So much for the setting, which is quite unimportant. The real matter of moment is, that the Blackwood article is a really very valuable contribution to the controversy as to the identity of the mysterious Mr W. H.
It will be remembered that the Sonnets were first issued in book form in 1609, by a sort of piratical bookseller of those days, called Thames Thorpe who, on his own responsibility, prefixed the edition with a dedication—"To the only-begotten of these insuing sonnets, Mr W. H., all happinesse and that eternite promised by our ever living poet wisheth the well wishing adventurer in setting forth. T. T." Round the identity of this W. H. there has long raged an ardent controversy. Most of the commentators have rushed to the conclusion that he must be the person to whom the Sonnets are addressed. Some have attempted to identify him as Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (the initials being reversed), who is known to have been an early patron of the poet, others without much apparent reason have assumed that the W. H. in question was none other than William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. The most probable theory is undoubtedly that of Mr Henry Lee, that the dedication is entirely Thorpe's own, that it has nothing whatever to do with Shakespeare or the inspirer of the poet, and that it was meant for William Hall, a sort of literary intermediary. In confirmation of this he adduces the undoubted fact that Thorpe had, at anyrate, once previously dedicated a work to its "begotten."
One point is established almost beyond dispute—viz. that the first 126 sonnets are addressed to a young man and the remainder refer to a "dark woman" who, after having bewitched the author, casts her spell over his young friend and estranges the two.
A counter-theory is that Shakespeare's selection of the sonnet, "that puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic composition," as Byron calls it, as a medium for his muse, is that he was experimenting in the style of writing which had become the fashion in England between the years 1591 and 1597.
Wilde's history is a totally new one, and deserves close examination. Given that it could be proved that the young actor to whom he maintains the Sonnets were addressed ever had a real existence, and the matter would be as good as proved, but that is the weak point in his armour. Mayhap some enthusiast may, by digging amongst old deeds and papers, light upon some reference to him, but until then his hypothesis can be only regarded as an ingenious, though highly interesting speculation. Parenthetically it may be mentioned, although the fact is only known to very few, that an artist friend of Oscar Wilde, whose work is the admiration of all connoisseurs, had, under his direction, painted exactly such a panel-portrait as described, employing all the arts of the forger of antiquities in its production, and that a young poet whose recently published volume of verse had caused considerable sensation in literary circles had sat for the likeness.
The points Wilde advances in confirmation of his theory are as follows:—
1. That the young man to whom Shakespeare addresses sonnets must have been someone who was really a vital factor in the development of his dramatic art, and that this could not be said of either Lord Pembroke or Lord Southampton.
2. That the Sonnets, as we learn from Meres, were written before 1598 and that his friendship with W. H. had already lasted three years when Sonnet CIV. was written, which would fix the date of its commencement as 1594, or at latest 1595, that Lord Pembroke was born in 1580 and did not come to London till he was eighteen (i.e. 1598) so that Shakespeare could not have met him till after the sonnet had been written; and that Pembroke's father did not die till 1601, whereas W. H.'s father was dead in 1598, as is proved by the line—
"You had a father, let your son say so."
3. That Lord Southampton had early in life become the lover of Elizabeth Vernon, so required no urging to enter the state of matrimony, that he was not dowered with good looks, and that he did not remember his mother as W. H. did. (Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee calls back the lovely April of her prime), and moreover that his Christian name being Henry he could not be the Will to whom the punning sonnets (CXXXV. and CXLIII.) are addressed.
4. That W. H. is none other than the boy actor for whom Shakespeare created the parts of Viola, Imogen, Juliet, Rosalind, Portia, Desdemona and Cleopatra.
5. That the boy's name was Hughes.
These points he proves from the Sonnets themselves. As regards No. 1 he writes: "to look upon him as simply the object of certain love poems is to miss the whole meaning of the poems; for the art of which Shakespeare talks in the Sonnets is not the art of the Sonnets themselves, which indeed were to him but slight and secret things, it is the art of the dramatist to which he is always alluding. He proceeds to quote the lines:
"Thou art all my art and dost advance
As high as learning my rude ignorance."
2 and 3 effectually dispose of the pretensions of Pembroke and Surrey.