Story, expanded text, published 1921
The Portrait of Mr. W. H. (Expanded Version): Themes
Themes
Faith and proof
The theory rests on one flaw, which both men name in turn: it assumes the existence of the very person it sets out to prove. Cyril says he needs no proof and forges one only for Erskine; Erskine, once converted, insists that 'a hypothesis that explains everything is a certainty'. Belief never stays put. The narrator loses his the moment he hands it on, and wonders whether 'Every disciple takes away something from his master.' Wilde makes the case persuasive and baseless at once.
Forgery and scholarship
The story opens with the narrator defending Chatterton, and his own research becomes a gentler kind of forgery. He reorders the Sonnets so that the dark lady fits his plot, dismisses Burbage from Manningham's anecdote as tavern gossip, and treats every gap in the record as room for Willie Hughes: 'there was certainly no evidence against it.' Beside Cyril's painted panel stands the narrator's written one, just as beautiful and just as unfounded. In the last paragraph the fake hangs in his library, admired and etched by friends who never learn its history.
The actor and the boy players
The expanded text makes acting its subject. The narrator praises the drama as the one art that uses every means at once, and devotes a chapter to the boy actors, arguing that Rosalind's doublet and Viola's page's dress exist because boys played the parts. Willie Hughes 'could act love, but could not feel it'. Shakespeare himself acts: he feigns passion for the dark woman to win back his friend, and finds that 'form can create the feeling from which it should have sprung'.
Friendship and the Platonic ideal
Chapter II sets the Sonnets inside a Renaissance tradition of passionate friendship drawn from Plato's Symposium, where friends beget 'children' of the mind rather than the body. The narrator reads Shakespeare's 'marriage of true minds' through Diotima, and places it beside Michael Angelo's sonnets to Cavalieri, Montaigne's grief for La Boetie and Languet's letters to Sidney. He uses this history to answer critics who found the poems dangerous, and in Chapter V traces his own love of Greek thought to an unseen presence beside him.
Art and the self
Chapter V argues that art cannot show us the outer world, only our own soul: 'It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.' The narrator comes to feel that the Sonnets tell 'the story of my soul's romance', pictures himself at the Globe watching the dark woman, and recalls a papyrus in a girl's coffin at Thebes that he wishes he had had read. Then the feeling vanishes, and he asks whether there is 'no permanence in personality'. The book that revealed him to himself returns nothing when he reads it again.
Dying for an idea
Two deaths frame the story. Cyril shoots himself to prove his faith, and Erskine, dying of consumption, writes as if he were about to do the same, hoping to reconvert his friend. Erskine had warned early on that 'a thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it'. At Cannes the narrator goes further: martyrdom is 'a tragic form of scepticism', and 'No man dies for what he knows to be true.' The false suicide note is Erskine's last piece of evidence, and his own forgery.