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A literary curiosity
Jul. 30th, 2004 10:26 amI've been reading a book of Oscar Wilde short stories, and just finished The Portrait of Mr. W. H. It's rather odd, but fascinating. It's not so much a story, per se, as a layer of fictional plausible deniability wrapped around an intriguing literary theory. One presumes that the theory itself was not one that could be seriously advanced in the middle of Victorian England.
The characters in the story posit that the subject of Shakespeare's Sonnets (the mysterious Mr. W. H.) was in fact a boy actor in his troupe. While the story doesn't actually *explicitly* discuss homosexual love, it's *far* more broadly hinted at than I recall seeing in any other mainstream Victorian lit. Now I have this strong urge to go re-read the Sonnets, and also to see what the current literary historian types think of Oscar's version...
The characters in the story posit that the subject of Shakespeare's Sonnets (the mysterious Mr. W. H.) was in fact a boy actor in his troupe. While the story doesn't actually *explicitly* discuss homosexual love, it's *far* more broadly hinted at than I recall seeing in any other mainstream Victorian lit. Now I have this strong urge to go re-read the Sonnets, and also to see what the current literary historian types think of Oscar's version...