WILDE, Oscar.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Autograph letter signed, to Henry Lucy. Wilde teasingly responds to a satirical article about the dedicatee of Shakespeare's sonnets, "Mr. W.H.", whose identity was the subject of his most recent short story. "By diligently reading between the lines of Punch I have come to the conclusion that you are really converted to 'Mr Will Hewes' - pray don't undeceive me, as I should like to consider you a convert."Wilde published "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." in Blackwood's Magazine in July 1898. In the story, three characters discuss the theory that Shakespeare addressed his sonnets to "some wonderful boy-actor of great beauty, to whom Shakespeare intrusted the presentation of his noble heroines" named Willie Hughes. The identification is based on puns on the name "Will" in Sonnets 135 and 143, and on the description in Sonnet 20 of "a man in hue, all hues in his controlling", rendered in the 1609 quarto as "all Hews in his controlling". Lucy's Punch column "Essence of Parliament", published the same month as Wilde's story, mocks "the William Hews of Oscar Wilde's mad fancy". The accusation would have appealed to Wilde's sense of irony: the story's three characters oscillate wildly between disbelief and conviction, ending in fatal consequences for two and, for the third, a final note of wry ambiguity.Though Wilde never publicly committed himself to the theory, he hints at his feeling in a letter to Robert Ross ("Now that Willie Hughes has been revealed to the world, we must have another

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.