Scars in their Eyes

In my last blog post, I provided a link to a new website which provides a wealth of information in support of the likelihood that the "Wadlow" portrait (detail, left) is a genuine portrait of William Shakespeare.

I believe it is, and in this blog post I shall point to just one of the features which helps to identify the sitter.

We'll be concentrating on the left eye (the sitter's left, that is) and, in particular, a distinctive scar immediately above the left eye.  It's clearly visible on the "Wadlow", cutting down from above the eyebrow to slice through the outer end of it.  Just in case, I'll provide another detail of the portrait, which brings us in a little closer.

There, see?  The scar comes down over the left forehead, meeting the left eyebrow about halfway across.  Something similar can be seen in the "Chandos" portrait of Shakespeare at the National Portrait Gallery:

It might look a little clearer in this detail of the above:

This scar was, apparently, something that Shakespeare bore for much of his life.  The evidence for this, I would suggest, is visible on the contested skull of Shakespeare at Beoley in Worcestershire (detail of photo by Richard Peach for The Village magazine):

A photo of the Beoley skull, taken at around the time of the Second World War, shows the scar over the left eyebrow very clearly:

Just in case, here's a detail of the same, showing the left eye socket and the scar above it:

So, Shakespeare had a scar over his left eye, cutting down over his left eyebrow, which is precisely what we see on the "Wadlow" portrait.

But, wait - what's that you say?  The Beoley skull was "proven" to have belonged to a mysterious, unknown female in her seventies and can't, therefore, have been Shakespeare?

Hmmnn ... tell you what: let's check one more image.

This is a detail from a facial reconstruction of the contested Shakespeare Death Mask in Darmstadt, Germany.  There it is, just above the left eyebrow - a scar which runs down to meet the eyebrow about halfway across.  The same reconstruction of Shakespeare's face from the death mask, only taken at a different angle, shows this scar very clearly:

And, for comparison, the scar on the death mask facial reconstruction alongside the scar on the Beoley skull:

They look pretty much the same, don't they?

Well, here's the odd thing.  That facial reconstruction of the death mask was done by Dr Caroline Wilkinson - the same expert who claimed that the Beoley skull was that of a woman in her seventies!

Admittedly, the Channel 4 Shakespeare's Tomb documentary, shown earlier this year, did rather railroad Dr Wilkinson into making that statement ... but maybe if Caroline Wilkinson had compared the skull with her own facial reconstructions of Shakespeare, she might have been less certain in her analysis.

The scar - on portraits, death mask, facial reconstructions and the Beoley skull - is one of Shakespeare's distinguishing features.

That, or a massive coincidence, requiring us to believe that the only skull to have been identified as the "veritable skull of William Shakespeare" actually belonged to an unknown septuagenarian, even thought it has exactly the same scar as Shakespeare had!

Shakespeare's Skull: The Eyebrow Test

This is a still from the Channel Four documentary, Shakespeare's Tomb.  Dr Caroline Wilkinson is analysing the laser scan made of the rogue skull in the ossuary at Beoley church.  What she's saying is this:

"In male skulls you tend to see a bulge just where the eyebrows sit, and you can see on this skull that we don't have a bulge of bone."

Ergo, we hear, the skull is probably female.

And, yes, Dr Wilkinson has a point: the skull really doesn't show much in the way of eyebrow bulges:

One might even suggest that the right eyebrow ridge (the one she's pointing to on the laser scan) looks somewhat damaged.  An earlier photo of the skull shows this quite clearly:

So we're agreed.  Eyebrow bulges not much to write home about.  But what's interesting is that, in the TV documentary, Dr Wilkinson had just been shown lining up the laser scan of the skull with two of the most familiar images of Shakespeare, the Droeshout engraving and the Chandos portrait.  Let's look first at the Droeshout:

Well, that's odd.  No real eyebrow bulges there, and especially not in the area indicated by Dr Wilkinson on the laser scan of the skull.  What about the Chandos, then?

Hmmnn.  You know what?  There aren't really any eyebrow bulges there, either.  And what's so strange about this is that Dr Wilkinson had been looking at both of the above images, apparently, before she told Kevin Colls and Dr Helen Castor that the absence of eyebrow bulges on the skull suggested that the skull might be female.

Funny, though, that she didn't think to mention the comparable absence of eyebrow bulges in the most famous images of Shakespeare, given that she'd just been looking at them.  Surely she can't imagine that the face in the Droeshout and the Chandos is female?

Okay.  Let's try some others.  How about that fond favourite of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the Cobbe portrait:

Well, whaddya know?  A remarkable lack of eyebrow bulges.  And what about the latest contender in the world of Shakespeare portraiture, the Wadlow?

