Overbury Overdrive Part 749: Shakespeare in Canard-land

Today's Washington Post Sunday Magazine features a head-scratcher of a cover story (not unlike the cover fodder in the color supplement pictured here) that serves up, in this case, a fine selection of canards about Shakespeare and the "new Shakespeare portrait."

The author of the piece, sports columnist Sally Jenkins, has clearly done her research. Or at least research of the un-fact-checked, single-sourced, if-you-believe-that-I've-got-a-bridge-to-sell-you-too variety that big media outlets such as hers perfected in the run up to the Iraq invasion.

She writes:

Both [the First Folio Shakespeare engraving and Stratford funerary monument] are so unintelligent-looking that scholars blame them for instigating the Author Controversy, which is not really a controversy so much as a campaign by conspiracy-minded amateurs to prove that someone more visually appealing wrote the plays. The thinking goes that the "peculiar dough-faced man" in the Droeshout, as Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard University calls him, is too stolid to have written such soaring words. Someone else must have, preferably someone good-looking. As scholar Marjorie Garber writes, "We'd rather he not look like an egghead."

The Author Controversy persists despite considerable documentary evidence. We have the man from Stratford's pay stubs for performing at court, his certificate of occupancy for the Globe Theatre, and his will, in which he left memorial rings to some London actors. Funny he would do that if he was just a country burgher who didn't write the plays.

Oh, dear.

Proponents of "the Author Controversy," as Jenkins terms it, are often accused of a number of sins. (Are we not snobs anymore? Where are the familiar red herrings we ordered??) But disowning the Stratford myth simply because Stratford Will is not pretty enough is a new one to me.

And the fact that the basic anti-Stratfordian argument (cf. here, here or here) presumes William of Stratford to have been an actor but not an author has evidently escaped Jenkins' notice. (The documents she cites, indeed the whole of Stratford Will's documentary record, are consistent with him working in the theater, probably as an actor -- something that few Shakespeare heretics dispute.)

From there, the howlers just keep coming:

* "One thing scholars agree on is that Shakespeare probably sat for a portrait in his early to mid-40s" - I think I recognize this old deadline-plagued journalist's trick: Find something in a book (in this case, pure supposition); claim that all authorities agree with it; then hedge your bets with that handy weasel word "probably." Nice.

* "he was exposed to great theater as a boy" & "Shakespeare avoided duels, so he must have been sweet-tempered" - these as examples of things that don't represent ways that scholars "fill in the gaps with overeager supposition."

* "He arrived in London in 1586 or 1587" ... or 1588 or 1589 or 1590 or 1591 or 1592.

* "The first time the Earl of Southampton laid eyes on Shakespeare he was probably stalking around a stage, wearing sham jewels and a robe hung with tiny mirrors to make it glitter, shouting hoarse rhymes in the air..." No room for doubt there. Jenkins is clearly catching on to the just-make-stuff-up school of Stratfordian biography.

And with such solid credentials built up in telling Stratford Will's life, Jenkins goes on recite the case that the sitter in the new Cobbe portrait of Sir Thomas Overbury is indeed Will Shakspere of Stratford. Namely, the c. 1610 painting came from a family descended from the Earl of Southampton ("Shakespeare's patron") and it resembles another painting once thought to be of Shakespeare.

To her credit, Jenkins also quotes authorities that, in the grand tradition of strange bedfellows, I'd just like to end this post with. Because they're right. (And in Jonathan Bate's case, he's more right than he probably knows.)

The [Folger Shakespeare] library is in a funny position: For years, it viewed the Janssen portrait as discredited and displayed it in a far corner of the ornate, gothic reading room in a row with other impostors and curios, under a small brass plaque that read "Sir Thomas Overbury?" In 1964, an art historian had tentatively identified the portrait as Overbury, a minor poet poisoned in the Tower of London under James I.

While Folger curator Erin Blake has met with Cobbe and directed him to useful historical sources, she stands by the provisional Overbury identification until she sees more evidence.

...

