"Martyrdom was to me merely a tragic form of scepticism, an attempt to realise by fire what one had failed to do by faith." (p.87)

For all that it's quite short, Oscar Wilde's 'The Portrait of Mr. W.H.' is certainly jam-packed, managing to fit not one but two frame stories as well as 51 pages of literary analysis into its trim 88 pages. And not a one of them is wasted.

In some ways, 'The Portrait of Mr. W.H.' is quite comparable to Nabokov's 'Pale Fire' in that much of the success of both hinges on the ability of the author to get you, the reader, on board with something that is at the same time presented as untrue. We are told from the onset that it is unlikely there ever was a 'William Hughes'; the evidence for this theory simply isn't there. Yet, we're told of a young man called Cyril Graham, so convinced of his existence that he commissions a fake portrait of William Hughes to manufacture the evidence. And then when he is found out, he kills himself.

This story moves our protagonist so much, that he too becomes obsessed with proving the existence of William Hughes. Then we get the 51 pages of him poring over Shakespeare's Sonnets, dedicated to 'Mr. W.H.', and weaving the story of this young man as the great love of Shakespeare's life out of lines from the poems.

And then, when the poems run out, he tries to find outside evidence, even going so far as to view no evidence as proof. For instance, he concludes it quite plausible that Willie Hughes's name doesn't appear in the First Folio either because he and Shakespeare were in the middle of a falling out at this time, or because acting was unreputable and so he used a nom de plume.

Taking it all another step further, he fantasises about what Willie Hughes's fate could have been: "Perhaps on the trampled heath of Marston, or on the bleak hills of Naseby, the dead body of Willie Hughes had been found by some of the rough peasants of the district, his gold hair 'dabbled with blood' and his breast pierced with many wounds."(p.72) He also speculates that he could have died of the plague, but hopes that in truth he outlived Shakespeare to fulfill "in some measure the high prophesies the poet had made about him." (p.72)

Having fully immersed himself in the fantasy he himself created, the narrator pours the entire theory out in a long letter to the man who told him the story of Cyril Graham and the forged portrait of Willie Hughes.

Upon sending the letter, the narrator all at once realizes he doesn't believe a word of it, and feels deep embarrassment about having allowed himself to get swept away. "The one flaw in the theory is that it presupposes the existence of the person whose existence is the subject of the dispute," he admits sheepishly (p.82)

However, though he no longer believes in what he wrote, it has convinced Cyril's friend Erskine (originally a steadfast critic) who goes off so convinced of it that several years later he writes to the narrator to tell him he's going to kill himself over it, just as Cyril did.

The narrator rushes to try and stop him only to discover Erskine died not by suicide, but of consumption; the suicide letter was a lie. "The very uselessness of Erskine's letter made me doubly sorry for him" (p.87). Erskine's mother presses the forged portrait of Willie Hughes on the narrator, who hangs it in his library but won't indulge his curious friends when they ask after its significance.

There are some that have argued in other reviews that while the plot itself is intriguing and wonderfully Gothic, the 51 pages spent analyzing the sonnets and creating the mythos of Willie Hughes is tedious, unnecessarily long-winded, and boring.

I disagree.

I think we needed every one of those 51 pages because without them it would be hard to believe a story like this, and moreover, it would lose some of its impact. By the time the narrator begins his research, we've already been introduced to the mystery of the identity of Mr. W.H. and we know at least one man has killed himself in pursuit of the answer. As Oscar Wilde reminds us: "Words have their mystical power over the soul" and with so much already said, we the reader are invested in finding the answers, and the most satisfying answer would be that Cyril was right: there was an actor named Willie Hughes with whom Shakespeare was in love and to whom his Sonnets are dedicated.

We, like the narrator, are primed to believe. And so, as the narrator pulls out quote after quote from the sonnets and explains how they fit the theory that Willie Hughes was real, we see what he's telling us to see: indeed, we cannot now read the quotes any other way. It feels exciting, it feels like we and the narrator (and Oscar Wilde by extension) have solved the mystery!

So then when the narrator breaks the spell by pointing out 'oh, wait a minute, I tried to tailor the facts to fit my theory rather than the theory to fit the facts' you also feel like you have egg on your face; you can't believe someone rational like yourself, like the narrator, could ever fall into this trap. But he did, and so did you. Probably. Maybe I'm projecting...

In any case, I think 'The Portrait of Mr. W.H.' is an excellent cautionary tale about how easy it is to slip into conspiracy brain rot, about how tempting it is to want so badly to solve a mystery, to be the one to solve a mystery, that you fall off the rails of the scientific method and spiral into unhinged and self-serving circular logic, and how that mindset can ultimately lead to tragedy: "No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true." (p.87)

And in our day and age of skepticism run amok leading to dangerous and sometimes deadly outcomes, perhaps we need a story like this more than ever.


Further Reading in this vein:
1. 'The Night Ocean' by Paul La Farge (this one most especially)
2. 'The Stranger's Child' by Alan Hollinghurst
3. 'Pale Fire' by Vladimir Nabokov