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

[Taliese]

Christopher Marlowe was robbed!

[bubbuh]

Naw. First, he was dead. Then, after a bit, he stunk up the place.

[ColinClout]

Correction: the chairman (not president) of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is Stanley Wells, not Milton scholar and New York Times blogger Stanley Fish.

[CosmicSpaceTurtle]

Shakespeare didn't write. He was a false identity created by a cult, known as the Second Templar Knights. This cult was in fact led by a hybrid alien known as Zolctorma. As all educated people know, an alien race contacted England in the late 1100's. One of their goals was to transmit works of literature to the people of England in the hopes of furthering human society so that humanity as a whole would be ready to be accepted into the Galactic Federation of United Worlds. To do this they used the Second Templar Knights to create the character of Shakespeare, and transmitted their literature through him. The real "Shakespeare" works were written by a variety of great alien authors, over 230,000 years ago.

I thought everyone knew that by now.

[ElaineO]

Riiiiiiiii­iiiiiiiiii­iight!!!

[CosmicSpaceTurtle]

(i'm being sarcastic to make fun of the people below who are claiming that Shakespeare wasn't the real author of Shakespeare plays)

[adtwah]

Just proves that life is more complicated than you thought.

[JohnnyLee]

Cool. We just figured out Tom Cruise's screen name.

[antaeus]

LMAO

[Hopalongpoppyseed]

What part did Zaphod Beeblebrox play?

[reasonshouldrule]

LOL. Good creative message.

[knosiswar]

Sir Francis Bacon wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare.

[helmboy]

oh please.

[bubbuh]

Bacon was a bit moldy and half burnt as a writer.

[bugsbonzai]

Is that you, Sir Francis?

[jeanruss]

There is alot of evidence that does point to Francis Bacon as Shakespeare. I agree with you.

[reasonshouldrule]

No. Bacon's writings are not at all like Shakespeare's.

[Mrjonz]

It must be him. He's got a b'ard.

[bubbuh]

Two. One's on top of his head.

[Steamboater]

Hmmm..good looking man that Shakespeare.

[epazotl]

OMG - Looking at that portrait, I can see it now: a biopic, "The True Life of the Bard, Wm. Shakespeare" starring ...... drumroll, please ..... T. Coraghessan Boyle. He is the spitting image of the man in that portrait, right down to the pompadour!

[Barrelhse]

Are you SURE it's not Marlowe or Bacon?

[bubbuh]

yeah.

[TFlint]

Who really wrote Shakespeare's plays? The humorist Will Cuppy once investigated the matter, by opening Shakespeare's books and looking at the name on the title page. He concluded:
"If Shakespeare didn't write his own plays, someone else with the same name did."

[bubbuh]

Shakespeare got paid for them and he did not get sued in the quarter century or so that he lived after the first one was produced. Mr. Cuppy had the write of it. Shakespeare was the Prints of Playwrights, and still is.

[TFlint]

Not necessarily. If Edward DeVere wrote the plays he would never sue his alter-ego. And . . . as Earl of Oxford, he was forbidden to write for the public himself. Add to that the fact that his coat of arms showed a man shaking a spear, and I think the discussion is still open. I vote for Will, but I'll keep an open mind.

[TFlint]

As usual, these fools do not know the difference between a painting and a photograph.

The clothes in a portrait were painted before the sitter arrived. The sitter picked the picture with the clothes he liked and had his head painted in. Wearing rich clothes in a portrait says nothing at all about the sitter's status, only about what half-finished canvases he had on hand.

[ShineTheLight]

TFlint, I like the contemporary economic reality you serve.

It makes sense to me -- because if WS wasn't rich until late in life, then it made sense to have his poor-but-genius actor-poet's face Photoshopped into an Armani suit at the wheel of a Jag.

I wish the ones who think other people wrote WS's work, just because bits here and there sound like they came from somebody else's life (the Edward deVere theory), would spend some time reflecting on the economic reality of a theater company at that time:

PATRONAGE got the bills paid and the actors fed. Flatter an aristocrat by working their life experiences or social/sci­entific/mi­litary ideas into your plays, and you've got a manor house to visit on your summer provincial tour, plus access to a LIBRARY for material for next season's plays.