Nope.  Same again - no visible bulging in the eyebrow area.  The Wadlow, of course, is interesting because it helped me to propose the theory that Shakespeare had a condition known as eyebrow ptosis (which he passed on to his illegitimate son, Sir William Davenant).  I came to that theory by way of the Beoley skull and the observation, made by a research student in forensic archaeology and biological anthropology, that the left eyebrow of the skull appears "bumpier" than the right, probably because the fatty deposits of the eyebrow were missing.  They had, it would seem, slipped.  As can be seen in the Wadlow.  That's eyebrow ptosis.

The Wadlow also shows a scar, immediately above the left eyebrow, which also shows up in the same place on the skull.

Now, either all of these portraits are actually of females, or the skull isn't necessarily female at all.  That, or portrait artists didn't understand eyebrows when the above portraits were made.  So let's look at this another way.

The above diagram comes from An Anthropological Study of some Portraits of Shakespeare and of Burns by Professor Arthur Keith, Conservator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, who gave his paper on this subject on 20 February 1914.  The outside line of the diagram shows the profile of the Shakespeare effigy in the funerary monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon.  The inner image is a drawing of a Bronze Age skull (enlarged 10%).

Look at the outline of the profile of the Shakespeare effigy.  No noticeable eyebrow bulge, is there?  This effigy was looking down on the programme makers when William Shakespeare's grave was being scanned - and yet no one looked up and noticed that the effigy has no significant bulges where the eyebrows sit:

Must be female, then.

Tell you what - just one more (though there are many I could choose from).  Look for the eyebrow bulges:

Now, what's interesting about this one is that we do see, quite clearly, certain features that also visible on the skull - the scar over the left eyebrow, the discoloured and depressed region over the right eyebrow, the damage to the lower edges of the eye sockets, and the loss of fatty deposits about halfway across the left eyebrow, which I described above in connection with the eyebrow ptosis.  What we don't really see is any major eyebrow bulges.  Some fatty deposits, yes, because we can also see where they're missing, but bulges in the bone?  Not many.

And this is where things get a little weird, because the image above is a detail from a 3-D computer reconstruction of the face of the Darmstadt death mask of Shakespeare.  It was made by ... Dr Caroline Wilkinson.

Who apparently had no idea that Shakespeare's eyebrows were remarkably and noticeably not very bulgy.  Even though she had been looking at his portraits and had previously done a facial reconstruction from his death mask.

But then, maybe she did realise that.  And the programme makers didn't want her to mention it.  Maybe careful editing made sure no one got to hear that the skull displays the same characteristics as the Shakespeare portraiture. 

Because let's be clear: in no way was Channel Four's Shakespeare's Tomb the serious scientific investigation it made itself out to be.  That would have left certain people with egg on their faces.

It would also have let the viewers know what they deserved to know.  That the Beoley skull probably isn't an "unknown woman in her seventies" and probably is what Rev C.J. Langston said it was - the "veritable skull of William Shakespeare."

Two Wills, Two Brows

It all kicked off in The Times on Monday, with a piece entitled "Lowbrow clue that poet was Shakespeare's secret son".  Not entirely a surprise: Dominic Kennedy, Investigations Editor, had already been in touch with me, and rather charmingly said, "I really enjoyed this book [Shakespeare's Bastard: The Life of Sir William Davenant] and congratulate you on your research."

And then, the story went everywhere.  And, predictably, the backlash started straightaway.

Out of a book of some 95,000 words, Dominic Kennedy had zeroed in on two key issues.  One is Shakespeare's Sonnet 126, "O Thou my lovely Boy", which I suggest might have been written to the infant William Davenant, Shakespeare's "godson" and, in all probability, his actual son.

The other is the matter of the drooping eyebrow.  Both Sir William Davenant and William Shakespeare appear to have had left eyebrows which drooped.  As this condition, known as ptosis, can be inherited, I had included the information in Shakespeare's Bastard, albeit in all of about three sentences.

If I was a little taken aback that the eyebrow comparisons should have attracted so much attention, I have been even more surprised that a largely unknown portrait, said to be of Davenant as a young man, should have been given so much exposure.  The portrait (above, photographed by Keith Barnes) hangs in the Fellows' Common Room at Davenant's old Oxford college, Lincoln, and was all but forgotten.  The only accepted image of Davenant was the engraving by William Faithorne, based on a lost portrait, which adorned the title page of Davenant's Works, published in 1673:

Frankly, I prefer the Lincoln College portrait, even if the provenance is uncertain.  But it's worth returning to the Faithorne engraving because, as it focuses on the left side of Davenant's face, the misshapen left eyebrow is more clearly visible than it is in the portrait:

Okay, so let's go back to Shakespeare.  The subject of Shakespeare's left eye had much preoccupied me while writing Who Killed William Shakespeare? (The History Press, 2013).  One thing that is clear from such portraits as the Chandos (National Portrait Gallery) and the Droeshout engraving from the First Folio is that there was something wrong with the outside corner of Shakespeare's left eye socket:

(* An x-ray of the Chandos portrait, reproduced at the bottom of this piece, illustrates the peculiarity of the left eye, the shading indicating some sort of abnormality in the left eyebrow.)

