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At about the same time as Martin Droeshout was engraving his image of Shakespeare, Gheerart Janssen was sculpting a bust to form part of the Shakespeare funerary monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. Gheerart Janssen was based in Southwark, but he had previously carved an effigy of Shakespeare’s friend, John Combe, which is also in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church. The Soest portrait (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soest_portrait_of_Shakespeare.jpg), which is said to be of Shakespeare, is also worthy of consideration as it appears to display many of the distinguishing features discussed herein. The Chandos portrait was the very first item acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The portrait is named after one of its owners: James Brydges, Duke of Chandos. Five years before James Brydges died in 1789, the Shakespeare scholar Edmond Malone noted on a copy of the portrait that the original had ‘formerly belonged to Sir William Davenant’. Sir William Davenant, whose name is also associated with the Davenant bust of Shakespeare, was remembered – in Oxford, at least – as Shakespeare’s godson. There were many jokes made about his relationship with Shakespeare, reflecting the gossip that Davenant was, in fact, Shakespeare’s natural son. Davenant himself encouraged that impression, and there are grounds for believing that it might have been true; Davenant certainly exhibited a lifelong attachment to Shakespeare and his memory. So we can take it that, if the Chandos portrait and the Davenant bust were both associated with Sir William Davenant, they were probably pretty good likenesses of his godfather. Lena shows that the person we thought had sculpted the monument for years, Gerard Johnson, is not the right person and that Nicholas Johnson instead produced monuments of people while they were still alive. It’s just amazing. I think that the monument will never be the same again after Lena’s research. She’s made us look at it with fresh eyes,” Edmondson said. The painted effigy is a half-height depiction of Shakespeare holding a quill, with a sheet of paper on a cushion in front of him. In the 17th century, a Jacobean sculptor called Gerard Johnson was identified as the artist behind it. Orlin believes that the limestone monument was in fact created by Nicholas Johnson, a tomb-maker, rather than his brother Gerard, a garden decorator.
Shakespeare's pen has been repeatedly stolen and replaced since, and the paint has been renewed. In 1793 Edmond Malone, the noted Shakespeare scholar, persuaded the vicar to paint the monument white, in keeping with the Neoclassical taste of the time. The paint was removed in 1861 and the monument was repainted in the colours recovered from beneath the white layer. [25] Duncan-Jones, Katherine, and H. R. Woudhuysen, eds. (2007) Shakespeare's Poems London: Arden Shakespeare, Thomson Learning. ISBN 978-1-90343-687-5, pp. 438, 462.
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The doublet is ‘pinked’ to show the expensive scarlet lining. The impression is one of slash marks and flesh wounds. In the middle, poking through the doublet, is a neat bow. Jenny Tiramani, an expert in period costume, has admitted that she has never seen the band strings of a shirt collar poking through a buttonhole like this. The detail of the bow in the Wadlow portrait is extremely unusual. More than anything, it appears to resemble a dragonfly. a b Schoenbaum, S. (1987). William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, Oxford University Press, p. 308. She said Nicholas Johnson also worked on another monument in Holy Trinity church dedicated to Shakespeare’s friend John Combe. “The evidence is that this man’s monument – he died in 1615 – was created by a London sculptor whose practice was to travel with the sculptures to see their installation,” Orlin said. “If this sculptor followed his usual practice, he would have been in Stratford some time in the year before Shakespeare’s death. Even if not, his workshop was round the corner from the Globe. It’s highly likely that he would then have seen Shakespeare’s face.” Critics have generally been unkind about the appearance of the sculpture. Thomas Gainsborough wrote that "Shakespeare's bust is a silly smiling thing". J. Dover Wilson, a critic and biographer of Shakespeare, once remarked that the Bard's effigy makes him look like a "self-satisfied pork butcher." [31] Sir Nikolaus Pevsner pointed out that the iconographical type represented by the figure is that of a scholar or divine; his description of the effigy is "a self-satisfied schoolmaster". [32] Hamper, William, ed. The Life, Diary and Correspondence of Sir William Dugdale. London: Harding, 1827.
