When I say that Portraits of Shakespeare is the definitive history of visual depictions of William Shakespeare, it should not be taken as too high praise: There are only three images of the man that are likely contemporaneous with him. But Katherine Duncan-Jones, emerita fellow at Somerville College, Oxford, here provides the historical background for each of the three images in forensic levels of detail and offers a compelling original thesis about the authorship of one of the three images. She also gives her appraisal of the images’ artistic merits and what they tell us about Shakespeare.
The images that historians are confident were created during (or near) Shakespeare’s lifetime have been viewed by his admirers with great disappointment. Two are technically amateurish, and they do not give the viewer much insight into Shakespeare’s personality or life. Only one, the so-called Chandos portrait, seems to do justice to the greatest playwright of all time.
Let us begin on that happy note. The Chandos portrait, Duncan-Jones informs us, is a poor name for the best portrait we have of Shakespeare. It is named for a previous owner, the “prodigal and bankrupt duke of Chandos,” when it could more appropriately be named after the man, Francis Egerton, who donated it to London’s National Portrait Gallery. Better yet, it could be named after the young associate of Shakespeare, Joseph Taylor, who (Duncan-Jones believes) painted it. Up until this point, scholars have been convinced, based on the records of an 18th-century Shakespeare obsessive named George Vertue, that the Chandos artist was one John Taylor, “a Player contemporary with Shakespeare and his intimate Friend.” This attribution posed a problem for Shakespeare sleuths inasmuch as John was the most common Christian name in 17th-century England and Taylor one of the most common surnames.
Nonetheless, several possibilities have been forwarded, some more plausible than others. (On the less plausible end of the spectrum, it has been suggested that the great tragedian Richard Burbage, known to be an amateur painter, did it. But the attribution error in this hypothesis has never been adequately explained.) Duncan-Jones offers an alternative in the young star of a leading theater company, who by George Vertue’s account may have been tutored in the role of Hamlet by “the Author Master Shakespeare.” This would be Joseph Taylor, an actor who rivaled Burbage, according to popular accounts. Duncan-Jones speculates that Vertue mistakenly identified the painter as “John,” an explanation that seems more plausible when it is noted that 17th-century bookkeepers often abbreviated names to their first two letters. Vertue could very well have taken a reference to “Jo. Taylor” to mean “John” as opposed to the less-common “Joseph,” leading sleuths down the wrong trail for centuries.
So is Joseph Taylor, the great Hamlet and leading player of the Duke of York’s Men, the artist of the Chandos portrait? It is an attractive thesis, in large part because it explains the portrait’s most fascinating attribute: its informality. Taylor painted Shakespeare “in a relaxed, off-stage mood, with his white shirt collar unfastened.” Even his posture seems to slump, as though the painting was executed during the rest breaks of a busy rehearsal. Shakespeare looks out cockily at the viewer, with the slightest shadow of a smile passing across pursed lips. His only ornament is a gold hoop earring in his left earlobe, a conspicuous feature that hints at Shakespeare’s “more splendid appearance in public” as a gentleman and frequent visitor at court.
The fact that Joseph Taylor worked mostly for a different theater company may explain why the portrait has reached us at all: He may have taken it back to his residence, or company theater, sparing it from the 1613 conflagration at the Globe Theatre that undoubtedly destroyed many Shakespeare treasures.
Then there are the Shakespeare images that are often viewed not quite as treasures but as artifacts with which we are stuck, like an heirloom dresser that clashes with everything else in the house. I am thinking here of the bust that adorns Shakespeare’s monument at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford, which is variously described here as “clumsy, provincial, and artistically second-rate . . . coarse and garish”—and my favorite, “puddingy.” The Stratford bust makes it appear that its subject, like his character Sir Andrew Aguecheek, was “a great eater of beef.” Shakespeare’s cheeks are plump, his body rotund, his head disappearing directly into his neck. Shakespeare’s mouth is agape, his wide eyes fixed far off into the distance. The sculptor may have been trying to depict the Bard in a moment of artistic revelation. He looks, instead, like he has been whacked with a mallet or perhaps fallen into a food coma.
