Bard news: it’s much ado about nothing…
THERE is a huge desire to have your own souvenir of Shakespeare and people have always projected what they think he should have looked like.
There are plenty of idealised portraits of him. We have one hanging downstairs in The Shakespeare Institute.
The logic is that he ought to be as beautiful as the plays he wrote. In fact, he might have written beautifully but he certainly wasn’t possessed of model looks.
Just as practically every unidentified Elizabethan portrait of a woman has been said to be Elizabeth I or the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets, so an enormous number of images of men have been claimed as Shakespeare.
But mostly it’s wishful thinking.
As for this portrait, I’m quite sceptical. The Bard wasn’t a particularly good-looking bloke but he was bad-looking in a different way to this.
And we have two well-attested images of him, although both are posthumous. The funeral monument in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-uponAvon, where he was baptised and buried, was commissioned by his family and he may even have sat for it prior to his death. Likewise, the First Folio of his plays has an engraving by Martin Droeshout as its frontispiece.
It’s striking that this painting doesn’t have the sitter’s name on it. Shakespeare was not the only person who was 44 in 1608.
Nor does it include his coat of arms – we know he went to great lengths to gain his coat of arms and at this stage of his career I suspect he would have wanted it to be included.
To me, this looks like the portrait of a courtier rather than a hardworking playwright.
Look at the collar – it’s far more expensive and finely wrought than we’d typically expect for Shakespeare.
It’s quite likely Shakespeare did know the painter Robert Peake but sadly that doesn’t make this a painting of him.