Shakespeare's environment

by C. C. Stopes

Bad art as Droeshout’s is, it nevertheless conveys to us the information that Shakespeare had a high forehead, prematurely bald, fine eyes, long straight nose, small moustache and beard, clean-shaven cheeks, oval face, and rather long hair. The dress is of rather less importance, as it might have been his own, or that of some character in which he had acted. The painting from which the engraving was taken has long been sought for. Some thought it had been found in the so-called Felton portrait. The right panel of this had been split off in the middle of the collar, and the foot shortened to make it fit a frame. It has some details similar to, but not identical with, those of the engraving, though it has a little more art in the workmanship, and a little more expression in the features. On the back is written, “Guil. Shakespeare 1597,” and two letters, “R.B.,” supposed to stand for Richard Burbage. Notwithstanding much that was unsatisfactory in its pedigree, Richardson restored the hair, collar, and dress after Droeshout, and published it, whence have arisen many reproductions.

A much more important rival has, comparatively lately, turned up. Though its pedigree also is hazy, the likeness to the Droeshout print is undoubted, and Mrs. Flower of Stratford-on-Avon purchased it, and presented it to the Memorial Picture Gallery in 1895. Mr. Lionel Cust, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, read a paper about it before the Society of Antiquaries, 12th December 1895, in which he accepted it as genuine. It is, of course, open to the questions whether the picture was painted for the engraving or from the engraving, and whether it had been painted before or after the poet’s death. The expression is better than that of the engraving.

The first reproduction of Droeshout, after the Second Folio, is that which appeared as frontispiece to “Shakespeare’s Poems” in 1640. The engraver, Marshall, turned the face the other way, increased the inanity of the expression, flung a cloak over one shoulder, and put a spray of laurel in the poet’s hand. “This shadow is renowned Shakespeare’s,” etc. William Faithorne introduced it into the frontispiece of “The Rape of Lucrece,” 1658. Very many varieties of these two engravings have appeared.

The chief rival of the Felton and Flower Portraits is the Chandos portrait, which has a long pedigree. If there is any weakness in the chain of evidence for the authenticity of this portrait, it is only in the first links. It was said to have been painted either by Burbage, or by Taylor, the player, to have remained in the possession of the latter until his death, and to have been left by him to Sir William Davenant. It is no objection to this likeness that it should have rings in the ear, because the custom of wearing a rose in the ear was so common among the jeunesse dorée of Elizabethan times, that it was quite natural that an actor should have his ears pierced. But one always feels a little in doubt of the good faith of Davenant, because of his known desire to be thought like Shakespeare. The picture passed from Davenant to Betterton. While in that actor’s possession, Kneller painted a portrait from it, which was presented to Dryden. This came afterwards into the possession of Earl Fitzwilliam. The original passed from Betterton to Mrs. Barry, Mr. Keck, Mr. Nicholls, whose daughter married the Marquis of Carnarvon, afterwards Duke of Chandos, and thence to his daughter, who married the Duke of Buckingham. The picture was bought by the Earl of Ellesmere in 1848, and presented to the nation on the founding of the National Portrait Gallery.

The first engraving taken from it was by Van der Gucht for Rowe’s “Shakespeare,” 1709.

Many other oil paintings and miniatures of unproven authenticity have been put forward as likenesses of the poet, but so diverse are they in their characteristics, that it is impossible that they can be all genuine.

Some fine conceptions based upon composite ideas, others avowedly works of imagination, have been evolved in stone, glass, and oil paintings through the centuries. There is dignity in the Kent and Scheemacher’s statue at Westminster, in the Roubiliac statue, genius in Lord Ronald Gower’s group, and there is pre-Raphaelite art in Ford Madox Brown’s rendering of 1849, but there is no space here to discuss these and other artistic productions. They teach us no facts.

The Stratford bust should possess a stronger claim to antiquity and authenticity even than the Droeshout engraving. It is referred to in the First Folio by Leonard Digges, as having been already set up by the time he wrote. It was designed under the supervision of Shakespeare’s widow, daughters, and sons-in-law, amidst his friends and kinsfolk, who knew him as a man, not as an actor, and they had it coloured, so that the likeness, if at all good, should have been much more striking than the work of the engraver. They, too, suffered from a plentiful lack of art in their sculptor, Gerard Johnson, and from their own deficiency in critical judgement. But there is every reason to believe that they did their best to represent him to the life. They loved him, and they were rich enough to pay for the best they could get.

Yet every one who approaches the Stratford bust is more disappointed in it, as a revelation of the poet, than even in the crude lines of Droeshout. There is an entire lack of the faintest suggestion of poetic or spiritual inspiration in its plump earthliness. The designer has put a pen and paper into the hands, after the manner of the school-boy, who wrote under the drawing of something-on-four-legs, “this is a horse.” The pen strives to write “this is a literary man,” but there is nothing to support the attribution. The intensely disappointing nature of this supposed simulacrum of the poet, made me, years ago, commence a careful study of all his known representations, whether founded on fact or based on imagination. A good deal has been written on the subject from the time of Boaden’s “Inquiry,” 1824. In 1827 Mr. Abraham Wivell brought out a book upon Shakespeare’s portraits, criticizing the opinions of Steevens, Malone, and Boaden, and since then many successive writers have more fully classified and illustrated the varieties, and brought our knowledge of them up to date. But none of them gave me what I wanted, an early representation of the Stratford original bust. I therefore commenced to search with a purpose, and in the very first book I opened I found what I sought, a representation of the tomb as it appeared little more than twenty years after its erection.

This was, of course, in Sir William Dugdale’s great “History of the Antiquities of Warwickshire.” He seems, judging from the notes in his diary, to have prepared his work in the neighbourhood of Stratford-on-Avon about 1636, though the publication was delayed by the civil wars for twenty years.