This letter was signed "J. Wilson," who was the conductor of the European Museum. This "J. Wilson" appears to have been the original Barnum. Although Prince Hal and Falstaff are said in the play to have affected "The Boar's head in Eastcheap," it does not appear, except from Mr. "J. Wilson," that "Shakespeare and his friends" ever resorted thither. There was an old inn in Eastcheap, but it was not called "The Boar's Head." There was an inn by that name, however, in Blackfriars, near the theater, from which the manager might have borrowed it. Then, again, Mr. "J. Wilson" seemed to have forgotten the great fire in London in 1666, which, "in a few hours, in a strong east wind, left the whole of Eastcheap a mass of smoking ruins, and the wretched inhabitants could think of saving nothing but their lives." Mr. Wilson subsequently amended his story so as to read that "it was found between four and five years ago at a broker's shop at the Minories by a man of fashion, whose name must be concealed," etc., etc. Mr. Steevens, who scouted the other pictures as spurious, accepted this picture, for a time, as the original of the engravings we have called No. 1 and No. 2; but finally, the whole thing exploded and was forgotten.
No. 4. The Bust in Stratford Church.—This was carved by nobody knows whom, from nobody knows what, nobody knows when; for the statement that it was cut by "Gerard Johnson," an Amsterdam "tomb-maker," is invariably accepted, but can be traced to no historical source. Says Boaden (page 81), "The performance is not too good for a native sculptor." In 1623 Leonard Digges alludes to it in a few verses well known. It seems to have been originally colored, but there is no testimony as to the original colors. In 1748, one hundred and twenty-five years after Digges, John Hall, a Stratford artist, "restored" it, painting the eyes a light hazel, and the hair and beard auburn. This was "a good enough" Shakespeare for all practical purposes for the next half-hundred years or so. But in 1793 came Mr. Malone. He caused the bust—in deference, probably, to a purer taste and a sense of churchly propriety—to be covered completely with a thick coat of white paint. *
* While these pages are going through the press (April,
1879), however, we find a statement that within a year or
two (and since the writer of these pages visited it) one
Simon Colling has applied a bath to the bust—removing
Malone's whitewash, and revealing the identical auburn hair
and hazel eyes which tradition had asserted to be
underneath.
From this bust, Mr. Boaden says, a Mr. Bullock once took a cast, which is sometimes engraved as frontispiece to an edition of the plays, in which case it is entitled "Cast of the head of William Shakespeare, taken after death," which may or may not—for Mr. Boaden can not tell us who this "Mr. Bullock" was—be the German "Death Mask" noticed further on, (at any rate the statement "taken after death"—"William Shakespeare being unquestionably dead at the time—is literally true.)
The bust represents its subject as possessing a magnificent head, admirably proportioned, with no protruding "bumps." The face is represented as breaking into a smile. According to this effigy, Shakespeare must have had an extraordinarily long upper lip, the distance between the base of the nose and the mouth being remarkably out of proportion with the other facial developments; there seems to be a little difficulty, too, about the chin, which is pulled out into what appears to be a sort of extra nose; but, nevertheless, the Stratford bust represents a fine, soldierly-looking man, with a fierce military mustache cocked up at the ends, and a goatee. If Ben Jonson—knowing his friend William Shakespeare to have been the martial and altogether elegant-looking gentleman the Stratford bust represents him—authorized the verses we have already quoted to be placed under the "Droe-shout engraving," it was a deliberate libel on his part, and as gross as it was deliberate, and only perhaps to be explained by Jonson's alleged secret enmity to, or jealousy of, William Shakespeare, his rival playwright, which we shall be called to examine at length further on. *
* Post Part III. The Jonsonian testimony.
No. 5. "The Chandos Portrait." This picture, so termed because once the property of the Duke of Chandos, is the best known of all the so-called portraits—being, in fact, the one from which the popular idea of Shakespeare is derived; therefore, when a man is said to resemble Shakespeare, it is meant to be conveyed that he bears a likeness to the Chandos picture. Mr. Malone announced that it was painted in 1607, but never gave any other authority than his own ipse dixit for the statement, not even taking the trouble to refer, like Mr. J. Wilson, to "a man of fashion, whose name must be concealed." Mr. Boaden lays (page 42) that he once saw it, and compared it "with what had been termed a fine copy, I think by Piamberg, and found it utterly unlike."
"Indeed," he continues, "I never saw any thing that resembled it." He also says (pages 41-42) that "the copies by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mr. Humphrey were not only unlike the original, but were unlike each other, one being smiling and the other grave." That is to say, that not only have the romancers constructed "biographies," but the artists have kept up with them; and we may, every one of us, select our own Shakespeare to-day—poet or potman, scholar or clown, tall or short, fair or dark; we may each suit our own tastes with a Shakespeare to our liking. Mr. Boaden continues (page 49): "It" (the Chandos) "was very probably painted by Burbage," the great tragedian, who is known to have handled the pencil; it is said to have been the property of Joseph Taylor, our poet's Hamlet, who, dying about 1653, at the advanced age of seventy, left the picture by will to Davenant. At the death of Davenant in 1663, it was bought by Betterton, the actor, and when he died Mr. Robert Keck, of the Inner Temple, gave Mrs. Barry, the actress, forty guineas for it. From Mr. Keck it passed to Mr. Nichol, of Southgate, whose daughter married the Marquis of Caernarvon.
Steevens, whom Boaden quotes (page 43), declined to be convinced by this genealogy, and said, "Gossip rumor had given out that Davenant was more than Shakespeare's godson. * What folly, therefore, to suppose that he should possess a genuine portrait of the poet, when his lawful daughters had not one! Mrs. Barry was an actress of acknowledged gallantry; as she received forty guineas for the picture, something more animated might have been included though not specified in the bargain," etc., etc. Steevens was fond of calling this picture "the Davenantico Bettertono-Barryan-Keckian-Hicolsian-Chandosian portrait."
* There is a story that once, on the occasion of one of
Shakespeare's visits to Stratford, a villager, meeting young
Davenant in the street, asked him where he was going. "To
the inn, to see my godfather Shakespeare," said the lad.
"Beware how you take the name of God in vain, my lad," said
the other. The allusions to William's gallantries are
numerous. On the Stratford parish records there is entry of
the birth of one "Thomas Green, alias Shakespeare." The
tale of the interrupted amour, at the theater, of "Richard
the Third" and "William the Conqueror," as is apt to be the
case, is about the most widely familiar of the Shakespearean
stories, and unnecessary to be repeated here. But Davenant
was proud to claim the dishonor of his mother, and
Shakespeare for his father, to his dying day.