The Portrait of Mr. W. H. by Oscar Wilde

Author:Oscar Wilde [Wilde, Oscar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443442718
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

‘Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all’;

the ‘profitless usurer?’ of ‘unused beauty,’ as he describes him. But the proofs, the links – where were they? Alas! I could not find them. It seemed to me that I was always on the brink of absolute verification, but that I could never really attain to it. I thought it strange that no one had ever written a history of the English boy-actors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and determined to undertake the task myself, and to try to ascertain their true relations to the drama. The subject was, certainly, full of artistic interest. These lads had been the delicate reeds through which our poets had sounded their sweetest strains, the gracious vessels of honour into which they had poured the purple wine of their song. Foremost, naturally, among them all had been the youth to whom Shakespeare had intrusted the realisation of his most exquisite creations. Beauty had been his, such as our age has never, or but rarely seen, a beauty that seemed to combine the charm of both sexes, and to have wedded, as the Sonnets tell us, the grace of Adonis and the loveliness of Helen. He had been quick-witted, too, and eloquent, and from those finely curved lips that the satirist had mocked at had come the passionate cry of Juliet, and the bright laughter of Beatrice, Perdita’s flower-like words, and Ophelia’s wandering songs. Yet as Shakespeare himself had been but as a God among giants, so Willie Hughes had only been one out of many marvellous lads to whom our English Renaissance owed something of the secret of its joy, and it appeared to me that they also were worthy of some study and record.

In a little book with fine vellum leaves and damask silk cover – a fancy of mine in those fanciful days – I accordingly collected such information as I could about them, and even now there is something in the scanty record of their lives, in the mere mention of their names, that attracts me. I seemed to know them all: Robin Armin, the goldsmith’s lad who was lured by Tarlton to go on the stage: Sandford, whose performance of the courtezan Flamantia Lord Burleigh witnessed at Gray’s Inn: Cooke, who played Agrippina in the tragedy of ‘Sejanus’: Nat. Field, whose young and beardless portrait is still preserved for us at Dulwich, and who in ‘Cynthia’s Revels’ played the ‘Queen and Huntress chaste and fair’: Gil Carie, who, attired as a mountain nymph, sang in the same lovely masque Echo’s song of mourning for Narcissus: Parsons, the Salmacis of the strange pageant of ‘Tamburlaine’: Will. Ostler, who was one of ‘The Children of the Queen’s Chapel,’ and accompanied King James to Scotland: George Vernon, to whom the king sent a cloak of scarlet, cloth, and a cape of crimson velvet: Alick Gough, who performed the part of Caenis, Vespasian’s concubine, in Massinger’s ‘Roman Actor,’ and three years later that

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