Shakespeare

The Droeshout image, approved by Shakespeare’s colleagues after the playwright’s death as a fitting accompaniment to the collected edition of the plays, is perhaps the closest to a true resemblance. Martin Droeshout could not have been working from life, since he was only fifteen at the time of Shakespeare’s death. But he was part of a dynasty of Flemish artists living in London. His father, Michael Droeshout, had been an engraver and his uncle, Martin Droeshout, was a painter. It is possible, then, that the younger Martin Droeshout based his engraving upon an earlier likeness now lost. It is also relatively close to the image adorning the monument above Shakespeare’s tomb in the church at Stratford. That bust shows Shakespeare with a beard, which suggests that he grew it or shaved it according to mood.

The sculpture has been described by one Shakespearian as resembling that of “a self-satisfied pork butcher.”¹⁰ That it is a good likeness is not in doubt, however, because an early chronicler of Shakespeare’s Stratford believed that “the head was evidently taken from a death-mask.”¹¹ It must have been acceptable to Shakespeare’s immediate family, who commissioned it. It was executed by Gerard Johnson, a Dutch artist who lived near the Globe in Southwark. He had ample opportunity, therefore, to study his subject. There is no reason why a great writer should not resemble a pork butcher, satisfied or otherwise, and it is at least ironic that later accounts did make him a butcher’s apprentice. He may have possessed that corpulent and ruddy glow that seems to be peculiar to English butchers. And why should he not look satisfied?

There are other portraits which claim some attention from posterity, if only because the quest for Shakespeare’s face is an unending one. They all provide varying degrees of resemblance. One painting, now known as the “Chandos portrait” (c. 1610), depicts a man in his early forties wearing a black silk doublet; he is of muddy or swarthy complexion, and his black curls lend him a gypsy or continental appearance. He is also wearing a gold earring. It was once suggested, half in earnest, that it was a portrait of Shakespeare dressed to play Shylock. The painting itself has a long and complicated history, which is as much as to say that its provenance is uncertain.

A more refined and noble image presents itself in the painting known as the “Janssen portrait” (c.1620), in which a sensitive face surmounts an exquisite doublet. The “Felton portrait” (c. eighteenth century) is executed on a small wood panel, and displays a man in his thirties with an enormous forehead but no other distinguished or distinguishing characteristics. The “Flower portrait” is close to the Droeshout engraving, and has led some scholars to believe that it is in fact the lost original for the Folio engraving; it is dated 1609, and has been painted on top of a Madonna of the fifteenth century. But there have been arguments over the authenticity of the dating. And so the matter rests. All of these paintings have a family resemblance, but all of them may be derived from Droeshout.

The one notable exception would seem to be the Grafton portrait (c. 1588), which has already been described in the context of Shakespeare’s own life. It shows a young and fashionably dressed man in his early twenties, and was previously dismissed on the grounds that the young Shakespeare could not have been so affluent at such an early stage of his career. That is no longer a reasonable supposition, as we have seen, and so the merits of the painting can be taken on their own. If it is placed next to the Droeshout engraving, a consonance of youth and middle age begins to emerge. All of these representations, hovering in the realm of uncertainty and conjecture, resemble Shakespeare in more than a pictographic sense; they are a token of his elusiveness in the world. They also suggest that the appearance of the man may have been quite different from any mental or cultural image of Shakespeare that currently exists. He may have been swarthy. He may have worn an earring. He may in later life even have been fat.

CHAPTER 73. My Lord This Is But the Play,Theyre But in Jest