Portraits of Shakespeare

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Portraits of Shakespeare present one of the most persistent puzzles in English cultural history. No contemporary written description of William Shakespeare survives. Not a line from a witness who saw him in the flesh. Yet the world is saturated with images of the man, stamped onto pub signs, printed on banknotes, reproduced in advertisements and cartoons for centuries. How did a face become so universally recognised when no one can say for certain it belongs to the right person? That question has driven scholars, forgers, artists, and obsessives into a centuries-long argument that shows no sign of ending. Two images are accepted without dispute as likenesses of Shakespeare. Beyond those two, more than sixty paintings were offered to the National Portrait Gallery within four decades of its foundation in 1856, and in none of them has Shakespeare's identity been proven. What the listener will find in this documentary is not a solved mystery. It is the story of how a blank canvas became an icon, and what that transformation reveals about fame, forgery, and the hunger to put a face to genius.

• 2. The Two Certain Images

  ›

  Martin Droeshout engraved the only image of Shakespeare that carries unambiguous authority: the portrait on the title page of the First Folio, printed in 1622 and published in 1623. Ben Jonson, who knew Shakespeare personally, contributed an introductory poem to that volume suggesting the engraving was a very good likeness. That endorsement from a contemporary is as close as history comes to a signed certificate of authenticity. The second certain image is the half-length bust carved for Shakespeare's funerary monument, installed in the choir of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. It too must have been completed by 1623, because an introduction to the First Folio mentions it. Both representations arrived, then, within the same year, and both may be posthumous. Shakespeare died in 1616, leaving a gap of at least seven years before either image was formally published or confirmed. Whether either was drawn from life, or worked up from memory and earlier sketches, is a question neither object can answer on its own.

• 3. Portraits Claimed from Life

  ›

  The Chandos portrait, attributed to John Taylor and dated to about 1610, carries the most credible claim among paintings said to have been made while Shakespeare was still alive. In 2006 the National Portrait Gallery published a report by Tarnya Cooper concluding it was the only painting with any real claim to have been done from life. The portrait takes its name from a former owner, the Duke of Chandos. A second candidate surfaced in 2009 when Stanley Wells and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust announced that the Cobbe portrait, held by the Cobbe family since the early 18th century, was in their view a likeness drawn from life. They believed it had originally belonged to Shakespeare's patron, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. Cooper, however, argued that both the Cobbe and the related Janssen portrait depicted Thomas Overbury rather than Shakespeare. The Grafton portrait, showing a man aged 24 in 1588, the same age Shakespeare was that year, belongs to the John Rylands University Library in Manchester. Cooper's analysis found no evidence it depicts Shakespeare, and concluded the clothing was incompatible with his financial situation at the time. Country Life magazine ran a cover story in May 2015 claiming that a figure on the title page of John Gerard's Herball, published in 1597, was Shakespeare. Others called the identification tenuous at best. Nicholas Hilliard's A Man Clasping a Hand from a Cloud, dated 1588, was identified as Shakespeare by Leslie Hotson in his 1977 book Shakespeare by Hilliard. Roy Strong countered that the sitter was Lord Thomas Howard, first Earl of Suffolk. The Sanders portrait carries a label stating it was painted in 1603 and attributes the work to a John Sanders, or possibly his brother Thomas, believed to have been a scene painter for Shakespeare's theatre company. Scientific tests on the label and the oak panel suggest both date to Shakespeare's lifetime, which would make it a likely authentic image, but scholars have questioned whether the subject looks too young for a 39-year-old, and have noted that the 23rd of April birth date on the label reflects a conventional date adopted in the 18th century rather than a verified one.