Close inspection of those images, and comparison with the Beoley skull - which will soon hit the world's media, by way of a Channel 4 documentary - suggested that the extreme corner of Shakespeare's left eye socket was damaged, probably very shortly before his death.  However, that does not necessarily explain the oddity of Shakespeare's left eye as it appears in many portraits.

In several portraits thought to be of Shakespeare, the artists appear to have struggled with the left eye, making it look lower than the right eye, as if the shape of the eyebrow demanded an adjustment to the placing of the left eye - as below, in the Grafton, Janssen, and Coblitz portraits:

If these portraits appear to "drop" the left eye, in order to accommodate the deformed left eyebrow, the Soest portrait takes a different approach, squashing the left eye somewhat:

Two portraits which arguably do a better job of representing the swollen "droop" or overhang of Shakespeare's left eyebrow are the Cobbe and the Wadlow:

The fold of the overhanging left eyebrow is surely unmistakable in these images, the first trumpeted by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust as Shakespeare, the second identified by yours truly as a portrait of Shakespeare in my paper for Goldsmiths, The Faces of Shakespeare.

The question of what was going on with Shakespeare's left eyebrow was first raised for me by a research student in biological anthropology.  Perusing the images I had of the Beoley skull and assorted Shakespeare busts and portraits, including the Darmstadt death mask, the student noticed something:

... if you look at both temples on the skull, you may notice that the left temple is more "bumpy" than the right.  This happens in areas where the bone needs to hold on to the soft tissue more than it normally would.  If there was scar tissue in that area, that would explain why the temple bone is "bumpy" on the left and not the right.  The scar tissue need not be on the skin, it could be in the muscle or facia (the stuff that holds the muscle on to the bone ...)  Scar tissue often makes a depressed area in the skin so that would explain the depression behind the left eye in the portraiture.  There are also a few ways this can occur developmentally with essentially the same results.

"And interestingly," she added, "the Davenant Bust has fatty deposits (we all have them) across all of his right eyebrow, only half of his left (near facial midline).  If this is true, it would fit.  Fatty tissue often doesn't grow in regions where there is scar tissue."

Evidently, seen through the eyes of a biological anthropologist, the "bumpy" texture of the bone above the left eye of the Beoley skull (above, from a photo by Richard Peach, 2009) corresponds with the imbalance of the fatty tissue of the eyebrows, visible on the Davenant Bust of Shakespeare (Garrick Club).  A significant amount of the fatty tissue above Shakespeare's left eye was, apparently, missing, causing the bone to become "bumpy" as it sought to hold on to the skin.

The clue seemed to be the presence of a scar, clearly visible in a photo of the Beoley skull taken in about 1939, and also on the portraiture (the Wadlow replicates this scar exactly):

So, it appeared at first that a scar above Shakespeare's left eyebrow might have displaced the fatty tissue, causing the bone to become "bumpy" and the eyebrow to "droop" (it might have been this scar that the poet Ted Hughes had in mind when he wrote in a letter to Nicholas Hagger, "But what do you think of the deep scar on Shake's left temple (in the Chandos, & on the [death] mask)." - I'm grateful to Deivis Garcia of Jersey City for pointing that out to me).  Obviously, this scar had been a long-term feature of Shakespeare's appearance, because the bone of the skull had adapted to the lack of fatty tissue, and was therefore unrelated to the manner of his death.

The problem came when I was analysing the Davenant portraits.  The Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford - who, along with the Fellows, was kind enough to give me permission to reproduce the portrait in Shakespeare's Bastard - was unconvinced that the portrait at Lincoln was of Davenant.  Comparing the portrait with the Faithorne engraving (the latter post-dating the syphilis which ravaged Davenant's nose), I became fairly convinced that the chin, lips and cheekbones offered a pretty good match:

But what to make of that slightly odd fold over the left eye in the Faithorne engraving?  Although the left eye is less visible in the Lincoln College portrait, the left eyebrow does seem to descend at a rather steep angle, apparently matching the swollen or drooping left eyebrow seen in the engraving.

