The Mind's Construction in the Face

In a phone conversation on Thursday 26 November 2015, the director of the Channel Four documentary Shakespeare's Tomb tried very hard to assure me that the programme would not be spending very much time at Beoley, was not terribly interested in the skull, and didn't expect to discover much about the mysterious "veritable skull of William Shakespeare."

The director seemed startled when I mentioned Dr Caroline Wilkinson, who I already knew was involved.  No, I was told, Caroline Wilkinson probably wasn't going to be doing much with the skull - at most, maybe coming up with some thoughts about possible age and gender - and she almost certainly wouldn't be doing any sort of facial reconstruction from the skull or anything like that at all.

I'm still at a loss to explain why the director told me all that, unless it was to throw me off the scent.  Given that I had only just been made aware of the fact that I was no longer involved with the documentary, I can imagine that she was trying to mollify my (i.e. "No, don't worry, we won't be doing anything that directly concerns you and your work") or, to put it another way, I was being fobbed off and kept in the dark.

Anyway, surprise-surprise, Dr Wilkinson did do something of a facial reconstruction from the skull after all.  Maybe she had a bit of time on her hands, I don't know, or maybe that was the plan all along but the director didn't want me to know about it.  The image above is partly that of Dr Wilkinson's reconstruction, made under the apprehension that the skull is that of an "unknown woman in her seventies".  Obviously, for copyright reasons, I haven't reproduced the whole image.

Something about the eyes in the reconstruction reminded me of an early 17th-century portrait in the royal collection.  This portrait of an unknown man was flagged up by Lee Durkee on his fascinating Lost Shakespeare Portraits blog.  Lee Durkee knows his stuff, and when he suggests that the "unknown man" in the portrait might be Shakespeare, I'm inclined to think he might be onto something.

So the image of an "unknown female" you see at the top of the blog has been merged with the features of the "unknown man" from the portrait in the royal collection.  Look closely: it's difficult to see where the "unknown man" ends and the "unknown female" begins.

Now to the reproduction image proper.  For some bizarre reason, the forehead reproduced from the skull has been blurred.  This has the effect of focusing attention on the central features of the face - eyes, nose and mouth.  It is unfortunate, because (as those who follow my work will know) many of the identifying features of the skull which also show up, with a remarkable degree of consistency, in the Shakespeare portraiture, are to be found on the forehead.  Which, in the image taken from the Shakespeare's Tomb documentary, has been blurred.

Moreover, the forehead is one of the best-preserved parts of the skull.  It is pretty much intact.  The face of the skull has been smashed to bits (much of that damage, I believe, done at around the time of death).  Which means that much of what we see most clearly of the face in the reconstruction is not actually taken from the skull, because those parts don't actually exist.  Where it is most in focus, then, the reconstruction is based on a reconstruction.

You have a laser scan of a damaged skull, onto which have been projected (we must assume) the missing parts of the structure (cheekbones, maxilla, lower jaw).  In other words, the facial reconstruction shown in the programme is based on another reconstruction - the conjectural reconstruction of the missing parts of the skull - which is itself based, not on the original skull, but on a laser scan thereof.

Complicated, isn't it?  But the point to be made here is that those parts of the skull which do exist, and which we ought to be able to see very clearly in the facial reconstruction, have been largely blurred, while those parts of the skull which don't exist, and therefore had to be speculatively reconstructed, have been rendered rather clearly.

Odd, hunh?  Even so, the image yields some interesting surprises.  Let me concentrate on the left eye, temple and forehead as shown in the facial reconstruction (part of which is blurred) for the Channel Four programme:

Let's start with the forehead.  Blurred though it is - so as not to give the game away - some features can still be made out.  Looking up from the outside half of the eye, it is quite clear that there are a couple of grooves or indentations, running down from the hairline, with something resembling a raised area in between.

