Monday, August 19, 2013

Will(iam) the Real Shakespeare Please Stand Up?


Cobbe Portait, compelling albeit controversial

Shakespearean scholar Stanley Wells posed proudly with this portrait in March 2009, which after three years of research, some experts apparently deemed to be a genuine rendering of Shakespeare's likeness (i.e., a live portrait).

Professor Stanley Wells

Not so fast, of course.  Other scholars are wont to be skeptical, as the New York Times reported.
David Scott Kastan, a Yale Shakespeare expert, said by telephone that there were reasons to question the Cobbe portrait’s provenance - it was in fact once owned by the Earl of Southampton or commissioned by him, as the trust representatives believe - to doubt whether the richly dressed man in the portrait was Shakespeare. 
“If I had to bet I would say it’s not Shakespeare,” Mr. Kastan said. But even if it was, he said, the traditions of Elizabethan portraiture meant that it would be unwise to conclude that Shakespeare actually looked like the figure depicted in the portrait. “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,” he said.
Kastan makes a good point.  Rembrandt, the Dutch master, painted in the decades soon after Shakespeare's death, and built his artistic reputation on painting the newly wealthy merchants of Amsterdam.  For the sake of posterity, I imagine, he was expected to render, and no doubt did render, a flattering (i.e., idealized) portrait of his proud subjects.  Indeed the Cobbe Shakespeare is princely handsome and young and suffused with the wealth that, according to Wells, came from the wider success Shakespeare garnered in his later years.

From what little was reported of the research of this portrait, the evidence established that the wood and paint were from Shakespeare's time (i.e., late 1500s and early 1600s).  But I don't know if the evidence suggested that the man in the portrait was in fact Shakespeare.


Chandos portrait, considered to be his likeness
It was Tarnya Cooper, of the National Portrait Gallery, who concluded that the Chandos portrait was authentic after her own three-and-a-year research.


Droeshout engraving, on the First Folio
Janssen portrait, at the Folger Shakespeare Library

You see, the Janssen portrait and the Droeshout engraving bear a much more striking resemblance to the Cobbe portrait, than does the the Droeshout engraving to the Chandos portrait.  This may not mean much, if artists were working off of the same portrait.  But one question is, How wealthy was Shakespeare at different stages in his life?  Another one is, Even if he weren't actually wealthy at all, did any of his patrons, formal or informal, have a stake in portraying him as wealthy?  

References

Art Collector Finds The "Real" Shakespeare

Portrait of Shakespeare Unveiled, 399 Years Late

Is This a Shakespeare Which I See Before Me?

No comments:

Post a Comment