There is a satisfying regularity to the news stories concerning new 'discoveries' about Shakespeare. Whether the issue is the authorship, his birthday or what he looked like, the Shakespeare industry is a dab hand at keeping itself in the news and the media themselves are surprisingly willing and complicit in publishing most of it whether it has any provenance or not.
The latest revelations promised us a picture of the real Shakespeare, 90% likely to be genuinely him and endorsed by Prof Stanley Wells, the doyen of Shakespearean Studies.
The problem is that the extant knowledge of what Shakespeare looked like neeeds to be discredited and thrown out before the latest likeness can be taken seriously because there is only the most superficial resemblance between the established image of him and this one.
It is generally accepted that the monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford and the engraving by Martin Droeshout on the first folio of the plays, published in 1623, were seen by the wife and theatrical colleagues of the poet and must thus have some authority. Unfortunately it has become the trend for any vaguely likely-looking lad of the times with a bit of a beard and a moustache to be roped in as the bard and made into sensational news stories.
In the event, it is becoming a similarly jokey little game as on my previous website when any middle-aged, balding creative type- Salman Rushdie, Stanley Kubrick, Shakespeare and then the singer from a band called Eels- was rounded up and said to look a bit like me.
Some of the problem for bardolaters (people like Prof. Wells who nurture idolatrous feelings for Shakespeare) is that the established images are not quite as attractive as they'd like. The Droeshout is a badly drawn cartoon and the Stratford monument shows a plump, jolly sort of face, neither of which are as lovely to contemplate as the lusher, more refined and gentle features of pictures like the Chandos portrait or this new attribution. But one of the great traditions of Shakespeare biography has been to not let the few pieces of genuine evidence that are available spoil the story as we'd prefer it to be.
The Cobbe portrait, as it is known since it is owned by the Cobbe family, has been tested and conveniently dated at 1610. All the research into the history of the painting, its ownership and the concomitant possibilities fit marvellously into the usual pattern of convincing circumstantial evidence, the likes of which have been used to 'prove' that any of several other hands wrote the plays, for example. But on this occasion no amount of astute and brilliant academic work can overturn the more common sense evidence that this painting simply doesn't look like the bloke it is being claimed to be.
The latest revelations promised us a picture of the real Shakespeare, 90% likely to be genuinely him and endorsed by Prof Stanley Wells, the doyen of Shakespearean Studies.
The problem is that the extant knowledge of what Shakespeare looked like neeeds to be discredited and thrown out before the latest likeness can be taken seriously because there is only the most superficial resemblance between the established image of him and this one.
It is generally accepted that the monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford and the engraving by Martin Droeshout on the first folio of the plays, published in 1623, were seen by the wife and theatrical colleagues of the poet and must thus have some authority. Unfortunately it has become the trend for any vaguely likely-looking lad of the times with a bit of a beard and a moustache to be roped in as the bard and made into sensational news stories.
In the event, it is becoming a similarly jokey little game as on my previous website when any middle-aged, balding creative type- Salman Rushdie, Stanley Kubrick, Shakespeare and then the singer from a band called Eels- was rounded up and said to look a bit like me.
Some of the problem for bardolaters (people like Prof. Wells who nurture idolatrous feelings for Shakespeare) is that the established images are not quite as attractive as they'd like. The Droeshout is a badly drawn cartoon and the Stratford monument shows a plump, jolly sort of face, neither of which are as lovely to contemplate as the lusher, more refined and gentle features of pictures like the Chandos portrait or this new attribution. But one of the great traditions of Shakespeare biography has been to not let the few pieces of genuine evidence that are available spoil the story as we'd prefer it to be.
The Cobbe portrait, as it is known since it is owned by the Cobbe family, has been tested and conveniently dated at 1610. All the research into the history of the painting, its ownership and the concomitant possibilities fit marvellously into the usual pattern of convincing circumstantial evidence, the likes of which have been used to 'prove' that any of several other hands wrote the plays, for example. But on this occasion no amount of astute and brilliant academic work can overturn the more common sense evidence that this painting simply doesn't look like the bloke it is being claimed to be.
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