If Shakespeare's eyebrow was made to droop by a wound, the scar from which caused the fatty deposits of the eyebrow to slip, then that feature could not have been inherited.  Whereas, if the drooping left eyebrow was caused by something else - one of the other ways that the loss or displacement of the fatty tissue could occur developmentally - then perhaps it was an inherited feature.

Such a drooping of the eyebrow as can be seen in the Davenant and Shakespeare portraiture is known as "ptosis".  It can be an autosomal dominant inheritance, meaning that a single copy of the relevant gene is enough to cause the defect.  Even if the mother had no such mutation, the fact that the father had it would mean that it was passed on to the child.

Hence my remark, in Shakespeare's Bastard, concerning the line in Ben Jonson's 1623 poem to Shakespeare in the First Folio: "Looke how the fathers face / Lives in his issue ..."  When Ben Jonson wrote those words, William Davenant was already settled in London and working for the sister-in-law of Ben Jonson's patron. 

Might not Davenant's drooping left eyebrow have produced in Ben Jonson a shock of recognition, that the father's face had lived on in his issue - given that Ben would have been familiar with the unusual shape of Shakespeare's left eyebrow caused, it would seem, by congenital ptosis?

(* X-ray of the Chandos portrait:)

2016: Year of the Skull and the Bastard

Belated New Year greetings!

You know, I've a feeling that it's going to be quite a year.  Come April, we'll be hearing a lot about Shakespeare, it being the 400th anniversary of his death.

Before then, my latest book - Shakespeare's Bastard: The Life of Sir William Davenant - will be published by The History Press.  And we can also look forward to a documentary, to be broadcast on Channel 4 here in the UK, which will show the very skull, hidden in a crypt under St Leonard's Church, Beoley, which might well be Shakespeare's (long time followers of this blog will know something about this skull already, as will anyone who's read Who Killed William Shakespeare?).  So there's a lot to look forward to in just the first four months of this year.

In anticipation of which, I take great pleasure in linking the reader to a fascinating and colourful infographic on the subject of "Shakespeare in Pop Culture".  This was sent to me, a little while ago now, by Roslyn Willson, and it is with great thanks to Roslyn that I include the link here.

Enjoy!

The Faces of Shakespeare

Morning, all!

I'll be on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire local radio this morning, talking about the story of Shakespeare's skull.  There have been developments in that arena, but I can't go public with them just yet.

HOWEVER ... Goldsmiths, University of London, have just published their GLITS e-journal for the past year, and my illustrated paper on The Faces of Shakespeare - Revealing Shakespeare's Life and Death through Portraits and Other Objects is the second item on the menu.

Here's the link to my paper in the Goldsmiths GLITS journal.

More to come later.

Call Ye Midwife

More from the wonderful world of Davenant research.

Liza Picard's book on Restoration London is a witty little treasure trove of stuff.  The book describes "Everyday Life in London 1660-1670" and it does so beautifully.  I was particularly struck by the section on the Medical Risks of Birth and Infancy.

Midwives, it seems, were generally in a hurry to get to their next patient.  If the mother's waters hadn't broken, the midwife wasn't going to hang around.  A specially sharpened fingernail, or the sharp edge of a coin, would slit the amniotic sac, and then the baby would be yanked out.

Such was the hurry that the midwife would be unlikely to wait for the afterbirth to be expelled.  That, too, would be grabbed and pulled out.

Midwifery was a pretty good way of killing baby and mother.  Bacteria would be transferred from one mother to another by the midwife who had just tugged baby and the afterbirth out of one womb before moving on to the next.

 

The skull in the crypt at Beoley Church, which I suggest in Who Killed William Shakespeare? was Shakespeare's, is rather interesting in this respect.  There is an oval depression, mid-brow, near the top of the frontal bone.  Heading down the left side of the temple, the skull is uneven, with a ridge sloping down across the brow and slight depressions on either side of it.

 

These features - the oval depression and the ridge - are visible in portraits of Shakespeare.  The "missing link" between the skull (which disappeared) and the portraits is almost certainly the "Death Mask of Shakespeare" in Darmstadt Castle:

  

  

The depression and ridge are present on the death mask (dated 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death), and since this was probably the model for most of the portraits, we see the same features in some of the more familiar images of Shakespeare.  They are present, for example, in the Cobbe portrait:

  

 

And, indeed, in the Wadlow portrait:

  





 

And on others.  These distinguishing features, along with other "defects" visible on the face, are what I now look for in order to determine whether or not an image of Shakespeare s genuine.

 

In Who Killed William Shakespeare? I focussed on the very noticeable depression high up in the middle of the forehead.  It can be seen very clearly on the Shakespeare bust in his funerary monument in Stratford Church:

  

 

In the well known Chandos portrait in the National Portrait Gallery:

 

 

 

And on the Davenant bust of Shakespeare at the Garrick Club:

  

 

Among others. 

