Shakespeare image: maybe not, say experts

Screenshot from BBC website

Screenshot from BBC website

Published May 20, 2015

Share

London - Grandly presented to the world as the first known image of William Shakespeare to have been produced while he was alive, a 400-year-old drawing said to depict the Bard in his prime has taken dubious scholars by surprise - not least because of its source.

Experts immediately raised doubts over whether a botanist writing in Country Life magazine really had cracked a complicated Tudor code to make one of the most startling discoveries about the playwright in generations.

The commonly known likenesses of Shakespeare, found in the First Folio of his works and his monument at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford, were both created after his death. But Mark Griffiths, who also works as a historian, claimed yesterday that he had discovered an image of the playwright made during his lifetime in a celebrated Elizabethan book on plants.

Just 10 first edition copies of John Gerard's 1598 book The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes are known to survive with its elaborately engraved title page intact. A handsome, bearded man on the right of the image is shown wearing a laurel wreath on his head while carrying an ear of sweetcorn in one hand and flowers in the other.

Around him are symbols and cryptic clues “of the kind loved by the Elizabethan aristocracy” that reveal his identity as the world's greatest playwright, Mr Griffiths said.

“We have a bunch of identifiers, the names of which are indisputable and unique to Shakespeare. We have basically a caption underneath, coded in the style of clever men of the time, which says William Shakespeare,” he said. “Drawn from life, in the prime of life... finally we know what he looked like.”

Arguing he had not taken assumptions about the picture too far, Mr Griffiths - who spent five years testing his theory which had involved unlocking the meaning behind ciphers, heraldic motifs, rebuses and emblematic flowers - said: “It's algebra, it's a simple equation.” He also claimed to have found new work by the playwright - a small entertainment commissioned by Queen Elizabeth I's spymaster Lord Burghley - saying he will reveal more information next week. Country Life's editor Mark Hedges called it the “literary discovery of the century”.

The claims were also supported by Edward Wilson, emeritus fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, who said: “It is sensational and we don't think anyone will disprove this.”

Yet Shakespeare Professor Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute, said he was “deeply unconvinced”, calling Mr Griffiths' theory a “hallucination”. “I can't imagine any reason why Shakespeare would be in a botany textbook,' he said, adding: “I don't think very many people are going to take this seriously.”

Lucy Monro, Shakespeare lecturer at King's College London told the BBC that the picture was “unlikely” to be the Bard, adding: “The writer [being] depicted in quite this way would be pretty much unprecedented.”

 

The Independent

Related Topics: