The Sixth Act: Shakespeare after Joyce

Summary

In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Sir Henry Wotton complains that women never let go of their old love affairs. At a recent dinner-party he was dismayed when one of his ex-lovers tried to drag out a romance that he had wisely buried in a bed of asphodel. Although she insisted he had spoiled her life, Wotton observed that she ate an enormous dinner, so he did not feel any anxiety. ‘But women never know when the curtain has fallen’, he declares.

They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art.

As usual in Wilde, this criticism against women is really a compliment in disguise – for no one could be more addicted to sixth acts than the charmingly artificial Oscar. De Profundis is one of the longest postscripts ever written to a played-out love affair, and it makes a devastating tragic ending to what should have been a bedroom farce. Similarly, Wilde’s story ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ adds a sixth act to Shakespeare’s love-life, outing the Bard after the curtain has fallen on his sexuality. Like Dorian Gray, ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ is a story about three men and a picture, in which one friend after another falls for the contagious theory that the Sonnets were dedicated to one Willie Hughes, supposedly a fetching boy-actor at the Globe.