[reasonshouldrule]

Excellent points!

[MJinCanada]

Or, Shakespeare could have borrowed a suit for the occasion.

[fresita]

Who cares who portrait that is. The real Shakespeare ( the actor not he playwright) was a drunken illiterate. Why would the greatest writer in the English language never have written a letter?? Nothing exists that he ever wrote. In the video whoever that is talks about how he died a rich man. This is just not true, he didn't even own a book when he died. His children were not even educated. It's been a sham for hundreds of years. Edward DeVere probably wrote the plays not that drunk.

[LadyAurora]

For starters - the actor and playwright are the same person.

I think it was PBS that did a show a few years ago researched Shakespeare through actual records. They proved that there was a real Shakespeare, that he did indeed live in Stratford-­Upon-Avon, and was an actor/playwright during Elizabethan times.

There will always be people who say there never was a William Shakespeare or that he didn't write all of his plays, but after seeing this particular show, I believe he did exist and did write all of the plays attributed to him.

[fresita]

I also saw that show on PBS. You should broaden your scope of research. There is ample proof that Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays. There is no proof that he could even write at all.

[Merckx]

Are you saying he couldn't write because he was a drunk? I thought drinking was almost a prerequisite for being a writer.

[hypnus]

The Edward De Vere theory has so many holes in it you could use it for a strainer, the most notable being that De Vere’s death would have prevented him from witnessing certain events which are alluded to in, The Tempest. Also the writing styles of both De Vere and Shakespeare are nothing a like (yes, I know, that’s what made De Vere so great, that and being clairvoyant).

[bendzela]

"the most notable being that De Vere"s death would have prevented him from witnessing certain events which are alluded to in, The Tempest."

This assumes that the Strachey pamphlet was a source for The Tempest. But as scholar Kenneth Muir has said,

"The extent of the verbal parallels of the [Bermuda] pamphlet has...been exaggerated. There's hardly a shipwreck in history or fiction which does not mention splitting, in which the ship is not lightened of its cargo, in which the passengers do not give themselves up for lost... in which no one gets to shore by clinging to wreckage."

Quote in Anderson, "Shakespeare By Another Name."

[reasonshouldrule]

Yes, you are right. Happy to see a few knowledgeable comments on this topic.

[MintysMom]

THINK!!!

Anyone who had access to alcohol back then was a drunk, unless you couldn't tolerate the stuff.

[CosmicSpaceTurtle]

Are you really using alcoholism to prove Shakespeare couldn't have been a good writer? For whatever reason, it seems most of the great writers are either alcoholic or drug addicts. Hunter S Thompson, Ernest Hemmingway, etc, etc, etc, etc.

To pretend being a drunk makes you incapable of being a good writer is probably the most laughable claim I've ever read on this website.

[inorbit]

There is a more detailed article in Time Magazine that tells of the research that went into this.

[MissTerry]

I'd hit that.

[Barrelhse]

LOL

[Wisterley]

Most intelligent comment here.

[shengirl]

I'd need to know a lot more about why the experts think this is the original Shakespeare. So many men in those days looked so similar, portraits all done in similar styles, and to me, the mouth and chin look wrong, much softer or weaker than any of the other so-called portraits. But of course, he isn't the real author anyway.

[Earl]

Read Bill Bryson's book on Shakespeare and you'll learn about both of those beliefs.

[TFlint]

I think it was Oscar Wilde who said "A portrait is a picture with something a little wrong about the mouth."

[Gusweyn]

Shakespeare was Gay and I don't mean happy!!

[bubbuh]

sure

[hypnus]

How did his wife take the news?

[pc51]

doesn't he look suspiciously like that kid who played him in that movie a few years back?

[bubbuh]

Yeah, that's the latest Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare theory. Joseph Fiennes was thrust into Mr. Peabody's wayback machine with copies of all Shakespeare's stuff to make sure everything came out all right. While he was there some paparazzo managed to snap out this portrait which was subsequently left behind and now has been discovered. Rumor has it he took Gwenyth Paltrow along which accounts for much of her subsequebt behavior, including that odd web site she spnsors. Mr. Peabody and Sherman are always messin' with our minds.