Overbury Overdrive, pt. 3: The (modern day) back-story

Here is a fascinating interview Channel 4 (UK) did with the family owner of the Cobbe portrait of "Shakespeare," the art restorer Alec Cobbe. An affable chap. After the 35 minute mark, the interviewer asks a few questions about the possible Thomas Overbury identification. And Cobbe says, essentially, that facial features can't be used to identify a sitter in a portrait.

But rewind the tape by about ten minutes, and there's Cobbe arguing for his portrait being a "Shakespeare" portrait by appealing to the similarities between his painting and the Droeshaut engraving of Shakespeare.

So there you have it. It can when you want it to, but it can't when you don't.

Foofy nihilism

Couldn't let today's New York Times commentary about the "Cobbe Portrait of Shakespeare" go unnoticed.

The thing about the Bard, commentator Verlyn Klinkenborg writes, is that if you "Go looking for the man... you will find only the person doing the looking."

Shakespeare is just one big hall-of-mirrors. Mm-kay?

The article's kicker offers up my favorite sentence:

Every claim to have found some relic of the original Shakespeare is just another reminder that his work needs no biography.

Shorter NYT: Bard's bio no workee. Bio = bad.

Thankfully, north of the border, a letter-writer to the Toronto Globe and Mail chimes in with a fine rejoinder to the Times' muddle-headed navel-gazing:

Too bad [the Cobbe] is not a portrait of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, the man who wrote plays and poems under the nom de plume "Shakespeare." That would have been really interesting.

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.]

Here's looking at you, scurvy jack-a-nape

(Creative Commons image by dejahthoris)

Poetry, music and culture blogger Remy Wilkins offers up a curious (if a little oddly worded) mind game this weekend on his blog The Whole Garden Will Bow:
"The Movies I’d Watch With Dead People if I Could Watch One Movie With Someone Dead"

[in no order]
1. The Darjeeling Limited with G.K. Chesterton
2. Magnolia with Flannery O’Connor
3. There Will Be Blood with Herman Melville
4. Gattaca with Fedor Dostoevsky
5. The Decalogue with Moses
6. Spirited Away with Booker T. Washington
7. Beowulf with St. Boniface
8. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with E.E. Cummings
9. Die Hard with Jane Austen
10. Casablanca with Edward de Vere

Not to get too Facebook-y, but this top-10 list does have the air of a challenge to it.

Whoever you think Shakespeare was (or wasn't), what movie(s) would you want to sit the Bard down and have him watch? Just to see what the guy thinks about the stories we tell on the screen. Ten that would at least be on the short list, for me, would be Taxi Driver, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Away From Her, His Girl Friday, The Matrix, Brazil, The Incredibles, Trouble in Paradise, The Life Aquatic... and for the last one, I'm thinking either Pink Panther 2 or Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Toss up.

I'm resisting the historical period piece or adaptations of his own canon. You gotta figure, the man would probably have seen enough Shakespeare to last him a lifetime.

Bad Quartos

This bit of Bard-inspired pop passed along by reader A.N.. I kind of like the song "Every Day" -- about Twelfth Night based around a cooled-out version of the riff from Led Zeppelin's "The Song Remains The Same." (Originals of songs here.)

Dr. Horrible

Nothing to do with anything, really. Just one amazing piece of musical dramedy. Made possible, courtesy of Joss Wheadon and family and friends, by otherwise idle pens during last year's writer's strike. DVD here.