Shakespeare. Bill Bryson

The painting had previously hung in the Cobbe family’s ancestral home near Dublin and was long thought to be a portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh.

      ‘I was sceptical indeed to begin with,’ Stanley Wells told me at the time of the unveiling. ‘There are a lot of paintings that have been claimed to be of William Shakespeare on pretty dubious grounds. But the more I considered the evidence for this one, the more I grew persuaded. I would say I am 90 per cent convinced now it is genuine.’

      It is a terribly exciting thought. Unfortunately, it has also encountered a good deal of criticism. Sir Roy Strong, the art historian, dismissed claims for the portrait’s authenticity as ‘codswallop’. Katherine Duncan-Jones of Oxford University thought the man in the portrait ‘too grand and courtier-like to be Shakespeare’, and in a long critical article for the Times Literary Supplement characterized the evidence as ‘not hugely compelling’. She suggested it was a portrait of a Sir Thomas Overbury.

      At about the same time that the Cobbe portrait came to light, archaeologists from the Museum of London caused much scholarly excitement by announcing the discovery of the foundations of London’s first purpose-built theatre on the site of a disused warehouse in Shoreditch in east London. Built in 1576 and so indubitably original that it was called simply The Theatre, it is the oldest theatre positively associated with Shakespeare and was probably where Romeo and Juliet was first performed.

      Soon afterwards, archaeologists also found the foundations of a nearby theatre, with similar Shakespeare connections, called the Curtain. Only modest fragments of both theatres survive, but so little is known about the physical aspects of Elizabethan theatres that even the discovery of some small runs of brick and stone is a matter of excitement and value.

      Also causing a pleasant stir was the rediscovery and return to Durham University of a missing First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays taken from the university library by a light-fingered opportunist in 1998. It had been gone for so long that most people had assumed it to be lost for ever. Happily, the volume was sent for a valuation to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, where it was recognized as the missing Durham volume. The Folger alerted the FBI and a man named Raymond Scott was arrested, tried and eventually sentenced to eight years in prison for the theft.

      The folio, mercifully undamaged, is now back in the university library on Palace Green in Durham, where it had resided peacefully since 1664. The question of how many First Folios there are in the world is an interesting and surprisingly challenging one, and is discussed at some length in the pages that follow. Suffice it to say for the moment that the rediscovery of one missing volume is cause for rejoicing. I am faithfully assured that it will not be stolen again.

       Chapter One In Search of William Shakespeare

      BEFORE HE CAME into a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life.

      He sired an illegitimate child in Italy, spoke occasionally in the House of Commons against the repeal of the Corn Laws, and developed an early interest in plumbing (his house at Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, had nine of the first flush toilets in England), but otherwise was distinguished by nothing more than his glorious prospects and many names. But after inheriting his titles and one of England’s great estates, he astonished his associates, and no doubt himself, by managing to lose every penny of his inheritance in just nine years through a series of spectacularly unsound investments.

      Bankrupt and humiliated, in the summer of 1848 he fled to France, leaving Stowe and its contents to his creditors. The auction that followed became one of the great social events of the age. Such was the richness of Stowe’s furnishings that it took a team of auctioneers from the London firm of Christie & Manson forty days to get through it all.

      Among the lesser-noted disposals was a dark oval portrait, twenty-two inches high by eighteen wide, purchased by the Earl of Ellesmere for 355 guineas and known ever since as the Chandos portrait. The painting had been much retouched, and was so blackened with time that a great deal of detail was (and still is) lost. It shows a balding but not unhandsome man of about forty, who sports a trim beard. In his left ear he wears a gold earring. His expression is confident, serenely rakish. This is not a man, you sense, to whom you would lightly entrust a wife or grown daughter.

      Although nothing is known about the origin of the painting or where it was for much of the time before it came into the Chandos family in 1747, it has been said for a long time to be of William Shakespeare. Certainly it looks like William Shakespeare – but then really it ought to, since it is one of the three likenesses of Shakespeare from which all others are taken.

      In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London as its founding work. As the gallery’s first acquisition, it has a certain sentimental prestige, but almost at once its authenticity was doubted. Many critics at the time thought the subject was too dark-skinned and foreign-looking – too Italian or Jewish – to be an English poet, much less a very great one. Some, to quote the late Samuel Schoenbaum, were disturbed by his ‘wanton’ air and ‘lubricious’ lips. (One suggested, perhaps a touch hopefully, that he was portrayed in stage make-up, probably in the role of Shylock.)

      ‘Well, the painting is from the right period – we can certainly say that much,’ Dr Tarnya Cooper, curator of sixteenth-century portraits at the gallery, told me one day when I set off to find out what we could know and reasonably assume about the most venerated figure of the English language. ‘The collar is of a type that was popular between about 1590 and 1610, just when Shakespeare was having his greatest success and thus most likely to sit for a portrait. We can also tell that the subject was a bit bohemian, which would seem consistent with a theatrical career, and that he was at least fairly well to do, as Shakespeare would have been in this period.’

      I asked how she could tell these things.

      ‘Well, the earring tells us he was bohemian,’ she explained. ‘An earring on a man meant the same then as it does now – that the wearer was a little more fashionably racy than the average person. Drake and Raleigh were both painted with earrings. It was their way of announcing that they were of an adventurous disposition. Men who could afford to wore a lot of jewellery back then, mostly sewn into their clothes. So the subject here is either fairly discreet, or not hugely wealthy. I would guess probably the latter. On the other hand, we can tell that he was prosperous – or wished us to think he was prosperous – because he is dressed all in black.’

      She smiled at my look of puzzlement. ‘It takes a lot of dye to make a fabric really black. Much cheaper to produce clothes that were fawn or beige or some other lighter colour. So black clothes in the sixteenth century were nearly always a sign of prosperity.’

      She considered the painting appraisingly. ‘It’s not a bad painting, but not a terribly good one either,’ she went on. ‘It was painted by someone who knew how to prime a canvas, so he’d had some training, but it is quite workaday and not well lighted. The main thing is that if it is Shakespeare, it is the only portrait known that might have been done from life, so this would be what William Shakespeare really looked like – if it is William Shakespeare.’

      And what are the chances that it is?

      ‘Without documentation of its provenance we’ll never know, and it’s unlikely now, after such a passage of time, that such documentation will ever turn up.’

      And if not Shakespeare, who is it?

      She smiled. ‘We’ve no idea.’

      

      If the Chandos portrait is not genuine, then we are left with two other possible likenesses to help us decide what William Shakespeare looked like. The first is the copperplate engraving that appeared as the frontispiece of the collected works of Shakespeare in 1623 – the famous First Folio.

      The Droeshout engraving, as it is known (after its artist, Martin Droeshout), is an