"To me, a lot of the interesting discoveries about Shakespeare are discoveries of his absence," [Shakespeare scholar Jonathan] Bate says. "It comes back to this sense that what he was good at was withholding himself and leaving things open to the audience. ... It's that kind of disappearing act that he was so good at, that's what keeps him alive."



[POSTSCRIPT: Although I'll be in deadline-land tomorrow, please note that as the Post article points out, Sally Jenkins will be taking questions about this story Monday at 12 noon ET.]

Overbury Overdrive, pt. 5: The Empire Strikes Back

The genteel slapping sounds of kid-leather-glove-against-cheek have been on the rise in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement of late.

Last week, this blog noted the arguments put forward by Shakespeare scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones that, in short, the eyes have it: The new "Cobbe portrait," featuring the face of Sir Thomas Overbury, is actually a portrait of Sir Thomas Overbury and not, pace Stanley Wells and his colleagues at the Stratford Birthplace Trust, a portrait of Will Shakespeare.

"Sir,--" Stanley Wells begins his rebuttal in this week's TLS. (Isn't it curious how the newspaper as a medium is dying, reaching out to every reader it can, while one of the world's most legendary upholders of newspaperly traditions hasn't quite gotten around to addressing the ladyfolk yet?)

" Katherine Duncan-Jones," Wells writes, "attempts to revive David Piper’s ill-founded suggestion of 1964 and 1982 that the Cobbe portrait portrays not William Shakespeare but Sir Thomas Overbury (March 20). Piper claimed that an “early inventory” of the Ellenborough collection, sold in 1947....."

The snows of largely irrelevant facts and dates continue to fly as Wells urges his readers to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

"[P]erceived resemblance unsupported by documentary evidence is a naive (though natural) basis for identification," Wells writes. "Different people can look alike."

So, let's see... there's an engraving of Sir Thomas Overbury that says it's an engraving of Sir Thomas Overbury. And there's a miniature that says its sitter is Sir Thomas Overbury. Both of these pieces of documentary evidence have the same face as the Cobbe portrait of "Shakespeare." (Not going to rehash the previous posting that makes this straightforward case.)

But, to quote an old sage, your eyes can deceive you. Don't trust them.

Er... well, except when it comes to noticing some interesting similarities between the Cobbe portrait and the Droeshout engraving in the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio.

Wells continues:

"Duncan-Jones waves away our suggestion that the Cobbe portrait was the basis for Droeshout’s 1623 engraving, where the sitter is only slightly less richly dressed. Certainly Droeshout appears to have simplified the image, updated the collar, and given Shakespeare less hair, possibly reflecting his later appearance. He was keen enough to catch the cast in Shakespeare’s left eye, not present in the Overbury portrait. But engravers commonly simplified and updated... Compositionally, the 1623 engraving and the Cobbe portrait match perfectly.

And there you have it. The Droeshout and the Cobbe match one another perfectly. So says the good professor, anyway.

Remember, the Cobbe portrait hasn't even been shown to the public yet. The Cobbe's official unveiling, at an exhibition in Stratford-upon-Avon, is still 25 days away.

Shall we compare the mounting bluster to a summer's breeze? It's certainly getting drafty in here.

Overbury Overdrive, pt. 2: The Face

Before getting into the new Cobbe (misattributed "Shakespeare") portrait in detail, I wanted to make sure that it is abundantly clear just how precise the match is between the Cobbe's face and undisputed images of the face of Sir Thomas Overbury.

Here is why it matters: The "new Shakespeare portrait" is no such thing. It is a big snafu-in-the-waiting that could also have significant implications beyond this little embarrassment for Stratfordian scholarship. For the nonce, I'm just going to lay that claim out there, with the promise that I'll be following up on these bigger issues in subsequent posts.

Below I've attached a Photoshop exercise that I'll explain after the jump. (Click on the image to enlarge.)




The image here is a gradual fade-in of the Cobbe "Shakespeare" over an engraving of the Jacobean poet Sir Thomas Overbury. As noted in the previous post, it should be as plain as can be that each of these two images is portraying the same face.