I've blogged about this feature before: in Call ye Midwife I suggested that, along with a defining depression high up in the forehead, just left of centre, they were the result of the rushed and insanitary midwifery practices of the day, while in Shakespeare's Face (3) I used them as part of my evidence to indicate that the somewhat controversial Cobbe portrait is indeed of William Shakespeare.

Basically, that double groove running down the left side of the forehead is a fairly consistent feature of the Shakespeare portraiture.  And, let's remember, it's there on the skull - one of the remaining parts of the skull - from which Dr Wilkinson made her reconstruction.

Moving down a bit, there seems to be evidence of a scar running across the top of the left eyebrow.  I examined this in my 2014 paper for Goldsmiths University, The Faces of Shakespeare.  Again, the skull concurs with the portraiture, the scar being especially visible on the Wadlow portrait.

The outside of the left eye shows what appear to be two lines descending to meet in a sort of V-shape immediately to the left of the eye.  I have written about this extensively, describing and illustrating this feature in Who Killed William Shakespeare? and elsewhere.  It is another defining feature of Shakespeare portraiture and is caused by the breakage of the end of the facial bone and the lower edge of the orbit showing through the skin.  The crease which comes round from the left, just under the eye, in the reconstruction is also a feature of Shakespeare portraiture, clearly visible in the Droeshout engraving (First Folio, 1623) and the Chandos portrait (National Portrait Gallery).

The damage to the lower part of the eye socket shows up both in the Shakespeare portraiture (often as a faint, thin, bluish or greyish line, as in the Wadlow portrait) and is replicated in the facial reconstruction as a sort of puffy, saggy, bags-under-the-eyes look.  Indeed, a forensic archaeologist and biological anthropologist who studied the photos of the skull told me that the "guttering" at the bottom of the eye sockets would produce just such a look in the portraits.

Just inside the eye, alongside the nose, there is shading and a minor blemish, consistent with the portraits (the Cobbe shows this as a sort of bluish tinge with what a friend, who has seen the Cobbe portrait at Hatchlands Park in Surrey, described as a "slight boil or deformity on the nose side of the left eye orbit").  This is where a pointed instrument, a stabbing weapon such a poignard, was jabbed into the eye socket, puncturing the inner medial wall of the left eye.  This forced the eyeball forwards, and slightly to the left, as we see in the death mask and the "wall-eyed" look of the portraits.  The death mask shows the scar made by this weapon.  The portraits, and the facial reconstruction, reflect the damage that was done to the inner eye socket by this stabbing weapon (for more on this, see my paper for Goldsmiths and my Historical Honey article, Shakespeare and the Dragonfly.)

Finally, the cheek.  First of all, there appears to be something of a swelling, a raised area, where the (missing) cheekbone should be - and curiously enough, something very similar appears in much the same place on Dr Wilkinson's facial reconstruction of the Darmstadt death mask (Shakespeare, again). 

Look more closely at the facial reconstruction and you'll see a thin line meandering slightly as it runs down the left cheek, from just beneath the eye to just to the side of the mouth.  That really is a giveaway: you'll find it in the portraits, too, especially the Chandos, where I first noticed it - a thin grey slightly wavy line running own the left cheek, with another, fainter but similar, immediately to the left of it.

That's the outline of the broken maxilla (upper jaw).

So - even though they did their best to misinterpret certain features of the skull and to obscure the others, the facial reconstruction which Dr Wilkinson apparently wasn't going to do but then went ahead and did anyway does, in fact, confirm that the Beoley skull matches the portraiture of William Shakespeare.

How much longer, I ask you, must we allow the cover-up to go unchallenged and the world to remain in the dark about the true identity of the owner of the Beoley skull?

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."

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.

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.



Shakespeare's Face (2)

A bit frazzled today, after yesterday's splendid hootenanny launching Who Killed William Shakespeare? at Waterstones Stratford-upon-Avon (of which I'll write more soon; for now, just the biggest thanks to Josie and the wonderful team at Waterstones, who were quite simply brilliant, and to everyone who came from far and wide to support us.  Thank you, guys!)

