![]() But the play seems to have been performed around 1600, a good ten years earlier than the date on this portrait, while the work that Gullio refers to is mostly still earlier than that, from Shakespeare’s first lyric crop in the fifteen-nineties. This presents a problem, since it is a rule of life that undergraduates don’t put pictures of bald, funny-looking guys up in their dorm. Ben Jonson was so jaundiced about anything that struck him as pretension that when poor Shakespeare got enough money to buy a coat of arms and the motto “Non Sanz Droict” (“Not Without Right”) Jonson immediately introduced a dim-witted social-climbing character into a play just so that he could have him say that his motto was “Not without mustard.” Shakespeare lived in as satiric and short-tempered a circle as has ever existed if, close to his retirement, he was bald, and had a picture painted where he wasn’t, they would have jumped on him, and he knew it. Differences in likeness were as evident to them as they are to us-that’s why Hamlet urges his mom to “look here, upon this picture, and on this.” There is not a single line or scrap of evidence from the time in which someone says, Well, sure, the picture shows him with a full head of hair (or beard or whatever), but he didn’t really look like that. In Elizabethan portraits, people look like the period, but they also look like themselves: a portrait of Southampton looks different from a portrait of Ben Jonson which looks nothing at all like a portrait of Richard Burbage. All author pictures are cosmetic, then as now-do you think that the sage man with his hand to his head, the wry woman novelist with the half smile actually look like that?-but they were no more stylized back then than any other kind of portraiture. Nor is it true that there was, in the Jacobean period, a kind of broad, hazy latitude about portrait-making, in which artists were free to make people look however they wanted them to look and everyone accepted it. Any portrait of Shakespeare in his forties that doesn’t look like these portraits of Shakespeare isn’t a portrait of Shakespeare. Shakespeare might have said, “Well, he was better-looking than that, dammit” (then again, given what she had put up with, she might not have), but she wouldn’t have said, “He didn’t look like that at all,” or she wouldn’t have let it happen. ![]() To use an old distinction, they’re “conceptual” rather than “optical”-they show an assembled stack of features rather than a convincing illusion of a specific face-but the concepts are clearly articulated: he’s a bald guy with a short beard. Neither image is especially masterly, or even much good at all. The Shakespeare family put up and paid for the monument, sculpted by an artisan named Janssen, in Stratford right after their dad died-the Shakespeare scholar René Weis thinks the likeness was “almost certainly” made from a life mask taken not too long before the poet drew his last breath, in 1616-and though it makes him look like a Thurber husband, that must have been just how he looked, at least by the end. Ben Jonson said that the First Folio engraving looked just like him, saying, “could he but have drawn his wit as well in brass, as he hath hit his face/the print would then surpass/all that was ever writ in brass,” and Jonson knew him as well as anyone. They were commissioned soon after he died, by people who knew him intimately, in order to give other people a sense of what he looked like while he was alive. To commemorate the anniversary of his death on 23rd April 1616, we delve into Art UK's collection to ponder over the many presumed portrayals of Britain's most-loved writer, the Bard.First, the two familiar portraits of Shakespeare-the Droeshout engraving from the First Folio and the Stratford bust at Holy Trinity Church, in his home town-are not “thought to be” portraits of Shakespeare or “widely accepted” as portraits of Shakespeare. To convey the subject's wealth and status, or even their 'inner essence' from the unique perspective of the artist was deemed more important than accurately capturing their physiognomy. Secondly, it is important to note that historically, artists didn't intend to capture the exact 'likeness' of their sitters. On top of this, the many paintings that have been identified to be Shakespeare were simply false or misattributed. Therefore any painterly depictions of him must be taken with a pinch of salt. Firstly (and very obviously), Shakespeare lived before the time of photography. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) is the most famous playwright in history, though ironically, we know very little about his life and perhaps even less about what he really looked like. Ted May (b.1939) Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
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