If evaluated through queer hermeneutics, Sonnet 144 can appear to have homoerotic overtones. For example, Oscar Wilde's "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." is a critical analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnets that emphasizes their potential homoeroticism. Wilde believed in the theory that the young man addressed in the sonnets was an actor in Shakespeare's troupe named Willie Hughes. The sonnets are thus a love letter from Shakespeare to Willie Hughes. Wilde writes, "finds that what his tongue had spoken his soul had listened to, and that the raiment that he had put on for the disguise is a plague-stricken and poisonous thing that eats into his flesh, and that he cannot throw away. Then comes Desire, with its many maladies, and Lust that makes one love all that one loathes, and Shame, with its ashen face and secret smile." Wilde writes of Shakespeare's mental and emotional battle of whom to love and how to love that person. Wilde writes specifically of Sonnet 144, "[Shakespeare has his moments of loathing for her Dark Lady, for, not content with enslaving the soul of Shakespeare, she seems to have sought to snare the senses of Willie Hughes." In Sonnet 144, the second quatrain is full of dislike toward the Dark Lady, "To win me soon to hell, my female evil / … / and would corrupt my saint to be a devil."