As Duncan-Jones hastens to remind us, it is not essential “for a ‘great poet’ to look like one,” but that reality does not diminish the dissatisfaction most people feel about the Stratford bust, which is so pronounced that a Google image search for “William Shakespeare” does not return it at all. It has been memory-holed, and quite effectively. And perhaps that is for the best. “The whole history of the Stratford bust,” Duncan-Jones declares, “is one of overzealous interference and horribly ill judged and mismanaged attempts at restoration,” to the extent that the effigy we see today may not bear much resemblance to the original. At one point the limestone bust, which was originally colored with paints and dyes, was whitewashed in the mistaken belief that sculptures back then were uncolored.
While the Stratford bust fails as a work of art, the monument it adorns is revealing about aspects of Shakespeare’s life. While many wall-mounted monuments of the period depicted gentlemen with their families, Shakespeare sits alone at his work. This may have been intended as a fitting tribute to an artist of singular significance—or, perhaps, evidence of Shakespeare’s unhappiness in his domestic life, to be cited alongside the infamous “second-best bed” that he left his wife in his will. On a slightly less depressing note, Duncan-Jones observes that Shakespeare’s family motto—a late invention that smacked of arrivism—was omitted from the monument, possibly because it was singled out for mockery in a satirical play. Shakespeare was capable of blushing.
Finally, there is the Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare, a rush job commissioned for the overbudget and overdue First Folio. This image, unlike the Stratford bust, will be familiar to most fans. As a likeness, it bears some similarity to the Chandos portrait, but with wilder hair, a pronounced cupid’s bow in the upper lip, and an improbably tall forehead. As a piece of art, it stands up to passing scrutiny—but not much beyond that: Shakespeare’s head is so big and free-floating above the collar of his doublet that it appears to draw the body toward it by the strength of a gravitational field. And the text accompanying the engraving in the First Folio (by Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson) seems to acknowledge its deficiencies as a work of art within the bounds of politeness: the Graver had a strife / with Nature, Jonson wrote, to out-doo the life. The implication may be, Duncan-Jones points out, that the strife was won by Nature.
In addition to Duncan-Jones’s discussion of each of the three contemporaneous images of Shakespeare, she discusses the many fakes, forgeries, and homages that have been created over the centuries. She also discusses the commercial applications of the three legitimate images, in case anyone cares to learn about the Chandos portrait in advertising.
Of course, the main attraction here is the three images: Shakespeare’s admirers want to know what the man looked like. But why is that? And why does it matter to us, as it most evidently does, that he look like the self-confident rogue of the Chandos portrait rather than the “puddingy” schlub of the Stratford bust? Perhaps because we want to think that the author of those magnificent plays and poetry looked the part, just as a lover wants to think his beloved lovely. Perhaps because, as the best portraitists have understood, a well-made image can convey important qualities of character and temperament.
Hamlet certainly thought so, as he implored his mother to look first on the portrait of Old Denmark, with “an eye like Mars to threaten and command,” and then on the portrait of his murderer-brother, who looked “like a mildewed ear.” As a friend suggested to me, perhaps the reason we are so maddened by the Stratford bust is because it indicates that Shakespeare, a man of unparalleled brilliance, let himself go at the end of his life, returning to Stratford “to get rich and fat” instead of working at his calling. Was the world denied a masterpiece or two by this choice? Is it selfish of us to hold such a decision against him?As with so many other aspects of William Shakespeare’s life, those who search his portraits for insight are bound to be disappointed: They leave shadows of meaning but few revelations. Even the Chandos portrait, best of the three, is cryptic. Barring any new discovery, frustrated fans can only return to Shakespeare’s real legacy, his writings. To quote Ben Jonson’s introductory poem from the First Folio, Reader looke / not on his Picture, but his Booke.
Blake Seitz is assistant editor of the Washington Free Beacon.