We're currently considering the Cobbe Portrait and its alleged depiction of one William Shakespeare, master poet, playwright and murder victim.  We're doing this by comparing specific details of the portrait - where there seems to be something a trifle unusual going on - with the same details from established Shakespeare portraiture, including a death mask and a skull (for more details of these items, buy the book!)

Let's keep it fairly simple today by just looking at the left cheek in the portrait.

 

 

Look closely at this detail of the left cheek from the Cobbe Portrait.  There appear to be two faint lines running down the cheek - a rather jagged one which crosses the cheek bone and descends to the corner of the mouth, and another a little further to the right.  Are these strange lines replicated on the other Shakespeare images?  Well, yes they are:

 

 

 

Here's the same part of the face, taken from the Chandos Portrait of Shakespeare (No 1 in the National Portrait Gallery's collection).  The lines are even more noticeable here - although, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever mentioned them before.  So what are they?  They don't look like scar tissue ...

 

 

 

The terracotta Davenant Bust of Shakespeare (Garrick Club, London) also seems to have something going on here - very similar thin lines running down the left cheek.  And if we look at what is probably the most famous image of the Bard:

 

 

... do we not also see hints of a line or lines running down the left cheek on the Droeshout engraving from the First Folio of 1623?  Evidently, this is a rarely acknowledged feature of the Shakespeare portraiture: a thin, jagged line, or more than one line, following a roughly perpendicular path across the cheek area, from below the left eye to the side of the mouth.

 

The death mask of Shakespeare, now in Darmstadt Castle, does appear to have something similar running down the left cheek:

 

 

 

What this might be, exactly, is unclear, but if we examine the same part of the face in the 3-D computer-generated model from the University of Dundee, which was based on the death mask:

 



 

 

 

... we certainly get the impression of a thin, jagged line running down the cheek, beneath the eye, and another, just to the right, across the hollow of the cheek itself.





 

So what are we looking at here?  As I pointed out, these do not seem to be scars, but they do seem to be present, one way or another, in the Shakespeare portraits and, indeed, on the Cobbe Portrait.  Let's assume, then, that all of the images we've considered so far had a common source, that source almost certainly being the death mask of Shakespeare.  Those lines being visible on the death mask, they were quite properly reproduced in the portraiture.

 

The skull at Beoley offers a clue as to what those lines might have been:

 

 

The zygomatic (cheek) bones of the skull are missing.  The maxilla (upper jaw) bone has been snapped, with the outside part of the maxilla also missing.  This gives the cheek area of the skull a pronounced jagged outline comparable with the lines on the portraiture which can be traced down from the eye socket to the corner of Shakespeare's mouth.

 

 

The older photo of the skull (taken in circa 1939) also shows the jagged outline of the broken maxilla.  Inevitably, if the maxilla had snapped, then it would have existed in two parts before the skin tissue decomposed and the broken off section of the maxilla bone became detached.

 

By the time the death mask was made (some 24-48 hours after death), the skin tissue of the face had relaxed, so that the outline of the broken maxilla became faintly visible.  The missing section of the maxilla would also have created an outline on the death mask, and this would have been slightly to the side of - and roughly parallel with - the jagged line made by the existing piece of upper jaw.

 

In other words, we would expect there to be two lines on the death mask if the maxilla was broken before or at around the time of death, and the two sections had separated under the tissues of the cheek.  Such breakages are a common feature of certain kinds of cranio-facial injury.

 

The Shakespeare portraits - including, it would seem, the Cobbe Portrait - replicate these vague lines running down the left cheek, which I suggest were formed by the jagged edges of the broken maxilla showing through the relaxed skin tissues as seen on the death mask.

 

Over the next few days, we'll look a some other striking features of the portraits, the death mask and the skull.

Shakespeare's Face (1)

This is the so-called Cobbe Portrait.  I've been a bit rude about it in the past - not the portrait itself, which is fine, but about the questionable claim that it is a portrait of Shakespeare.

I'm now thinking I might have been a little hasty.

