Built of Books by Thomas Wright

Author:Thomas Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805092462
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

* If Douglas did harbour such hopes as he sat in the Tite Street library on that July afternoon, the portents would have struck him as auspicious. He was, as he doubtless realised, acting out a scene from Chapter 4 of the novel in which Dorian waits for Lord Henry in the beautiful little library of his Mayfair house. Dorian passes the time by examining the room’s Persian rugs and ornate furniture, and by casting his eye over Lord Henry’s éditions de luxe. Life, yet again imitated art, as Douglas would have whiled away the time in exactly the same fashion.12

* Willie Hughes would enter Douglas’s life in an uncanny, and thoroughly Wildean, way. In his book The True History of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London, 1933) Bosie defended and elaborated Wilde’s theory that the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets was the boy-actor, Willie Hughes. Soon after the book’s publication, Douglas actually unearthed the first factual evidence confirming the historical existence of a sixteenth-century boy from Canterbury called William Hughes, who may have been an associate of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s rival playwright. Wilde himself had been unable to discover any empirical confirmation of his theory, which he had based, as he puts it in his essay-story, ‘not so much on demonstrable proof of formal evidence, but on a kind of spiritual and artistic’ intuition. How extraordinary that Douglas, Wilde’s own Willie Hughes, should happen upon that evidence. It all sounds too good to be true, but true it all is: life again imitated Wilde’s art.15

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