The Times of London yesterday commented on the Bard:
The poet’s pen, declares Theseus in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name”. Yet the paucity of biographical information and contemporary records of William Shakespeare encourages every generation to speculate anew about the greatest writer in the language. Now a portrait held by a family for 300 years is being claimed as an authentic likeness of the Bard, painted from life when he was in his 40s. The claim is supported by professor Stanley Wells, a leading Shakespearean scholar.
The portrait’s sitter undoubtedly bears a facial resemblance to two depictions of Shakespeare: his bust in the parish church at Stratford; and the famous engraving by Martin Droeshout that appears in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s work. What is most distinctive in appearance about the claimed portrait is the subject’s lower hairline compared with the expansive dome of the conventional image of the playwright. He bears the image, from bearing and clothing, of wealth and contentment, as a successful man of the theater and a landowner might evince.
It would be satisfying if this distinguished face could be put to a man who was, as his contemporary Ben Jonson put it, not for an age but for all time. Droeshout was 15 when Shakespeare died, and must have relied on someone’s description or an existing portrait for his engraving. Another famous depiction of Shakespeare, the so-called Flower portrait, is clearly copied from Droeshout rather than from life. Yet scholarly consensus is liable to prove elusive. For knowledge of Shakespeare, succeeding generations must, as Jonson said, “look not on his Picture, but his Book”.
