…the love that Shakespeare bore him was as a sculptor’s love for some rare and exquisite material…
In this controversial story with homosexual overtones dealing with the possible young male subject of many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the suggestion here is that the love the Bard had for the boy was something higher and purer than mere sexual desire. The comparison here is the boy as an aesthetic instrument which fills Shakespeare with artistic inspiration.
He was an extraordinary old aristocrat, who swore like a costermonger, and had the manners of a farmer.
This multiple simile references the guardian of a young man whose parents had died. The young man is described as effeminate by the guardian and the comparison here to a grower and seller of produce is likely intended to be revealing, perhaps, of things not always being everything that they seem. After all, the effeminate young man is also described by the narrator as talented fencer and assured on a horse.
Beauty forsakes itself…like a flower it lives and dies.
An observation made upon the study of passages from Shakespeare’s sonnets in the narrator’s epic attempt to solve the riddle of the object of the sonnets not directed toward the Dark Lady.
…the dark woman who, like a shadow or thing of evil omen, came across Shakespeare’s great romance…
The sonnets directed not toward the object of Shakespeare’s real desire in the mind of the narrator—the boy—but rather the dark woman come under his perusal. It is clear from this particularly direct and pointed simile, that the narrator is fully intended to be understood as homosexual. And making that so explicit at the time was truly a breathtaking risk for Wilde.
“a closet never pierced with crystal eyes”
With a quote from Shakespeare’s sonnet 46, the narrator is forced to admit after all the effort put into trying to find out to whom the poems were addressed that what Shakespeare confessed in his verse still remains so. His heart is a mystery yet to be solved through the act of prying it open.
