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Article: Introduction: these other Victorians.(a discussion of Oscar Wilde and other Victorian era writers)(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- Studies in the Literary Imagination
- Article date:
- September 22, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Georgia State University, Department of English. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In Oscar Wilde's "The Portrait of Mr. WH" we have an essay on the exigencies of interpretation presented to us as though it were a melodramatic murder mystery. As Scott Wilson describes it:
After an opening discussion about Art as the realization of
personality beyond "real life" and its ethical demands, Lord Erskine
tells the story of his dead friend Cyril Graham, who devised a
theory about the young man of Shakespeare's sonnets. Graham, an
"effeminate" boy player of Shakespeare's roles at Trinity, decided
that the "Mr. WH" of the sonnets must have been, like him, a boy
player on Shakespeare's stage called Willy [sic] Hughes. Graham
...