forged authenticity, the reader is free toenjoy its speculative thesis: that the Mr W. H. of the Sonnets is in reality aboy-actor, Willie Hughes, whose beauty is their 'onlie begetter'. Nearly convinced of the theory, Erskine insists that there is still not enough proofat this point; Cyril has a painter forge the portrait. When Erskinein advertently discovers the forgery, it destroys his faith in the theory. Thetwo men quarrel, and Cyril commits suicide, 'to offer his life as a sacrifice tosecret of the Sonnets' as he writes in his suicide note (CW 311). (Do we believe this? Does it not sound like another forgery? Surely the 'secret' ofthe friendship between Erskine and Cyril, rent by their quarrel, had more to do with the suicide than a literary theory.)
In his letter, Cyril entrusts the Willie Hughes theory to his friend, but Erskine declines to propagate such a 'perfectly unsound' idea. Protesting that his friend will so 'wrong the memory of . . . the youngest and mostsplendid of all the martyrs of literature', the narrator returns home tobecome possessed by the idea (CW 312), But, despite his very convincing exploration of the theory's ramifications, all collapses when the narrator writes his final version of the theory down in a letter to Erskine. 'No sooner... had I sent it off than a curious reaction came over me. It seemed to me that I had given away my capacity for belief in the Willie Hughes theory ofthe Sonnets' (CW 345).
Erskine, on the other hand, is reconverted. In a replay of the first narrative sequence: the two men quarrel and part. Two years later, thenarrator receives a letter, claiming that 'by the time you receive this I shall have died by my own hand, for Willie Hughes' sake … and for the sake of Cyril Graham' (348). It was (as its written form implies) a forged demise: Cyril had actually died from consumption. Ironically, this final act of invalidation lures the narrator back to the theory, about which, he concludes, there is still 'a great deal to be said' (CW 350)'
What is 'said' in the story inspires a kind of infectious confidence; what iswritten is inevitably 'forged', artificial and not to be trusted. (In the dock,Wilde himself denied the import of his own 'written' article.[32]) If what is 'said'begets the written, what is written only validates the primacy of what issaid. Locating the impulse of Shakespeare's own creation in the performance of an actor, Wilde returns the literary text of the Sonnets totheir source in his own performance of their interpretation. At every level,that performance subverts the authority of the text, and the 'forged'reputation of its author, William Shakespeare.
Middle-class England held its Shakespeare next in authority to thesacred text of the Bible. 'But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with withoutknowing how', Austen wrote in Mansfield Park. 'It is part of an Englishman'sconstitution.' Shakespeare's status as a poet of Empire, as part of theideological apparatus of the state machinery, has been explored under therubric of Bardolatry. But Wilde's target was not so much the public Shakespeare as the insidious Shakespeare of Austen's lines: the 'forged'author of the Family Shakespeare (reputed to have been edited by Thomas Bowdler) or the Shakespeare edited into respectability and interpreted as amoral guide for British maidens, such as Rosa Baughan's editions of 1863-9, 'Abridged and Revised for the use of Girls'.[33]
To those readers, Wilde advances an equally insidious version ofShakespeare: the Bard as lover of boys, and not only of boys, but of lower-class boys who were, strictly speaking, not English at all. Wilde is(dis)credited with the (dis)honour of being the first to impute homoeroticlove as both subject and source of a Shakespeare text. Wilde goes further:in his story he describes how Shakespeare's text itself provides a literallyfatal source of homoerotic infection, providing not only code but authorityfor what was, at the time of its writing, a criminal activity.[34] Up to Wilde's time, it may have been rumoured - but not written - that the Sonnets centred on homoerotic love. Hitherto, interpreters explained the dubious passages in terms of esoteric Elizabethan convention.[35] In any case, the language that was being devised during the closing decades for 'the love that dare not speak its name' was largely a gentlemanly and encoded discourse, confined to allusions about crushes between boys at prestigiouspublic schools, a kind of initiation into sexual activity common to the elite – who could justify it by citing their Plato in the original.
Willie Hughes is an insult to such a discourse, described as low-bornand of a class near the bottom of the social strata. Advancing such a theory went against every earnest effort to make Shakespeare safe. Wilde's theory was dangerous; moreover, Wilde knew how dangerous it was: 'Our English homes will totter to their base when my book appears', hepredicted.[36] As it happened, preliminary version of his story was printed in I889, the definitive did not appear in his own lifetime.[37] But the English home did totter when Wilde took its text for his own script. After his affairwith Lord Douglas cooled, Wilde sought sexual gratification from 'rent-boys', lower-class boy prostitutes. It is their testimony against Wilde that,more anything else, sent him to prison.
These lovers were not gentlemen. Nor, in Wilde's fantasy, were theyEnglish. Willie Hughes in all his glory is described in Wilde's tale asincorrigibly Celtic: having the chameleon-like personality which found thehallmark of its temperament.[38] That wonderful boy-actor, Shakespeare, inone of the punning sonnets, hailed as 'A man in hew, all Hews in hiscontrowling', could also exasperate him: '''How is it", Wilde has Shakespeare saying to Willie Hughes, "that you have so manypersonalities?" (CW 314). In 'The Portrait of Mr. W. H.', Wilde - ironically known to his own circle of disciples as 'Shakespeare'[39] - forged a picture which was to haunt him: that of his other, Celtic self: that of his shadow andfate, Dorian Gray.