 

But by focusing on that depression as one of the key indicators that the portraits were based on the death mask, and the death mask replicates the actual face of the man whose skull is in the crypt at Beoley, I neglected to consider the ridge and grooves to the side of the main depression.

 

I concluded - wrongly, I fear - that the depression was a sunken fontanelle, caused by malnutrition or dehydration in early childhood.

 

I now suspect, and I made the point in the paper on The Faces of Shakespeare, which I gave at Goldsmiths, University of London, a couple of months ago, that the depression near the top of the frontal bone and the ridge and grooves beside it are connected.  They are finger marks.

 

I had begun to think that the midwife had grasped his skull with her left hand during the delivery.  Her thumb had impressed itself into the soft bone of his cranium, and her first two fingers left their marks alongside.  The pattern of the depressions indicates that she gripped his skull a bit too tightly.  When the bones of his skull hardened, the finger marks remained; indeed, it may be that their presence caused the coronal suture to fuse a little oddly, leaving a sort of raised wiggly line running up from the sides of his head.

 

The description of midwifery practices given by Liza Picard in her book on Restoration London confirms the possibility, at least, that Shakespeare might have been forced out of his mother's womb by an over-enthusiastic or impatient midwife.  I've argued elsewhere on the blog that Shakespeare wasn't a very tall man (which is why his skull seems "undersized"), and it may be that he was from his mother's womb "untimely ripped". 

 

Quite simply, he wasn't ready.  But maybe the midwife had been called because the mother's health was at risk.  Or he was believed to be due.

 

Perhaps the woman nicked the sac with her jagged fingernail, reached in, gripped the skull with her left hand (the right hand underneath) and pulled.  There is no reason to assume that the midwifery profession had changed very much in the hundred years separating Restoration London from Elizabethan Stratford.

 

Shakespeare bore the marks of the midwife's fingers all through his life.  And they are still visible - on his portraits, on the busts, on the death mask ... and on the skull at Beoley.

Saint William?

With apologies for taking so long to post since my last offering, let us now return to the subject of Shakespeare portraiture.

It's a thorny subject.  There are quite a few portraits which have been "identified", at one time or another, as Shakespeare, but only a few appear regularly enough to be considered "authentic".  But maybe we're missing something here.

This is the so-called "Flower Portrait", which has been in the Royal Shakespeare Company's collection since it was donated by Mrs Charles Flower in the 19th century.  The portrait is so similar to the more famous Droeshout engraving - printed at the beginning of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays in 1623 - that for many years it was assumed that the portrait was the original upon which Martin Droeshout the Younger based his engraving.

It was probably the other way round.  Although the Flower Portrait bears the inscription "Willm Shakespeare 1609", it is not contemporary with Shakespeare.  The gold paint visible on Shakespeare's doublet was not available before the early 1800s.  The portrait is a late forgery.

But let us not dismiss it straightaway. It might be a rather crafty copy of a better known image of Shakespeare, but that does not mean it has nothing to tell us.

The Flower Portrait was, in fact, painted over an earlier image.  That earlier image represented the Virgin Mary with the Christ child and St John the Baptist.

I was intrigued when I first came across that snippet of information.  It meant that this image of Shakespeare was painted over a religious image - a Catholic image, you could say.  Bear in mind the fact that William Shakespeare's parents were John (Shakespeare) and Mary (Arden), and you should spot a fascinating coincidence: the Flower Portrait of Shakespeare replaced, as it were, an image of a special child accompanied by two sainted individuals who happen to have borne the names of Shakespeare's mother and father.

Maybe that is just a coincidence.  But the portraits of Shakespeare present us with a conundrum.  The only hint that there might have been portraits of William Shakespeare around during his lifetime comes in a play performed by students at Cambridge University in 1601.  In The Return from Parnassus a character named Gullio expresses great admiration for "sweet Mr. Shakespeare" and vows to obtain a picture of him for his study.

Otherwise, there is no evidence that any of the surviving portraits said to be of William Shakespeare was painted during his lifetime.  But quite a number of "Shakespeare" portraits appeared after his death.  Why?  And why are so few of these accepted as genuine?

There are perhaps two problems here.  The first is, what would count as an authentic image of Shaespeare (and how would we know it if we saw one)?  The second, then, is: what if some Shakespeare portraits were not intended to be exact likenesses, but were intended to perform some other function?  Getting a portrait painted was usually a pretty costly business.  You'd have to be a big fan of the dead poet to want your own version of his portrait.

I think the Flower Portrait might provide the key to this problem.  It was obviously a copy of a well-known Shakespeare image, and it was painted over a religious image.

