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Shakespeare — it is his books not his looks

Simon Jenkins

There is no indisputable image of the Bard but that is a good thing. We need to care about his writing.

HOW DOES knowing Shakespeare's face affect our appreciation of his work? He was always acute to the separation of mind and body, to inner truth and outward appearance. There is no art, he said, that finds "the mind's construction in the face." Much of Macbeth plays on the dichotomy between the two. Macbeth's wife could see straight into his heart: "Your face, my thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters." He summons up his courage by replying: "False face must hide what the false heart doth know."

Shakespeare wavered between depicting faces as vehicles of truth or of deception. Hotspur's loathing for Henry was attributed to the latter's ability to dissemble in public: "[By] this seeming brow of justice did he win the hearts of all that he did angle for." The ambivalence is nowhere more potent than in Hamlet's explosive use of portraiture as a metaphor in accusing his mother, Gertrude. He praises the picture of his father: "See what a grace was seated on this brow... where every god did seem to set his seal/To give the world assurance of a man." As for the picture of the usurper, Claudius: "Here is your husband, like a mildew'd ear."

Shakespeare was fascinated by faces. He refers to them over 500 times in his plays.

In the light of this, I understandably raced to the National Portrait Gallery in London for Tarnya Cooper's admirable show, Searching for Shakespeare. Its core is an examination of six pictures supposed, at various times, to represent Shakespeare, none fully authenticated. Each is set in time and place. A range of Tudor and Jacobean portraits are offered for comparison. The Elizabethan stage is examined yet again, as is the other side of Shakespeare's biographical coin, the life of a well-to-do Stratford gentleman. We are even shown the original will and its notorious bequest to his wife of nothing but "my second-best bed." The choice of the six central pictures is my one quarrel with the show. The Grafton and Sanders portraits have nothing to do with Shakespeare apart from the hopes of past owners. The Janssen portrait is clearly of someone else, allegedly Thomas Overbury. The Soest and Flower portraits are apparently copies of the sixth and only probable authentic likeness, the Chandos portrait.

The Chandos has been scientifically tested as of the right age, and looks like the contemporary funeral bust in Stratford church, commissioned by and therefore attested by family and friends. It also matches the engraved face that appeared as the frontispiece to the First Folio, notably the distinctively feminine mouth. This engraving, by a Dutchman, Droeshout, was recognised by friends such as Ben Jonson as a likeness.

The Chandos portrait shows a man in his 40s with high domed forehead, bearded face and prominent nose. It was reputedly painted by one of Shakespeare's actors, John Taylor, and has a plausible provenance. The difficulty in questioning it is that this image is nowadays so familiar that we find ourselves saying it must be accurate because it looks so much like itself.

The work is criticised for making the Bard seem dark, Levantine and gloomy, as if made up to play Shylock. This is said to result from four centuries of overpainting, varnish discoloration and possible manhandling. There is not much "mind's construction" to be found in so battered an icon. (I must declare a bias here in having a 1775 copy of the Chandos by the meticulous miniaturist Ozias Humphrey. Since it is fresh and free from subsequent ageing or overpainting I regard it as a better "Chandos" than the original. It is certainly "my Shakespeare.")

When I left the gallery I sensed not so much Shakespeare's presence as his overwhelming absence. It was as if his very name were a metaphysical construct. There never was a man whose work less needed the prop of a picture byline. Shakespeare is in everything he wrote, except that he is nowhere because all humanity has displaced him. He is surely the most absent writer in history, fit only for the cliché "to be for all time."

The best conclusion is offered by Ben Jonson, writing on the engraver of Shakespeare's image for the First Folio frontispiece. "O, could he but have drawne his wit/As well in brasse as he hath hit/His face. The Print would then surpasse/All that was ever writ in brasse./But since he cannot, Reader, looke/Not on his Picture but his Booke."

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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