Wilde, Oscar
Wilde, Oscar (Fingal O'Flahertie Wills) (1854–1900),Irish playwright and author. Wilde's Portrait of Mr W.H. (1889), in which ‘homoerotic fantasy successfully masquerades as fiction and criticism’ (Schoenbaum), identifies the ‘onlie begetter’ of the Sonnets as William or Willie Hughes, a boy-actor playing women's parts, a first name which is certainly punned on in Sonnets 135–6, 143, and a last which may be in Sonnet 20, ‘A man in hew all Hews in his controwling’. The fiction's use of a hanging portrait of Mr W.H. seems almost analogous to Wilde's other corrupted portrait, that of Dorian Gray (1891). Wilde's citation of Shakespeare's Sonnets during his notorious trial in 1895 had a permanent impact on popular views of Shakespeare's sexuality.
Tom Matheson
[The entire page is 128 words long]
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