In the years that followed Shakespeare's death in 1616, a radical and fanatical faction - the Puritans - enjoyed a period of predominance.  These Puritans hated religious imagery with a passion: they considered it "papist" and somehow anti-Christian.  The ownership of any such Catholic imagery would not only be an invitation for an armed mob of Puritans to visit your house and destroy your precious artwork - it would be seen as proof that you were a "popish" traitor.  You could then be imprisoned, tortured, possibly executed, and all your possessions seized.

On the other hand, there were plenty of people who retained their Catholic faith, and many of these belonged to wealthy families.  Whether they supported the Royalist side during the English Civil War or simply clung to the Catholicism of their forefathers, these people bravery trod a dangerous path.  Their ultra-Protestant enemies sought for any opportunity to denounce and ruin them.

Now, as I have tried to establish in Who Killed William Shakespeare?, the Bard was a victim of the vicious sectarian infighting which was rife during his lifetime.  As a Catholic, or a Catholic sympathiser, Shakespeare was always a little suspect, and his death became inevitable when the Puritan faction began to gain ground at the Court of King James.  His death was then followed by a suspicious, eerie silence, as if those who knew anything at all about Shakespeare's beliefs and the circumstances surrounding his death thought it prudent to keep very, very quiet indeed.

If Shakespeare was indeed a martyr to the old religion, his image would have become rather precious to those who, like Shakespeare, kept the faith through the terrible years that followed.  To have a portrait of William Shakespeare would perhaps seem relatively innocuous - "I'm a lover of literature, that's all" - but, at the same time, it was a way of remembering and honouring a famous victim of Puritan malevolence.

The Flower Portrait might be an extreme example of a Catholic devotional image (the Virgin Mary, Christ child and St John) being hidden beneath a portrait of William Shakespeare (parents, John and Mary), but that fact might help to explain the proliferation of Shakespeare portraits after his death.  They were a way for certain families to commemorate a Catholic martyr whilst being able, at the same time, to deny that they were anything other than devoted lovers of plays and poems.

This would indicate that there are, in fact, two kinds of Shakespeare portrait.  These two kinds are not in any way mutually exclusive.

On the one hand, there are the portraits - like the Chandos Portrait in the National Portrait Gallery - that are about as accurate and authentic as you could get.  On the other, there are portraits which were definitely intended to represent Shakespeare, although they might not have aimed for the exact same degree of truth-to-life as the Chandos example.  But they were, all the same, portraits of the Bard, commissioned by an individual or a family which wanted to honour a victim of the Protestant ascendancy and its trademark brutality.

They were, that is, relics - of a sort - and further proof that Shakespeare was a dissident.  Born to Catholic parents, he spent much of his life and career pleading the cause of the embattled "papists".  It was a cause he died for.  And those who remembered this commemorated him by means of his portraits.

We would have known this, had we not been forced into forgetting Shakespeare's Catholicism and the ferocious violence and illegal persecution which was meeted out against the Catholics by the new order.  Such was the determination with which later Protestants sought to distance Shakespeare from his Catholic roots that they perversely created relics of their own - secular mementos designed to honour Shakespeare, not as a Catholic dissident, but as a Protestant mouthpiece.  And after a while, the purpose of the many Shakespeare portraits was forgotten.  They became mysteries, uncertain images of an uncertain subject.

The subject, though, was probably Shakespeare - and the likenesses, though not exact, were close enough to reflect the man who was being remembered and honoured, like a British saint.

The Dangerous Friendships of Princes

A few weeks back, I posted a short series of blogs examining the so-called Cobbe portrait and subjecting it to much the same detailed analysis as I carried out on the Beoley skull, the Darmstadt death mask and the familiar portraits of William Shakespeare in my runaway bestseller, Who Killed William Shakespeare?

Today, I had an email from a friend who just happens to have visited Hatchlands Park in Surrey recently, where the Cobbe portrait is on show along with a portrait of Shakespeare's noble patron, the third Earl of Southampton.  My friend remarked that he couldn't help noticing the strange bump or blister on the nose side of the left eye socket in the Cobbe portrait (which is said to be of Shakespeare).  Having read my book, he found this particular detail in the portrait "fascinating".

So I was reminded of the work that remains to be done on the Cobbe portrait.  Various features compare rather chillingly with the damage to the skull at Beoley Church, those features also showing up on the death mask, the Chandos Portrait, the Droeshout engraving and the Davenant Bust.  These correspondences would appear to indicate that the Cobbe portrait does indeed show an image of Shakespeare - one which was made posthumously, using the death mask as a model.

