Droeshout portrait

• 1. Introduction

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  The Droeshout portrait is the face the world puts on William Shakespeare, and yet almost everything about it is uncertain. It appears as the frontispiece of the First Folio, the collected edition of Shakespeare's plays published in 1623, seven years after the playwright died. An engraver named Martin Droeshout signed his name beneath it: "Martin Droeshout. sculpsit. London." That is about as much as anyone can state with confidence.

  It is one of only two images definitively accepted as depicting Shakespeare. The other is a statue erected as his funeral monument in his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. Both were made after he died. Neither was made from life. What drove the engraver, which Martin Droeshout actually held the burin, and whether the face bears any real resemblance to the man who wrote the plays, these are the questions this portrait has spent four centuries refusing to answer.

• 2. Two States, One Plate

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  The portrait exists in two distinct versions, called states, both printed from the same plate. Examples of the first state are extraordinarily rare. Only four copies are known to survive, and they appear to have been test printings made so the engraver could evaluate whether the image needed adjustment before full production began.

  The overwhelming majority of surviving First Folio copies carry the second state. It has heavier shadows and other small differences, most noticeably in the jawline and the moustache. The plate did not retire after the First Folio. Thomas Cotes reprinted from it in 1632 for Robert Allot's Second Folio, with minor retouching. It was reused in later folio editions as well, though by then the plate was wearing out and had been heavily re-engraved. The original plate was still in use for the Fourth Folio of 1685, heavily retouched, and then it disappears from the record entirely.

  Copies multiplied by other routes too. Already in 1640, William Marshall had copied and adapted the design onto a new plate for John Benson's edition of Shakespeare's sonnets. All subsequent engraved reprintings were made by later engravers copying the printed image, not the original plate.

• 3. Which Martin Droeshout?

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  The Droeshouts were a family of artists from the Netherlands who had moved to Britain. The family happened to have two members named Martin, and for years scholars argued over which one made the famous engraving.

  Most sources settled on Martin Droeshout the Younger, born in 1601, the son of Michael Droeshout, who had immigrated from Brussels. Because his father was an engraver, it was assumed the son followed the same trade. But Martin the Younger was only fifteen when Shakespeare died, which means he almost certainly never saw the playwright in person and would have had to work from an existing image.

  Research by Mary Edmond uncovered new information about the other candidate: Martin Droeshout the Elder, born around the 1560s and died in 1642, the uncle of the younger Martin. Edmond found that the Elder was a member of the Painter-Stainer's Company and wrote that it seemed perverse to attribute the engraving to an obscure and unsuitably young Martin, born in 1601, when a quite well-documented artist of the same name was available in the person of his uncle.

  In 1991, Christiaan Schuckman discovered a set of signed plates in Madrid that could be attributed to the engraver of the First Folio portrait. Those plates were made between 1635 and 1639 and include a portrait of the priest and writer Francisco de la Peña, which bears a striking resemblance to the English poet. On this evidence, Schuckman argued that the portrait was by the younger Martin, who had converted to Catholicism and emigrated to Spain around 1635.

  June Schlueter then found archival evidence that the Elder was in London at the time the engraver of the First Folio portrait was known to be working in Madrid. She had begun her research hoping to confirm the Elder as the maker, but the evidence pointed the other way. Stylistic analysis tilts the same direction: a drawing known to be by the Elder shows notably superior skill, while the clumsy body in the Shakespeare portrait resembles other prints attributed to the Younger. The National Portrait Gallery provisionally accepts the attribution to Martin Droeshout the Younger.

• 4. Ben Jonson's Endorsement

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  Shakespeare's friend Ben Jonson contributed a poem called To the Reader, printed alongside the engraving in the First Folio. In it, Jonson declared that the engraver had striven with nature to outdo the life, and that he had hit his face accurately. Jonson added one concession: the engraver could not represent Shakespeare's wit, for which the reader would have to turn to the plays themselves.

  That endorsement from a man who knew Shakespeare personally has carried enormous weight across the centuries. Art historian Tarnya Cooper, writing in 2006, described the Droeshout print as the only portrait that definitely provides a reasonable idea of Shakespeare's appearance. The 19th-century artist and writer Abraham Wivell put the point more forcefully, calling it the key that could detect almost all the impositions that had arrested public attention over the years, a witness capable of refuting false evidence.

  As a result, the Droeshout print became a benchmark. Whenever another portrait was put forward as a depiction of Shakespeare, scholars held it up against this one to test the claim.

