Toward the end of the reign of Queen Victoria, Oscar Wilde’s literary detective story ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ sketched the ‘onlie begetter’ of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a young actor speculatively called ‘Willie Hughes’. Wilde’s narrator said that Hughes was ‘not merely a most delicate instrument for the presentation of [Shakespeare’s] art, but the visible incarnation of his idea of beauty’. First published in 1889 and extensively revised before his death in 1900, the story is a late Victorian reply to the censure of the Sonnets at the beginning of Victoria’s reign, in particular to Henry Hallam’s notorious comment, ‘it is impossible not to wish that Shakespeare had never written them’. Hallam’s objection to the ‘weakness and folly in all excessive and misplaced emotion’ was an allusion to the unsayable, the love that dare not speak its name. Yet Hallam’s son Arthur Henry Hallam might also have been one of those ‘young men of poetical tempers’ whom the older Hallam said shared a tendency ‘to exaggerate the beauties of these remarkable productions’. Certainly Hallam’s friend Alfred Tennyson ’s view ‘in his weaker moments’ (according to Benjamin Jowett), that Shakespeare was ‘greater in his sonnets than in his plays’, caused a slight loss of nerve in Tennyson’s biographer, his son Hallam Tennyson. Reprinting Jowett’s memoir, the younger Tennyson excised the gloss suggesting his father had ever ‘expressed … a sort of sympathy with Hellenism’.