Incidentally, I reversed the engraving of Overbury. Note that that would have been the way the image appeared when being struck by the engraver, one Renold Elstrake. The dating of the Overbury engraving is c. 1616, which would put it after Overbury's scandalous death. So presumably Elstrake had to use another Overbury portrait as his source. As the above portrait overlay makes plain, the resemblance between the two faces is close -- so close that I think a good case can be made that the "Cobbe" portrait may have even served as the original for the Overbury engraving.


And, to bring in a third witness here, to the right is another image of Overbury -- revealing the same face as the Overbury engraving and as the face in the Cobbe portrait.

Now just to be clear: I'm not talking about the authorship theory in these postings about the Cobbe portrait. The story, the theory, the whole enchilada of "Shakespeare" By Another Name -- Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare" -- remains.

I just think this "Cobbe portrait" business is a mixed-up jumble of Stratfordian wishful thinking foisted upon an undeniable portrait of Thomas Overbury.

There may well, on the other hand, still be a different kind of "Shakespeare" connection to the Cobbe portrait.

And that's a mouse-trap for another day.

"Is this the real Shakespeare?" Um... No.

You may have caught the latest bit of Stratford Birthplace Trust-spawned media hype over the past few days. Here's a quick summary: We have a new portrait of Shakespeare! One painted during his lifetime! At long last!



Ahem. Yeah. Nice "new" picture of an old Jacobean poet there, guys.

Take a look for yourself. The "new portrait of Shakespeare" is to the left. An attributed engraving of the Jacobean writer Sir Thomas Overbury (1581-1613), to the right. Same guy. Plain as the nose on his face.

The owner of the "new Shakespeare" (a.k.a. Overbury) portrait, a British art restorer named Alec Cobbe, also set off a wave of media coverage in 2002 when he brought out what he claimed was a new portrait of the Earl of Southampton [PDF] that he owned. (Southampton was the dedicatee of the epic Shakespeare poems Venus and Adonis and Lucrece and is widely believed to have been the "fair youth" of The Sonnets. No one, short of the author and his family, is so closely tied to the conventional history of Shakespeare.)

Cobbe's would-be Southampton image was long thought to be a woman. But, in the process of researching an exhibition on his family's art collection, Cobbe says he discovered the Southampton connection.

Compare the media coverage of the 2002 and 2009 Cobbe-related news events:

The Guardian, Apr. 21, 2002:
But it was not until earlier this year, he says, after the Kenwood exhibition had closed, that 'the penny finally dropped. Suddenly I realised that the face reminded me of pictures I had seen during my research into my family's history. "My God," I thought, "could this be the third Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's patron and, perhaps, his lover?"'

The Telegraph, Mar. 9, 2009:
It remained in the same family for centuries and was inherited by art restorer Alec Cobbe. In 2006, he visited the National Portrait Gallery and saw a painting of Shakespeare that hangs in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington. It had been accepted as a life portrait of Shakespeare, but was discredited 70 years ago. Mr Cobbe saw the painting and realised the similarities with the painting he had inherited.

Kind of incredible. So according to the 2002 and 2009 news reports, then, Cobbe has transformed two old portraits owned by his family into two images of the two most important historical figures in Shakespeare studies.

Uh-huh. Sure.

Important to emphasize: I don't know nor do I really care what Cobbe's motives are in making the attributions that he has. I have no cause to suspect that he or anyone else driving this story doubts the "new Shakespeare portrait" attribution they've made. But I do find the attribution faulty. Especially when this "Shakespeare portrait" has Overbury's face!

And the portrait's Latin inscription, I think, seals the case that the portrait's subject was Thomas Overbury -- not William Shakespeare. Or, for that matter, Edward de Vere.

More on that in a day or two. [D'oh! Katherine Duncan-Jones beat me to the punch.]

[Thanks to readers G.Q. and R.C. for their help in putting together this post.]
[Edited to clarify how Cobbe says he made his 2002 discovery and to add the final point of emphasis.]