Ep. 165 - Mr. W. H.
“—Do you think it is only a paradox? the quaker librarian was asking. The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.”
Oscar Wilde and Alfred Lord Douglas
Topics in this episode include Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” Shakespeare’s sonnets, the identity of the Fair Youth, the dedication on the folio of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the identity of Mr. W.H., Willie Hughes, homoeroticism in Sonnet 20, camp, the meaning of “ephebe,” Wilde’s connection of same-sex relationships in ancient Greece and the work of Shakespeare, gay coding in “Scylla and Charybdis,” the chilling effect of Oscar Wilde’s trial, Oscar Wilde as a model for Buck Mulligan, Lyster and Eglinton as foils for Mulligan, homophobia in “Scylla and Charybdis,” and Joyce’s thoughts on Oscar Wilde and homosexuality.
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Further Reading:
Brivic, S. (1980). Joyce between Freud and Jung. Port Washington: Kennikat Press. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/joycebetweenfreu0000briv/mode/2up
Chua, X. (2016). A Queer Reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. https://www.academia.edu/40125344/A_Queer_Reading_of_James_Joyces_Ulysses
Devlin-Glass, F. (2005). Writing in the Slipstream of the Wildean Trauma: Joyce, Buck Mulligan and Homophobia Reconsidered. The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 31(2), 27–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/25515592
Gifford, D., & Seidman, R. J. (1988). Ulysses annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California Press. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/vy6j4tk
Haas, K. (2015, Mar 27). Thomas Tyrwhitt, Oscar Wilde, Mr. W.H., and James Joyce. The Rosenbach. https://rosenbach.org/blog/thomas-tyrwhitt-oscar-wilde-mr-wh-and/
Joyce, J. (1989). Oscar Wilde: The poet of Salome. In E. Mason & R. Ellmann (eds.), The critical writings of James Joyce. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/criticalwritings00joyc/mode/2up
Kestner, J. A. (1994). Youth by the Sea: The Ephebe in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and “Ulysses.” James Joyce Quarterly, 31(3), 233–276. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25473567
Lamos, C. (1998). Deviant modernism : sexual and textual errancy in T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/deviantmodernism0000lamo/page/150/mode/2up
McCann, H. (2024, March 27). The rise and rise of the disaster bisexual. BINARYTHIS. https://binarythis.com/2024/03/27/the-rise-and-rise-of-the-disaster-bisexual/
Slote, S., (2024) “As Camp as a Row of Pink Tents: Stephen’s Portrait of Mr W. S.”, Open Library of Humanities 10(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.15270
Was Shakespeare Gay? (n.d.). Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/podcasts/lets-talk-shakespeare/was-shakespeare-gay/