Page:The portrait of Mr. W. H (IA portraitofmrwh01wild).pdf/35

 was a practical theatrical manager as well as an imaginative poet; and Cyril Graham had actually discovered the boy actor's name. He was Will, or, as he preferred to call him, Willie Hughes. The Christian name he found of course in the punning sonnets, CXXXV and CXLIII; the surname was, according to him, hidden in the eighth line of Sonnet XX, where Mr W. H. is described as— "A man in hew, all Hews in his controwling.'"

"In the original edition of the Sonnets 'Hews' is printed with a capital letter and in italics, and this, he claimed, showed clearly that a play on words was intended, his view receiving a good deal of corroboration from those sonnets in which curious puns are made on the words 'use' and 'usury, and from such lines as—

"Thou art as fair in knowledge as in hew.'"

Of course I was converted at once, and Willie Hughes became to me as real a person as Shakespeare. The only objection I made to the theory was that the name of Willie Hughes does not occur in the list of the actors of Shakespeare's company as it is printed in the first folio. Cyril, however, pointed