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."

Confirmation Bias

It's a fair point.

A journalist has put it to me that "it was not in the interests of [the Channel 4/Arrow Media] documentary makers to debunk the Beoley skull.  It would have been a much better story for them if they had found a skull that could be Shakespeare's."

I wholeheartedly agree.  It would have been a much better programme if proper consideration had been given to the Beoley skull.

Here's why I think that didn't happen.

Stage 1: Cognitive Dissonance

We all have our own sets of prejudices and firmly held ideas about the world, based on what we've been taught and told, our cultural background, political and religious beliefs, and so on.  When someone comes along with evidence that challenges one or other of those firmly held ideas, some if not all of us can react pretty strongly, as if we were under physical attack.  The fight-or-flight instinct kicks in.  The person goes into a state of denial.  They cannot accept this new evidence because it clashes with what they already believe, and to engage with it might throw their entire world-view into crisis.

Example: when I met with the documentary director, she surprised me somewhat by saying, "You don't believe the skull is Shakespeare's."  I told her that I was uncomfortable with the concept of belief, in these circumstances, but that I was roundabout 98.9% convinced that it is.

Why did she assume that I didn't believe that the skull might be Shakespeare's?  Hadn't she been briefed on who I was, what I'd written and published, how I'd been involved in the process so far?

When I showed her some of the evidence, including the graphic illustrations in my Who Killed William Shakespeare? book highlighting the specific comparisons between the Beoley skull and the Shakespeare portraiture, she said "I can't see it."

Small wonder, then, that having told me they'd want to film me going down into the vault ("How do you think you'll feel, seeing the skull for the first time?") and giving a potted account of Langston's story, they later decided to dispense with my services and film somebody else going down into the vault and describing Langston's story ... someone who doesn't think that the skull is Shakespeare's.

Because as far as the director was concerned, the skull couldn't be Shakespeare's.  The idea was too radical.  It challenged her firmly-held set of beliefs about life, the universe and everything.

Stage 2: Confirmation Bias

Having decided that the Beoley skull couldn't be - mustn't be - Shakespeare's, the documentary was prepped along those very lines.

Let's say you've heard or read something which challenges your deeply-held convictions, triggering cognitive dissonance.  You want to fight back, to reassure yourself, to put your previous ideas back together and be comfortable with them again.  So you go hunting for evidence.

Not any old evidence, of course.  You look for the evidence that supports your point-of-view.  Any other evidence, especially anything that confirms the thing you didn't like hearing, has to be ignored, denied, mocked or destroyed.  What you want - what you need to overcome that uncomfortable feeling of cognitive dissonance - is anything that agrees with what you want to believe.

Anything else has to go.

So, in comes the reassuring Shakespeare expert who told the church court hearing into the application to remove the skull for analysis that the Rev C.J. Langston's account of How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen and Found was nothing but "Gothic fiction".

Out goes the guy who provided you with evidence that the story was written by someone who knew what he was on about.

The original plan, to have an actor present the programme, is ditched.  An actor might ask awkward questions.  Instead, a historian is hired - one less likely to challenge the consensus - so as to give the show an air of irreproachable authority.

A facial reconstruction expert who had previously commented on the photos of the skull - and then denied ever having seen them - is approached with a laser scan of the Beoley skull.  Though she is briefly glimpsed superimposing the scan of the skull over the Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare from the First Folio of 1623, this will not be discussed or commented upon in the show.

(Before the crypt was opened and the scan was made, and before Dr Caroline Wilkinson had seen it, the director tried to convince me that Beoley and the skull would not form a significant part of the programme, that they weren't expecting any results, and when - shock horror! - I mentioned Dr Wilkinson, that she wouldn't be doing any facial reconstruction or anything else with the skull, for that matter.  Would I mind signing a form and promising not to mention her name?)

The expert offers a tentative opinion based on insufficient evidence, and that is pounced on.  PROOF, ladies and gentlemen!  The proof we've all been waiting for!  Everything we previously believed was true!  The Beoley skull story was just a myth!

(Except that, having scanned Shakespeare's grave in Stratford, Kevin Colls, archaeologist, began to suspect that the first half of Langston's story might, in fact, be true.  He has vowed to keep looking for the missing skull.  And good luck to him.  He could spend the rest of his life doing that, now that the Beoley skull business has been kicked into the long grass.  So, nothing to worry our pretty little heads about there, then.)

I have very little doubt that, within a week or two of the director being appointed to oversee the making of the documentary, any hope that the skull would be properly examined had gone right out of the window.  From that point on, the programme was essentially biased in one particular direction.  The Beoley skull theory must be disproved, even if it means surrounding ourselves with people who don't believe it, discarding all the available evidence and any uncontrollable witnesses, asking one expert for their opinion, and then misrepresenting what that expert actually said.

Of course, it would have made a better programme if the skull had not been so summarily debunked, and on the basis of hardly any evidence whatsoever.

It would have made a much better programme.  And it would have paved the way for a more intensive and detailed examination of the skull.

But that wouldn't have helped get rid of that nasty sense of cognitive dissonance, would it?  So it didn't happen.

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:)

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.