• 5. The Lost Original

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  Because Martin the Younger was almost certainly copying an earlier image rather than working from life, scholars have long tried to identify what that original might have been. The 19th-century scholar George Scharf studied the inconsistencies in the engraving's lights and shadows and concluded that the source image would have been either a limning or a crayon drawing, since those media used outlines rather than the chiaroscuro modelling that Droeshout awkwardly tried to add.

  Mary Edmond noted that the Elder Droeshout appears to have had some association with the portraitist Marcus Gheeraerts, and she found evidence suggesting a portrait of Shakespeare by Gheeraerts may once have existed. She proposed that the engraving derived from this lost painting. Tarnya Cooper approached the question differently, arguing that the poor drawing of the doublet and collar suggests the engraver was copying a lost work that showed only Shakespeare's head and shoulders. The body, she argued, was added by the engraver himself, which was common practice at the time.

  In the 19th century, a painting discovered and later known as the Flower portrait seemed to offer an answer. It bore an inscription with the date 1609 and had been painted on an authentic 17th-century panel, leading many to accept it as the source Droeshout had copied. That conclusion collapsed in 1905, when the art scholar Marion Spielmann showed that the Flower portrait corresponded to the second state of Droeshout's print, not the first state one would expect if it were the original. He concluded it was a copy from the print. In 2005, chemical analysis confirmed it was a 19th-century fake painted over an authentic 17th-century image.

• 6. Four Centuries of Critical Displeasure

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  Critics have rarely been kind to the Droeshout engraving as a work of art. J. Dover Wilson famously called it a "pudding faced effigy." Sidney Lee catalogued its failings in blunt anatomical terms: a long face, a high forehead, a shapeless ear, a bald crown offset by hair falling abundantly over the ears. Samuel Schoenbaum described a huge head atop an absurdly small tunic with oversized shoulder-wings, lit from several directions simultaneously, featuring what had been called a "horrible hydrocephalous development" of the forehead.

  Northrop Frye was more succinct. He said the portrait makes Shakespeare look like an idiot. Tarnya Cooper observed that the art of printmaking in England was underdeveloped at the time, with relatively few skilled engravers, and that even by the less exacting English standards of the day, the Droeshout engraving is poorly proportioned. Benjamin Roland Lewis extended the judgment to the engraver's whole career, writing that virtually all of Droeshout's work shows the same artistic defects and that he was a conventional craftsman rather than a creative artist.

  Not everyone agreed. The 19th-century writer James Boaden saw in the portrait an aspect of calm benevolence and tender thought, great comprehension, and a kind of mixed feeling, as when melancholy yields to the suggestions of fancy. His friend the actor John Philip Kemble reportedly thought this despised work more characteristic of Shakespeare than any other known portrait. More recently, Park Honan suggested that if the portrait lacks the sparkle of a witty poet, it suggests the inwardness of a writer of great intelligence, an independent man who is not insensitive to the pain of others.

• 7. Coded Messages and Conspiracies

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  Proponents of the Shakespeare authorship question, who believe someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays, have treated the Droeshout engraving as a source of cryptographic clues. Dover Wilson, who did not share those views, nonetheless suggested that the sheer poor quality of this portrait and the Stratford funeral monument had itself fueled the campaign against the man from Stratford and the attempts to replace him with Lord Bacon, the Earl of Derby, the Earl of Oxford, or whatever coroneted pretender might be in vogue.

  In 1911, William Stone Booth published a book arguing that the features of the engraving were anatomically identical to those of Francis Bacon. He built what he called combination images by overlaying several Bacon portraits and superimposing them on the engraving. Using similar methods, Charles Sidney Beauclerk concluded the portrait depicted the Earl of Oxford. In 1995, Lillian Schwartz applied a computerised version of the same technique and argued the image was based on a portrait of Elizabeth I.

  Others have argued not that someone else's face is hidden in the engraving, but that the engraving is itself mocking Shakespeare or signaling that he was a mask for a hidden author. Edwin Durning-Lawrence asserted that the image cunningly depicts two left arms and a mask, and pointed to what he called a mask ear standing out curiously and a distinct line marking the edge of the mask.

  Benjamin Roland Lewis answered all of these claims by pointing to an engraving of John Davies of Hereford, which shares most of the same quirks, including the uncertain placing of the head on the body and the same awkward difference in design between the right and left shoulders. These features, Lewis argued, were entirely normal for engravings of the era, and none of them unusual.