This picture on the right was the first picture of Shakespeare that I ever saw, on the cover of the
Merchant of Venice, which we had as part of our 10th grade English literature course.He seemed a dour-looking gentleman, but we nevertheless paid our respects at his altar, memorizing and declaiming his prose in all seriousness.
Yesterday, a new picture was unveiled to the world, a far more vivid, aristocratic- looking character, who would give Joseph Fiennes fair competition in any screen test. See below (original link ) :
"A detail of the newly discovered portrait of William Shakespeare, presented by the Shakespeare Birthplace trust, is seen in central London, Monday March 9, 2009. The portrait, believed to be almost the only authentic image of the writer made from life, has belonged to one family for centuries but was not recognized as a portrait of Shakespeare until recently. There are very few likenesses of Shakespeare, who died in 1616."
This is being called the Cobbes portrait and has all (or at least a goodly proportion) of the Shakespearian scholars in a rare tizzy.
From the Yahoo article:
But
they can't be certain. In the shifting sands of Shakespeare
scholarship, where even the authorship of the plays is sometimes
disputed, nothing is written in stone.
"We're 90 percent sure that it's Shakespeare," said Paul Edmondson,
director of learning at the Shakespeare Learning Trust, which plans to
exhibit the portrait in Stratford-on-Avon. "You'll never be entirely
certain. There will always be voices of dissent."
Consider that the earlier 'authoritative' version of the Bard's image was this one,called the Chandos portrait .
Which of these is the true face of the Bard, I wonder. Inspite of the lavish felicity of the newly-discovered portrait, I think I rather prefer the Chandos portrait. It seems more in line with what I imagine Shakespeare might have looked like, rather than the faintly stylized nobleman look of the Cobbes version.
What do you think?
Accidental Blogger 
7 responses to “The Many Faces of the Bard (Sujatha)”
So, the bard was a hotty. I guess this find will be as pleasing to Shakespeare lovers as Martha Washington’s retroactive computer enhancement was to early American historians. Does it matter – Cobbes or Chandos? Didn’t the subject of the portrait(s) himself say, “A rose by any other name…” etc?
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Thank you for posting on this, Sujatha. There’s more on the revelation in the NYT. I doubt that our work on the portrait will tell us more about Shakespeare than it will about ourselves. An expert in the article is quoted as saying, “It might be a portrait of Shakespeare, but not a likeness, because the conventions of portraiture at the time were often to idealize the subject.” Point taken. And the conventions of portraiture at any other time? Are they more reliable? More accurate? Regardless, Shakespeare in the news is always fun.
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Dean:
Considering that the paintings could most definitely be from Shakespeare’s lifetime(which is proved by all that painstaking research into the number of rings on the trees in the wood panel used, paints used, etc.) I still doubt that it is definitive proof that the painting is that of Shakespeare himself, even if the provenance has the family of the owners being closely associated with a patron of Shakespeare.
No matter how admiring a patron, would he pay a pretty penny to have a aristocrat-style depiction of his favorite playwright? I think not,given that the aristocrat in question could not anticipate the ‘highly prized, possibly worth millions in the distant future’ bequest to his heirs and demand that a likeness be taken of Shakespeare, who was after all, just a wordsmith, albeit one who had the Queen’s favor.
Ruchira, you’re right- this is the Foxification of Shakespeare, just as they attempted to imagine Martha Washington as a ‘hot babe’ of her times.
Would we value Shakespeare any less if he looked exactly like the face in the wood-cut? Most certainly not. All we end up with is a ‘Look, he was the Brad Pitt or George Clooney or fill-in-your-favorite-hunk of the age’ style reporting, with all the silly gushing prose that accompanies it.
Like Bassanio, I’ll stick with the iron casket, rather than the golden or silver one,for ‘All that glisters is not gold.”
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The International Herald Tribune, the global edition of the NYT carries a shorter version of the same article by John F. Burns. It has Stanley Wells, Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, who calls the Cobbes portrait a “pinup” in the NYT piece, elaborating further:
Dean said: I doubt that our work on the portrait will tell us more about Shakespeare than it will about ourselves.
Well, it definitely says more about Mr. Wells. Also see the photo of Wells in the Herald Tribune which has been left out in the NYT article. Or look at him here for a full frontal shot. See any resemblance to the subject his of adoration in the Cobbes portrait? Weird!
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I think it’s agreed that the evidence isn’t definitive, but the fact that Wriothesley couldn’t anticipate the durability of Shakespeare’s fame doesn’t put much pressure on the possibility of his commissioning a portrait. Were Elizabethan courtiers such prudent financial planners?
I’m puzzled by the notion that, on the one hand, the portrait is not Shakespeare because it depicts an aristocrat while, on the other hand, Renaissance portraiture tended to idealize. Doesn’t the one cancel out the other? I’m also amazed that experts don’t think twice about characterizing the image as being that of “a head-turner.” Really? Is that an image of a looker?
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Elizabethan courtiers weren’t particularly prudent financial planners, agreed. But my contention is that given the choice of immortalizing your latest mistress in a portrait, or your favorite bard, the mistress would win hands down. Unless of course, they were one and the same, which could be another possibility according to some.
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Stanley Wells looks as much like Roy Mersky as Shakespeare. Mersky was the prominent director of University of Texas, Austin’s, law school library until he died unexpectedly last year. But then photography, like Renaissance portraiture, also manages to idealize its subjects according to its own conventions.
As for the sexuality of Shakespeare, well, that topic, too, invites us to muse as much upon ourselves as upon a dead white guy poet.
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