• 4. Fakes, Alterations, and Misidentifications

  ›

  The Janssen portrait offers the earliest proven case of deliberate alteration to manufacture a Shakespeare likeness. Before 1770, someone overpainted the canvas to recede the hairline and added an inscription with an age and date calibrated to Shakespeare's biography. That act of forgery set a template that others would follow. In 1792 a painting appeared at auction bearing Shakespeare's name on the back and the initials R.B., widely taken to stand for Richard Burbage. The 18th-century scholar George Steevens endorsed it; the painting, now called the Felton portrait, resembles the Droeshout engraving closely enough that the identification felt plausible. The Ashbourne portrait had a longer and stranger trajectory. Identified as Shakespeare in 1847 and later reproduced as a mezzotint, it hung for decades as a celebrated likeness. In 1940 Charles Wisner Barrell examined it with X-ray and infrared photography and concluded the painting was actually a retouched portrait of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, painted by Cornelius Ketel. When the canvas was restored in 1979, a coat of arms emerged identifying the true sitter as Hugh Hamersley. The hairline had been altered, the inscribed age changed by one year, and Hamersley's coat of arms painted over. The Flower portrait followed a different path. Named for Sir Desmond Flower, who donated it to the Shakespeare Museum in 1911, it was for a time considered the earliest surviving painting of Shakespeare and possibly the model for the Droeshout engraving. A National Portrait Gallery investigation in 2005 established it was a 19th-century fake, painted over an authentic 16th-century Madonna and child. The Kesselstadt death mask, made public in 1849 by the German artist Ludwig Becker, accumulated distinguished supporters over the years, including the scientist Richard Owen and the sculptor Lord Ronald Gower, who based the facial features of his large public Shakespeare statue in Stratford, unveiled in 1888, on it. The mask is now generally regarded as a fake, though a revival of the authenticity claim appeared in 1998.

• 5. Shakespeare as Symbol

  ›

  Jacob Tonson, an 18th-century English bookseller, put Shakespeare's face on his shop sign, in what appears to be the first known commercial use of a Shakespeare portrait in a public context. Which painting Tonson used is not certain, but it was probably based on one of the surviving versions of the Chandos. From there the image spread outward into every corner of commercial and public life. By the end of the 19th century Shakespeare's features appeared in advertisements, cartoons, pub signs, and architectural decorations. In Britain, Shakespeare's Head and The Shakespeare Arms became standard names for public houses. Between 1970 and 1993 the reverse of British twenty-pound notes carried an image of the Westminster Abbey statue. In 1964, for the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, Pablo Picasso produced numerous variations reducing the famous face to minimal form in a few simple lines. Louis Aragon wrote an essay to accompany the drawings. Later graphic designers continued the reworking: Rafal Olbinski created a Shakespeare in Central Park festival poster in 1994, Mirko Ilic contributed a Shakespeare illustration to a national newspaper in 1996, and Milton Glaser produced 25 Shakespeare Faces as a theater poster in 2003. In 2000, Istvan Orosz created a double anamorphic portrait for the Swan Theatre. In 2013 Lego introduced a Shakespeare minifigure. In 2024, the British micro-artist Graham Short engraved what was claimed to be the smallest portrait of Shakespeare in the world on a speck of gold inside the eye of a needle, made for the Royal Shakespeare Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon.

• 6. Shakespeare Imagined

  ›

  Angelica Kauffman painted The Birth of Shakespeare around 1770, depicting the infant playwright surrounded by the personification of Fantasy and the muses of Tragedy and Comedy. A sceptre, a crown, and a mask of tragedy fill the lower portion of the composition, portending the child's future. George Romney worked the same allegorical territory with The Infant Shakespeare attended by Nature and the Passions, in which Nature stands unveiled before the child placed between Joy and Sorrow, while Love, Hatred, Jealousy, Anger, Envy, and Fear populate the rest of the canvas. Romney also painted a simpler companion piece, Shakespeare nursed by Tragedy and Comedy. Narrative paintings reached their height of popularity in the Victorian era. The most frequently depicted episode was the apocryphal story of the young Shakespeare brought before Sir Thomas Lucy on a charge of poaching. The more patriotic scene of Shakespeare reading his work to Queen Elizabeth I was painted by several artists, including John James Chalon. In 1849 Ford Madox Brown synthesised multiple existing images, including the Ashbourne Hamersley portrait, into a composite likeness he believed was as authentic as possible. He showed Shakespeare as a commanding figure in a richly decorated room with books by Boccaccio and Chaucer on his desk. The following year, in 1850, John Faed placed Shakespeare at the centre of a gathering of scholars and writers in his painting Shakespeare and his Friends at the Mermaid Tavern. The Chandos portrait's influence spread even into preparatory studio work: Louis Francois Roubiliac made a copy of it when preparing for his sculpture of Shakespeare.