Simpson, Frank. “New Place: The Only Representation of Shakespeare’s House, from an Unpublished Manuscript.” Ed. Allardyce Nicoll. Shakespeare Survey 5. Cambridge: CUP, 1952. BBC News, ‘Shakespeare portrait ‘is a fake’’, BBC News Channel (22 April 2005) < http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4471515.stm> [Accessed 13 March 2014] The scientific community might have wanted to open up Shakespeare’s grave, but superstition and the gravestone ‘curse’ presented an obstacle to their plans. Brown, Mark, ‘A New View: is this the real Shakespeare?’, Guardian (10 March 2009) < http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/mar/10/shakespeare-cobbe-portrait> [Accessed 12 March 2014]
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Joseph Greene had the motivation, the opportunity and the means to perpetrate the fraud and the cover-up, although in his own mind he probably felt he was doing it for the best of reasons: to show his hometown hero as he should be shown, as a writer. William Shakespeare. Revered throughout the world as one of the greatest playwrights, Shakespeare wrote some of the best-known and best-loved words in the English language. Over 400 years on, these words still have the power to question, console, illuminate and inspire us today. There were two Martin Droeshouts in a family of Dutch engravers. This portrait, which appears on the frontispiece of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays published in 1623 (seven years after his death), is generally thought to be by the younger Martin. It is not well-regarded as a work of art but was said by Ben Jonson to be a fair likeness.
To the memory of my beloved, The AUTHOR MASTER WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, AND what he hath left us’, 67-70. William Shakespeare has been commemorated in a number of different statues and memorials around the world, notably his funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon (c. 1623); a statue in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, London, designed by William Kent and executed by Peter Scheemakers (1740); [1] and a statue in New York's Central Park by John Quincy Adams Ward (1872). [2] [3] 17th century [ edit ] Shakespeare's funerary monument A “monumental lapse” Figure 4. Vertue’s second engraving of Shakespeare in Pope’s 1723-25 edition and the first ever depiction of Shakespeare as a writer. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. In 1973 intruders removed the figure from its niche and tried to chip out the inscription. Local police took the view that they were looking for valuable Shakespeare manuscripts, which were rumoured to be hidden within the monument. According to Sam Schoenbaum, who examined it after the incident, the figure suffered only "very slight damage". [26] Interpretations [ edit ] A fanciful 1857 painting by Henry Wallis depicting Gerard Johnson carving the monument, while Ben Jonson shows him Shakespeare's death mask Thornton, Peter, and Helen Dorey. A Miscellany of Objects from Sir John Soane’s Museum. London: Laurence King, 1992.
Paul Edmondson
a half-hearted, belated mention of the Stratford man as the great poet-dramatist. Another sign of Dugdale’s peculiar reticence is the title he gave to Hollar’s engraving in his book. It does not identify the monument as Shakespeare’s. It says simply: “In the North wall of the Chancell is this Monument fixt.” The only mention of “Shakspeare” in the illustration is in his transcript of the verse epitaph. [3] All in all, Dugdale appears less than enthusiastic that “our late famous poet” was from his home county. William and Anne also had twins, Judith and Hamnet, who were baptized on February 2, 1585. Hamnet died at age 11 and a half. Judith married Thomas Quiney in 1616, and the couple had three sons: Shakespeare Quiney, who died in infancy, and Richard and Thomas, who both died in 1639 within a month of each other. Since neither of the boys married, there is no possibility of any legitimate descendants from Shakespeare’s line. Horace continued: ‘soon, when you’ve finished covering / Public events, reveal your great gifts / Again in Athenian tragedy, / You famous defendant of troubled clients …’ The inscription on the Cobbe portrait therefore carries a hint of menace, encapsulating, as it does, a warning from one poet to another that some things are best left unwritten about.
A few years after he left school, in late 1582, William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway. She was already expecting their first-born child, Susanna, which was a fairly common situation at the time. When they married, Anne was 26 and William was 18. Anne grew up just outside Stratford in the village of Shottery. After marrying, she spent the rest of her life in Stratford. A plaster mould was sold on the first day of Roubiliac's sale, 12 May 1762, lot 50; a plaster bust was lot 1 in the second day's sale; another plaster bust was lot 9 in the third day's sale; and another plaster mould was lot 55 on the same day. A further plaster bust was lot 5 in the fourth day's sale. A marble bust was sold on the fourth day as lot 74 . The bust was installed during the lifetime of his widow, two daughters, and his son- in-law. Anne ShakespeareWe don’t know who commissioned it, but I imagine it was a Catholic. In fact, I suspect that most of our Shakespeare portraits were Catholic keepsakes. They commemorate a martyr, a man who was killed because he was an eloquent and persuasive mouthpiece for the Catholic cause [19]; we remember the words of Horace – ‘You famous defendant of troubled clients’ – which are hinted at in the inscription on the Cobbe portrait. If we look more closely at the doublet in the Wadlow portrait we see little groupings of five points arranged in the form of a quincunx and representing, perhaps, the Five Wounds of Christ, which was a Catholic symbol of resistance to the Protestant policies of Elizabeth and James I. death in 1616, and 1623, when Leonard Digges refers to it as Shakespeare’s ‘Stratford monument’ in a poem at In Denmark, a memorial statue was commissioned to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the publication of Hamlet in 1603. [21] The statue, designed by Louis Hasselriis, was funded by public subscription and erected in Elsinore, along with a sculpture of Hamlet.
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