The image is that of a youngish man - not the middle-aged, semi-retired poet of the second decade of the 17th century, when the portrait is thought to have been painted.  This means that, though the portrait was almost certainly posthumous (witness the fatal head injuries), it presented Will Shakespeare as he had been quite a few years earlier.  Perhaps when, aged about 30, he had been friends with the Earl of Southampton.

The inscription at the top of the portrait reads Principum amicitas! - the 'Friendship of princes!'  The words come from one of the Odes of the Roman poet, Horace (Book 2, Ode 1: "To Pollio, Writing his History of the Civil Wars").  The opening verses of that Ode translate thus:

You're handling the Civil Wars, since Metellus
was Consul, the causes, mistakes, and methods,
Fortune's game, and the dangerous friendships
of princes, and the unatoned-for

bloodstains on various weapons:
a task that's filled with dangerous pitfalls,
so that you are walking over embers
that smoulder under treacherous ashes.

Now, if you've read Who Killed William Shakespeare? you'll know how relevant this verse is to Will Shakespeare.  He wrote about the "Civil Wars" and disturbances which had troubled the land ever since Henry VIII decided to tear England away from Rome.  In other words, he exposed the cruelty, the violence and the sickening oppression of the governments of Elizabeth I and James I in their efforts to destroy English Catholicism.  And for that, Shakespeare paid with his life.

Don't let the Muse of dark actions be long absent
from the theatre, continued Horace, writing to his friend Asinius Pollio, a Roman poet, playwright,literary critic and historian: soon, when you've finished covering
public events, reveal your great gifts
again in Athenian tragedy,
you famous defendant of troubled clients ...

Let us assume, then, that the Cobbe portrait really does show us an image of Shakespeare, backdated (as it were) to the time when his patron was the Earl of Southampton.  The inscription chosen for the posthumous portrait refers to a Roman poet and playwright, a "famous defendant of troubled clients", who was playing with fire by writing a history of his violent times and thereby "walking over embers that smoulder under treacherous ashes."

These words came from the Roman poet Horace, who gets more mentions in my Who Killed William Shakespeare? than any other classical poet.  The reason for this is that Shakespeare seems to have been considered - by his contemporaries - as something of a modern Horace; a writer who was inclined to quote Horace a great deal and (like Horace) a genius who was mocked and satirised by a slavish underdog (if you've read my book, you'll know who I'm talking about).

The Principum amicitas! inscription therefore lends weight to the possibility that the Cobbe portrait shows us Shakespeare, since Will Shakespeare was seen as being like Horace, as well as being a "Roman" (i.e. Catholic) poet and playwright, like the recipient of Horace's Ode.

The inscription also carries a very dark hint.  The Ode refers to the "heavy" or "dangerous friendships of princes" (grauisque principum amicitas), which has a particularly poignant significance in the context of Shakespeare's death.  The silencing of William Shakespeare, that "famous defendant of troubled clients", was - I have argued - ordered by King James I, who had no wish to see the eloquent playwright championing the cause of the king's former favourite, Robert Carr, who was about to be tried for murder.

According to a tradition passed down by Shakespeare's godson - and probably his natural son - Sir William Davenant, Shakespeare had once received a friendly letter, written in the king's own hand.  And so the inscription on the portrait serves as a reminder that the friendships of princes could be destructive.  King James was in fact a weak and paranoid king, while Shakespeare was an outspoken critic of his murderous regime.  He wrote about the "civil wars" of the English Reformation - the causes, the mistakes, the methods, the unatoned-for bloodstains on various weapons ... it's all in his writings.  He also referred repeatedly to "Fortune" as a sort of perverse monarch, the capricious and vengeful spirit of the times.  He knew "Fortune's game" and, ultimately, he lost.

We might think of the Cobbe portrait as a sort of dreadful memento mori.  Perhaps it was a gift to the Earl of Southampton (commissioned by person or persons unknown) which, in itself, sought to explain the sudden death of the Earl's former poet-protege.

For if Southampton ever thought back to his youthful days, when he had William Shakespeare as his pet poet and playmate, and wondered why Will had been so suddenly silenced, the portrait would explain it all.

Shakespeare had been walking on hot coals, writing true histories which it was not safe to write.  And so he was, in the words of Ben Jonson, "stopped", before he could plead for any more "troubled clients".

Shakespeare's Face (3)

We're looking at Shakespeare's face - more specifically, at certain unusual features in the portraiture.  We're doing this for a reason: to try to determine whether or not the so-called Cobbe Portrait deserves to be considered an actual likeness of Will Shakespeare.

So far, we've looked at the inside edge of the left eye socket and the left cheek (previous posts), comparing the strange lines, scars and markings visible on the portraits, the death mask and the skull.  Today, we move up the head a little, to consider the left brow and outer edge of the left eye socket.

