William Hughes (Mr. W. H.)
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William Hughes is one potential candidate for the person on whom the 'Fair Youth' of Shakespeare's Sonnets is based (if the sonnets are autobiographical). The 'Fair Youth' is a handsome, effeminate young man to whom the poet addresses many passionate sonnets. Some sonnets can be interpreted as puns on the name 'William Hughes'. However, no real life person of that name can easily be identified with the character.
The identification was first proposed by Thomas Tyrwhitt in the eighteenth century, who noted a line in the 20th Sonnet "A man in hue, all hues in his controlling." When this is combined with various puns in the Sonnets on the name 'Will', and the fact that the sonnets are dedicated to one "Mr W.H.", it can be argued that the Sonnets covertly reveal that they are written to someone called William Hughes. Since music plays an important role in the sonnets, Tyrwhitt suggested that Hughes was a musician. A musician of that name is known to have served the Earl of Essex, but he would have been considerably older than Shakespeare.
In his influential 1790 edition of the sonnets Edmund Malone endorsed Tyrwhitt's suggestion, giving it wide circulation among scholars.
The idea was explored in greater detail by Oscar Wilde in his short story "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.", in which Hughes is transmuted from a musician into a seductive boy-actor working in Shakespeare's company. Wilde uses the story to explain and expand the theory, which the story's unnamed narrator claims is the only one to fit exactly with the poet's words. In the story it is assumed that the conventional prime contender for the true identity of Mr. W.H. is William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke. The narrator is introduced to the Hughes theory by a friend, Erskine, who argues that W.H. "could not have been anybody of high birth", citing Sonnets 25, 124 and 125. He also asserts that the puns in Sonnets 135 and 143 make it clear that the Fair Youth's first name was Will, excluding the other popular candidate, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton.
Erskine presents the theory as dangerous, stating it was first proposed by a man called Graham, who had even created a forged portrait of Hughes to support the argument, but had killed himself when Erskine discovered the deception. Erskine himself considers the Hughes theory to be intriguing, but unsupported by empirical evidence. The narrator, however, becomes obsessed with it, generating interpretations of Shakespeare's lines in support of the idea, but failing to find any corroboration. When he writes to Erskine about his ideas, Erskine is once more converted, and devotes his life to seeking evidence for Hughes, only eventually to give up in despair. He writes an apparently suicidal letter to the narrator, who subsequently discovers that Erskine is dead. He assumes suicide, but learns that he had died from tuberculosis and had bequethed the faked portrait to the narrator.
Though the story is fiction, and Wilde himself never claimed to believe the theory, the argument presented has often been cited since. However, the references to "Will" in the poems are often read as a pun on the author's own name, and no.135 and 143 are widely believed to be addressed to the Dark Lady, not the Fair Youth. Most scholars of the Sonnets reject the theory due to the lack of corroborative evidence for the existence of Hughes.
