The Immortal Man Whose Name We Lost

A Poetry Tale about William Shakespeare, told by Hello Doggo.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? You’ve heard it at weddings. It’s usually taken as a man wooing a woman.

Probably not. It sits among the first hundred and twenty-six sonnets, which scholars generally take to be addressed to a young man. And the poem makes him an astonishing promise: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

So who was he?

Here’s where it gets good. The sonnets came out in sixteen oh nine, with a dedication from the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, to “the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mister W. H.”

Mister W. H. has kept people busy for four hundred years. Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, with his initials swapped round? William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke?

In the seventeen hundreds, a scholar called Thomas Tyrwhitt spotted something in Sonnet Twenty. In the line “a man in hue, all hues in his controlling”, the original printing gives that second “hues” a capital letter, in italics. A pun, he thought. On a name. Hughes.

Oscar Wilde adored this. He made Hughes a boy actor called Willie, and wrote a whole story, The Portrait of Mister W. H., in which a young man has a portrait of Willie Hughes forged, to prove the theory.

Nobody has ever found a Willie Hughes who fits. And nobody has proved any of the others, either.

So Shakespeare kept his promise. The young man lives every time the poem is spoken.

He just forgot to leave a name.