The attribution, which the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford has acccepted gleefully, is troublesome.  For a start, the portrait bears more than a passing resemblance to Sir Walter Raleigh, as I have previously indicated.  And the colour of the (slightly wonky) eyes is not the same as those in the somewhat more famous Chandos Portrait of Shakespeare in the National Portrait Gallery.

Now, I'm not about to have a complete Damascene conversion.  But I have been looking a bit more closely at the Cobbe Portrait, and over the next few posts I shall share some of my observations.  It's too early to be sure, but it would only be scientific to compare the distinguishing features of this image and those of Shakespeare - including his death mask and skull.

We'll start with the left eye and, in particular, the inner edge of the left eye socket, beside the nose.

 

This is a close up detail of the left inner eye in the Cobbe Portrait.  There's a slightly odd effect going on here.  A bit of a blue blob running down the inside of the eye socket.  And a thin bluish line crossing this blob, running from the bridge of the nose to the corner of the eye.  The unusual shading seems to suggest some kind of defect or deformity to the inner eye socket.

 

 

Here's the same region of the death mask (currently in Darmstadt, Germany).  The line running from the bridge of the nose to the eyeball is clearer here, and it traverses what may be a scar on the inside of the eye socket.  The thin grey lateral slit is one of the more intriguing features of the death mask and - as I argue in Who Killed William Shakespeare?- a major clue to the cause of Shakespeare's death.

 

 

The scarring on the inside of the eye socket is clearly visible in this 3-D computer reconstruction of Shakespeare's face, based on the death mask, which was created by experts at the University of Dundee for a television documentary a couple of years ago.

 

 

The Chandos Portrait of Shakespeare also hints at something rather odd going on in the inner corner of the left eye.  Again, we have those strange dark shadings or markings, representing some form of scarring perhaps on the inside of the eye socket, and something of a dark line stretching from the bridge of the nose to the eyeball.

 

What could all these unusual markings mean?  The thin grey slit on the death mask - which appears to have been replicated on the Cobbe and Chandos Portraits - begs the question: what is this?  So the best bet is to have a look at the Beoley skull (identified in the 19th century as Shakespeare's) and see what's going on there.

 

 

This detail is from a photo of the skull which was taken around the start of the Second World War.  What is shown here is the inner corner of the left eye socket (nose to the left of the photo).  Look closely.  There are at least two puncture marks in the thin medial wall of the eye socket.  Something damaged the skull there, more or less in line with the strange markings or shading visible on the portraiture.

 

 

The second image comes from a much more recent photograph of the skull, taken just four years ago.  Again, we're looking at the left eye socket, with the nose on the left of the picture.  Look at the upper part of the inside of the eye socket - an unnatural fracture or aperture can clearly be seen.  This is immediately above the puncture wounds visible on the first image of the skull (above).  Again, we get the distinct impression that damage was inflicted to the inside of the left eye socket by some sort of sharp, pointed instrument.

 

Now, let's go back to the death mask - with its thin grey slit running between the bridge of the nose and the left eyeball.  This slit appears to have been replicated (as a bluish line) on the Cobbe Portrait and may form part of the dark shading on the Chandos Portrait.  Both portraits also indicate some sort of scarring or abnormality on the inside of the eye socket, in the very region which connects the thin grey slit with the visible damage to the inner wall of the eye socket on the Beoley skull.

 

These are not naturally occuring features.  Most people do not have blue lines or thin grey slits running from their nose to their eyeball, and the only reason why a skull would show puncture marks, holes and fractures on the inside of the eye socket is because injuries had been inflicted.  Evidently, then, the Cobbe Portrait appears faithfully to replicate an unusual feature present on the Shakespeare portraiture (and death mask) and in line with damage to the skull.

 

I'll examine other features of the Cobbe Portrait, comparing them with the equivalent features on the other portraiture and relics, over the next few days.  I'll also raise some issues regarding the provenance of the Cobbe Portrait and its beguiling quotation. 