Here's a detail of the brow from the Cobbe Portrait:

 

 

Two things to note here.  First, there is some slightly odd shading around the corner of the eye and the outer edge of the eyebrow.  Secondly, above that, across the temple, there appear to be two grooves or shallow depressions (they look a bit like fingermarks descending the forehead above the corner of the left eye).  These are distinguishing features which, if the Cobbe Portrait really is of Shakespeare, should be visible in the other Shakespeare portraiture - and, potentially, on the death mask and the missing skull of Shakespeare.

 



Here's the same part of the face, taken from the Chandos Portrait of Shakespeare (National Portrait Gallery):

No doubt about it: there's something similar going on here.  Clearly, a depression of some kind is visible on the forehead, above the corner of the eye, and there is peculiar shading around the outer edge of the eyebrow.  In fact, look closely and you'll see thin but distinct jagged lines around the edge of the eyebrow, coming round to the lower side of the eye socket (one of these lines continues down the cheek - see previous post).

This detail from the Droeshout engraving (First Folio, 1623) clearly shows some kind of abnormality around the outside edge of the left eyebrow and the corner of the left eye.  And, if you look up a bit, there is also the suggestion of a depression or two running down the forehead above the eye.

We find much the same features on the Davenant Bust of Shakespeare (Garrick Club):

The depression(s) running down the forehead has/have clearly been replicated here, and there is some abnormality visible on the outside of the eyebrow: a peculiar hollow, just above the very end of the eyebrow, and the hint of a jagged line on the outer edge of the eye socket.

So - the Cobbe Portrait shares these features with the established Shakespeare portraiture.  I have argued in Who Killed William Shakespeare? that the Chandos Portrait, Droeshout engraving and Davenant Bust were all created using the death mask of Shakespeare (now in Darmstadt Castle) as a model, so we should now look at the left brow of the death mask:

There's clearly a depression or two of some sort coming down the forehead above the left eye.  There's also a dip or hollow above the very outer edge of the eyebrow - as with the Davenant Bust - and the trace of a jagged line running beneath the end of the eyebrow in towards the eye socket.  In other words, these features seem to have been faithfully reproduced in the Shakespeare portraiture - including the Cobbe Portrait - more or less as they appear on the death mask.

So the next question is - what does this part of the skull which resides in the crypt beneath the Sheldon Chapel at Beoley church in Worcestershire look like?

 

 

The older photo of the Beoley skull (taken in about 1939) clearly shows a jagged end to the bone at the edge of the left eyebrow.  The damage to the eye socket/left eyebrow is even clearer in the more recent photo, taken in 2009:

 

 

The jagged edge of the bone at the end of the eyebrow creates both a kind of overhang and a sharp protruberance underneath.  Where the skin tissue relaxed to the side of this, the effect became one of a dip or depression immediately above or beside the end of the eyebrow.  Because the skin had relaxed, after death and before the death mask was made, the jagged outline of the broken bone here showed through, and was indicated on the portraiture, both as shading and as thin, ghostly lines.

 

Equally noticeable are the depressions in the skull above the left eye socket.  On the one hand, we see these as natural features - the two depressions running down the forehead, looking a bit like fingermarks - although there is also a distinctive scratch in the skull which forms a sort of elongated oval shape.  It is unclear whether this scratch was related in any way to Shakespeare's death.

 

What is evident, though, is that damage to the outside of the left eye socket, and the edge of the eyebrow, is readily apparent on the Beoley skull (identified in the 19th century as the "VERITABLE SKULL OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE") and also appears on the mask, now in Darmstadt, Germany, but similarly identified in the 19th century as the death mask of Shakespeare (the plaster of Paris mask was inscribed with the date "1616" and a little cross, to indicate that this was the date of the subject's death; William Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616).

 

Furthermore, these features - damage to the region around the end of the left eyebrow and left eye socket, and depressions running down the forehead above the left eye - were faithfully reproduced in the posthumous portraits of Shakespeare: the Chandos Portraint, the Droeshout engraving, the Davenant Bust ... and, it would seem, the Cobbe Portrait.

 

The left side of the face in the Cobbe Portrait does bear comparison with the better known Shakespeare portraits and the death mask and the skull (it should be noted that the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which has happily accepted the Cobbe Portrait of Shakespeare, refuses to acknowledge the death mask or the skull).  These comparisons show undeniable correspondences between the various representations of Shakespeare's left eye (inner eye socket, outer eye socket, eyebrow), Shakespeare's left cheek and the left side of his forehead.  The peculiar features visible in these parts of the portraits can be traced straight back to the death mask and the skull.

 

Next time, we'll consider another aspect of the Cobbe Portrait, to see if we can get closer to an understanding of its Shakespeare connections.