ABSTRACT
It should be no mystery why an essay on Oscar Wilde is included in a collection on Shakespeare's Sonnets. First, Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Mr. W. H. (1889) charts and negotiates the currents eddying around Shakespeare and the Sonnets in the late nineteenth century. Defying genre categories, Wilde's fictional essay or analytical novella interrogates Edward Dowden's theory, which seeks to integrate Shakespeare's life and art, and it examines and dismantles the ever-continuing W. H. debates, which sought to name the sequence's dedicatee/addressee (see Figure 3 in this volume). 1 Like the library scene in Ulysses after it, Mr. W. H. makes “academic questions” about Shakespeare's life and works into literature. But beyond its Victorian context, it provides an allegory for literary relations so compelling that its presence is still felt in much current criticism on the Sonnets.