 

And then, maybe, we can start moving towards a conclusion: is the Cobbe Portrait really another posthumous portrait of Shakespeare, identifiable by the same pathological features which link the skull, the death mask, the Droeshout engraving, the Chandos Portrait and the Davenant Bust?  Was I entirely wrong to criticise the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust for their insistence that the portrait is of Shakespeare?  Did I - in fact - commit the same crime against knowledge as they themselves have been committing, making snap judgements without examining the evidence?

 

These are questions that you can help me answer as we look more closely at the damage that was done to Shakespeare's face.

 

 

The Rival Poet

I've blogged recently about the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's peculiar determination to insist that the so-called Cobbe Portrait is of William Shakespeare when it seems so much more likely to have been Sir Walter Raleigh.

If it is Raleigh, then Stratford really is adding insult to injury.  Not only is the Trust's favourite portrait not of Shakespeare: it's of a man he considered a rival!

The Sonnets of William Shakespeare (published in 1609) present us with three shadowy, elusive persons - the Fair Youth, the Dark Lady and the Rival Poet.  The first of these was almost certainly Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, who was Shakespeare's youthful and attractive patron in the early 1590s.

The Dark Lady was most likely Jane Davenant, nee Sheppard, with whom both 'W.S.' and 'H.W.' appear to have had a fling at the time (Will would rekindle his affair with the vivacious Jane in about 1605: she gave birth to a son, baptised William, in February 1606).

Which leaves the Rival Poet.  He lurks in the background of Sonnets 78-86, and he certainly made Shakespeare feel uncomfortably jealous.

Sonnet 80 hints at his identity:

O How I faint when I of you do write,
Knowing a better spirit doth use your name,
And in the praise thereof spends all his might,
To make me tongue-tide speaking of your fame.
But since your worth (wide as the Ocean is)
The humble as the proudest sail doth bear,
My saucy barque (inferior far to his)
On your broad main doth wilfully appear.
Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat,
Whilst he upon your soundless deep doth ride,
Or (being wracked) I am a worthless boat,
He of tall building, and of goodly pride.
     Then If he thrive and I be cast away,
     The worst was this, my love was my decay.

Sir Walter Raleigh had built his reputation on his naval prowess and eagerness to exploit the New World (in 1585, for example, he had organised an expedition to Virginia which resulted in a number of colonists being left - 'cast away' - at Roanoke; I argue in Who Killed William Shakespeare? that young Will himself might have taken part in that epoch-making expedition).  But his position at court had been secured by his willingness to flatter Queen Elizabeth I.  He wrote her fawning poems, in which she was his Cynthia and he was her Ocean (his name sounded like 'Water').

Raleigh fell from grace when he married one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, Elizabeth - 'Bess' - Throckmorton, who was in fact related to Shakespeare by marriage.  Few monarchs were as vain as Queen Elizabeth I, who expected her courtiers only to have eyes for her, and for marrying without her permission, Sir Walter and Bess Raleigh were both imprisoned.

Sir Walter settled on his Sherborne Estate in Dorset, where he set about rebuilding the lodge (making it four storeys high) and gathered around him a group of free-thinking poets and intellectuals - the infamous 'School of Night'.  These are hinted at in Shakespeare's 86th Sonnet:

Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the prize of (all too precious) you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write,
Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished ...

The maritime imagery gives the game away - as do the references to the Rival Poet's pride (Raleigh was described by his contemporaries as 'damnable proud'), to his 'compeers by night', his 'tall building' and his pseudonym 'Ocean'.

The Rival Poet of the Sonnets was Sir Walter Raleigh.  And now, the custodians of Shakespeare's memory in Stratford-upon-Avon are trying to pass off a portrait of Shakespeare's rival poet as if it were the Bard himself!  He must be turning in his grave (the parts of him which are actually in his grave, that is).

History or Belief?

Cracking on with the Grail book, and gearing up for the release of Who Killed William Shakespeare? - and what should I stumble across but Cicero's rules for historians:

The first law is that the historian shall never dare to set down what is false; the second, that he shall never dare to conceal the truth; the third, that there shall be no suspicion in his work of either favouritism or prejudice.

