Real Shakespeare Portrait: Stanley Fish Claims Only Picture Ever Painted Of Shakespeare While He Was Still Alive

In London today the chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stanley Fish, unveiled a portrait that he claims is of the famous playwright. Even more, he believes it to be the only one ever to be painted while the Bard was still alive. Fish makes a compelling argument, which the New York Times helpfully breaks down.

The portrait unveiling was attended with much fanfare. CBS News was there; watch their report from London below.

Comments

[Ergon]

Can't claim to be a scholar, but imo the claims for Shakespeare's illiteracy or that there are no samples of his writing are completely unfounded.
http://cco.cambridge.org/extract?id=ccol0521380340_CCOL0521380340A011
and
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/more.html
shows the conclusion of many scholars that "Since the 1870s, Shakespeare scholars have suspected that one of the hands ("Hand D") in the manuscript Elizabethan play Sir Thomas More is that of William Shakespeare. Over the years, enough evidince has been accumulated that most scholars today believe that Hand D is indeed Shakespeare's. The most important gathering of evidence was the the 1923 collection Shakespeare's Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More, edited by Alfred Pollard, which contained an impressive array of evidence suggesting Shakespeare's authorship from many different perspectives: handwriting, spelling, vocabulary, imagery, etc.
Naturally, Oxfordians strenuously dispute the evidence for Shakespeare's authorship of Hand D, since it destroys their belief that the author of Shakespeare's plays was really Edward de Vere. Following is a post to humanities­.lit.autho­rs.shakesp­eare in which I outline the evidence for Shakespeare's authorship, in response to a query from an Oxfordian."

[Ergon]

Here's Shakespeare's last will and testament. You'll note his signature
http://home.hiwaay.net/~paul/shakspere/shakwill.html and definitely not signed with an X. There were many drafts, with corrections and insertions into the document. "Collins never got round to having a fair copy of the will made, probably because of haste occasioned by the seriousness of the testator's condition, though this attorney had a way of allowing much-corrected draft wills to stand" (@ Schoenbaum 242-6)"
It' s possible the new portrait is that of Edward De Vere, but there really is no evidence that Shakespeare was a front for Bacon, Marlowe or the Earl of Oxford. Many of his contemporaries seem to have believed the man they knew as Shakespeare wrote the famous poems and plays http://shakespeareauthorship.com/monrefs.html
and a lack of higher education does not in itself prove anything.
He was a savant, imho, and the true author.

[Postroad]

I would love to see a study done as to whether those who believe Shakespeare did not write the plays we attribute to Shakespeare also believe that 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration, that area 561 harbors hundreds of aliens from other planets, that floride is put in our drinking water to enslave us and on and on and on...

[Ergon]

Conspiracy theory. Literary mystery. Fish. Fowl.

[bubbuh]

Well, this thread proves, for all and for all, that opinions are not like arseholes. Oh, no. Opinions are much more like hair, sprouting here, falling out there, getting matted and tangled, cut and shaped by the fashions of fools. Yes, they are like hair which, as time goes by, erupts multitudinous from the doggonedest places with Spenser's nor rhyme nor reason ("I was promised on a time - to have reason for my rhyme; From that time unto this season, I received nor rhyme nor reason." ), by which he meant as all the real poets do, bucks, pennies, or pounds for mutton and wine and anothers's lap to share.

If that protrait is a true representation of Wild Willy in middle age, it becomes abundantly clear why he took to theater instead of woolgathering.

[Cynthia Greenwood]

Stanley Fish??? I think you mean Stanley WELLS. Gosh, all you have to do is read the BBC article for the facts.

[kvass]

Rubbish - that is not WS - it is Markow you fools.

[PrickliestPear]

Stanley Fish would never say that the person in the picture is Shakespeare. He'd probably say it's whomever the viewer understands it to be.

[Mort]

I think I can see Gwynneth in the background

[Banji81]

Uh huh?! Interesting. Why then do I feel like I've seen this very same painting a gazillion times?

[bubbuh]

Because what you have seen is the engraving done from this painting. It's all explained in the full article.

[ChristopherAtom]

Billy Wigglestick.

[workmatw]

Another day, another badly edited Huffpost story. Stanley WELLS, not Stanley Fish. Get it together, guys, all you had to do was write 3 correct lines and come up with a non-misleading headline.

[Emerald1943]

Well, whoever that is in the painting, minus the lace collar, he was a pretty good lookin' dude! LOL

[DPinksen]

(I believe the article has confused Stanley Fish, an American literary scholar, with Stanley Wells, the general editor of the Oxford Shakespeare. It was Wells who made the announcement.)

I question Wells' timing and tone in making this announcement. An habitually conservative scholar, Wells' sudden and effusive support for this portrait is out of character.

Perhaps it has something to do with the imminent release of Anne Henderson's "Battle of Wills", a documentary which explores the Canadian Sanders portrait's claim as the 'only authentic portrait of Shakespeare painted in his lifetime'. This is exactly the claim made by Wells of this latest contender.

This coincidence calls the timing (and uncharacteristic ado) of Wells' announcement into question. There's a lot at stake here, and Wells seems to be using this announcement as a pre-emptive strike against the claims made by the Sanders film.

