By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘What is your substance, whereof are you made, / That millions of strange shadows on you tend?’ Sonnet 53 is pored over and analysed by Cyril Graham in Oscar Wilde’s brilliant short story ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ (1889), about a man who thinks he’s discovered the identity of the mysterious dedicatee of the 1609 edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.