Sound principles.  But how good are historians at sticking to them?

Well, when it comes to my particular areas of interest - ART(hur) and WILL (Shakespeare) - the answer must be, "Not very good at all."

I blogged recently about the Cobbe Portrait and the determination of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to promote it as a newly-discovered portrait of Shakespeare.  A day or so ago, I received a lovely comment from an illustrator based in Raleigh, North Carolina, who agreed with me.  The Cobbe Portrait looks exactly like Sir Walter Raleigh.  So why is Stratford hell-bent on insisting that it is Shakespeare when there is absolutely NO EVIDENCE to support that claim?

Are they not guilty of breaking Cicero's first law?

Now, interestingly, the driving force behind the (improbable) identification of the portrait as Shakespeare, and the relentless effort to make it the "official" Stratfordian image of the Bard, is also on record as denying point-blank that a plaster of Paris death mask, dated 1616 and held in the Library of Darmstadt Castle in Germany, is Shakespeare's death mask.  Definitely not.  No sirree Bob.  Now, move along, there's nothing to see here ... Move along ...

There is in fact a great deal of compelling evidence that the death mask is Shakespeare's, and a lot of that evidence is explored in my forthcoming book.  But a certain individual - one man - doesn't like the idea that the death mask is Shakespeare's, so we're not allowed to talk about it.

So there goes Cicero's second law.  Basically, a portrait that is almost certainly NOT of Shakespeare is ruthlessly promoted as if it was, while a true-to-life death mask that almost certainly IS Shakespeare's is pointedly ignored (and, when necessary, sniffily denounced).

However did we get into such a position?  Shakespeare is our national poet.  The custodians of his memory, though, appear to care nothing for evidence.  They are actively promoting a false view of Shakespeare and hiding the real man.  Makes you wonder what else they might be telling us that is fundamentally untrue, and what else they have been covering up.

Cicero's third law - there shall be no suspicion in his [the historian's] work of favouritism or prejudice - has not just been broken, here.  It has been smashed and then jumped up and down on.  Prejudice - well, one man doesn't like the death mask, or doesn't like what it shows us, so that's that.  And favouritism - a personal friend of the same individual comes up with a portrait (probably of Raleigh) and we all have to pretend that it's Shakespeare.  In both instances, this is all down to one man's say-so.  His favouritism.  His prejudice.

That is neither democratic nor is it good history.  It is baloney with a capital B.  And this is what we're selling to tourists, students and visitors from around the world.  Frankly, they should be demanding their money back.

In the 21st century it is an outrage that "experts" are allowed to practise such intellectual dishonesty and call it "history".  But this is not confined to Shakespeare studies.  The amount of evidence regarding Arthur that is routinely ignored so that a non-existent Arthur can be promoted is quite staggering.  The reason is much the same as that which motivates the Shakespeare portrait nonsense.  A clique - a cabal - has decided what it wants to believe.  No amount of evidence will dissuade them (they won't even consider it).  And they will move Heaven and Earth (in the sense of burying a great deal of evidence and loudly making claims which can't be substantiated) to ensure that everybody else is forced to believe the same.

That's not history.  That's religion.  It's not science.  It's fundamentalism.

Which is why I've revised the sub-heading for this blog.  "The Future of History".  Whoever controls the past controls the present (and, to some extent, dictates the future).  And for as long as we tolerate experts and scholars who lie to us about our past - who set down what is false, conceal the truth, and base their version of history on their own favouritism and prejudice - then we cannot hope to understand who and where we are today.

We have a moral duty to reclaim history from the hands of reactionaries and revisionists.  Only then can we hope to get a grip on the future.  Those who hide the evidence about Arthur or Shakespeare in order to promote their self-serving myths of the past betray us all.

Enough is enough.  The "Future of History" must be an honest account of what happened in history.  Otherwise, we may not have a future.