Daryl Pinksen

[Ergon]

What would be the value of the putative painting, if some rich gazillionaire were to believe it actually was of the Imortal Bard? Just askin'

[simplysimon2]

If it's a portrait of Edward DeVere, the17th Earl of Oxford, then it's a portrait of Shakespeare. Read "Shakespeare By Another Name" by Mark Anderson for the skinny and you'll join Henry James, Freud, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Charles Laughton and Orson Welles, to name a few, who recognized "the Bard of Avon" as not the author but a "front" for an intimate of Elizabeth's court. She gave DeVere more money than her top adviser every year without saying what he was to do with it. He operated a Warhol like "Factory" for writers and churned out Tudor propaganda (the history plays) while he wrote some personal stuff like "Hamlet" that mirrored his own life. DeVere was the real "Shakespeare in Love". Read the book and discover the enormous paper trail that leads back to the "Prince Hal" prodigy who created the monument known as Shakespeare. BTW, this truth would kill the tourist industry on the Avon.

[Hopalongpoppyseed]

Well, if your claims are true, then nobody will believe them. in any case. I am not a Shakespeare scholar, but I have found some of the late history plays, rather unworthy of so many of the other works attributed to Shakespeare.

[simplysimon2]

The claims are of the scholar, Mark Anderson, although I buy his take along with others more noteworthy than I. If the works were of a "Factory" team then some writers were better than others; my guess is DeVere did not write all the histories but executive produced the lesser ones.

[reasonshouldrule]

My Ph.D. is in medieval and renaissance language and literature. There is really no credible evidence to suggest that Shakespeare did not write his plays. All the efforts to "prove" DeVere or someone else wrote them are generally fallacious and/or contrived. What's puzzling to me is the passion some of these people have in trying to attribute the works to someone more "educated" and important than Shakespeare.

[antaeus]

Did I miss the announcement that class division and snobbery were banned in Britain?

[simplysimon2]

Read Anderson before blowing your Ph.D. hole.

[stringer]

Ding, ding, ding. I agree I'm firmly with you in the Oxfordian school of thought. Edward De Vere, the Earl of Oxford, was the "Shakespeare" we know.

There certainly was a William Shakespeare but he most certainly did not write the plays commonly attributed to him.

With regard to the charge there's not one wit of proof it was De Vere, that's demonstrably untrue. There is far more evidence that the plays were written by De Vere than by Shakespeare.

Among those who subscribed to the Oxfordian theory over the years: Orson Welles, Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau and Charles Dickens were all positive in their assertions that De Vere wrote the plays commonly attributed to Shakespeare.

The biographical details of a number of the plays matched De Vere's life, several of the plays were dedicated to De Vere's daughters' husbands (or son-in-laws.) De Vere had a history of writing anonymously or under pseudonyms. And he received a large, yearly 1,000 pound annuity from the Queen for undeclared reasons.

Think that's obscure? You should check some of the facts proponents of the actual William Shakespeare use for claiming he was the author. Three of the major ones actually include: The fact that Shakespeare's grave monument includes a pen and the fact that Shakespeare supposedly bequeathed gifts to his fellow actors in his will (Scholars have since noted this section was crammed between other lines in the will and doubtless added later on.)

[bubbuh]

Funny, Ben Jonson, Elizabeth and James as well as his other contempories thought he did. But, what would thery know. As an "Oxfordian", I am sure you know why Looney can be described as the father of your opinion. But, just in case, you don't: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Thomas_Looney

Oh, yeah, DeVere died in 1604. Shakespeare wrote:

1605 King Lear
Macbeth
1606 Antony and Cleopatra
1607 Coriolanus
Timon of Athens
1608 Pericles
1609 Cymbeline
1610 Winter's Tale
1611 Tempest
1612 Henry VIII

What a maroon!!!!!!!!!

[simplysimon2]

No real documentation on those claims of years when stuff was actually written as opposed to "released". All guesstimates. DeVere's plays started as entertainment strictly for Elizabeth's court but were later revised and released for the public. Read Anderson before commenting. Then insult. As to the supposed "others" who claimed Stratford Willy was the author, noblemen like DeVere were considered lower class if they wrote for the stage; therfore, I believe these others like Johnson and Elizabeth who proclaimed Willy as the author were part of DeVere's cover.

[bubbuh]

http://shakespeareauthorship.com/harpers.html

[MJinCanada]

Why on earth are some commenters insisting that Shakespeare was illiterate? The printing press was developed a hundred years earlier and there were more than a thousand books in print in English in his day. His father was a tradesman and alderman (i.e., not poor) and there was a school in Stratford.

[AgathaX]

He could barely sign his name and his kids couldn't read and write.

[reasonshouldrule]

Absolutely not true.

[bubbuh]

Funny that none of his contemporaries noticed this. What they noticed was that he "hadst small Latin and less Greek"
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/jonson/benshake.htm
But, of course. all of his friends, enemies and acquaintances were in on the conspiracy, right?

[stringer]

Absolutely true. Whatever language ability he may or may not have had, even his most ardent defenders wouldn't deny that he could only sign an "X" for his name. Not even one letter from Shakespeare still exists. It's a well-known fact that his children and wife were illiterate as well.

As for his contemporaries, Shakespeare, from a creative standpoint, was almost universally reviled by his contemporaries: both fellow writers and critics of the time.

Many subsequent writers, even English writers and actors, have generally had just as low if not lower of an opinion of his writing. George Bernard Shaw reviled him. The current top two British stage actors, Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, both in their 70s and both mutliple Tony and BAFTA Award winners, don't even believe Shakespare existed, but rather that he was De Vere.

Really, the only strong British patron Shakespeare had was T.S. Eliot.

[simplysimon2]

On the other hand, DeVere's Guardian and Father-in-Law (his own noble father mysteriously died when he was still a child, possibly by poisoning), was Elizabeth's top adviser and a double for "Polonius" had the largest private library of his day that was at this prodigy's fingertips; something that Stratford Willy did not have.