"Double Falsehood" No Hoax, Scholar Says

Lewis Theobald always claimed his 1727 play "Double Falsehood" was based on a lost work of Shakespeare, "Cardenio." Critics disagreed, calling Theobald a hoaxer. But Shakespeare scholar Brean Hammond of Nottingham University thinks Theobald might have been telling the truth, and next week the publisher Arden Shakespeare will release an edition of the play attributing it to Shakespeare (though the original was co-written with John Fletcher, and Theobald is known to have made substantial changes to "Cardenio"). There are reports that the Royal Shakespeare Company might even perform a version of the play this summer.

Lots of news coverage on this: Guardian, Daily Mail, Times, Reuters, &c. One of the longest articles is from Australia's ABC (even though they use "cannon" for "canon" in an early paragraph, they're one of the only reports to include comments from skeptics, including Dr. Huw Griffiths, who argues that the play should be treated as an adapation, not a true Shakespeare creation).

Interestingly, several of the news articles about "Double Falshood" are illustrated with the Cobbe Portrait, which some claim is Shakespeare (a conclusion vociferously opposed by others). The Shakespeare Wars continue!

Cobbe Portrait Debate Continues

I missed it in yesterday's Washington Post, but there was a long piece there by Sally Jenkins on the Cobbe Portrait controversy - is it, or isn't it, Shakespeare? The story is more than a bit overwrought ("The styled courtier who gazes out of the portrait is undeniably a seducer, and that much was true of William Shakespeare: He was an arch-persuader with language. But we didn't reckon he was such a looker. Frankly, we always thought he was a bald pudge. Whereas this man is bouffant and handsome, complicatedly so, with his doily of a collar and come-hither expression" are two lines from the first paragraph), and there doesn't seem to be much new in it, but the debate is interesting enough to make the eye-rolling worth it.

Shakespeare Portrait Debate Rages

After Katherine Duncan-Jones' effective volley in the Shakespeare Portrait Wars, Mark Broch, Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells fired back with a letter in the TLS this week, although some of the claims made within seem, eh, thin, if not outright laughable. They write that the Cobbe portrait can't possibly be Overbury, (even though it bears an uncanny resemblance to known portraits of him). "Perceived resemblance unsupported by documentary evidence is a naive (though natural) basis for identification," ... but isn't that exactly what they've done in calling the Cobbe painting Shakespeare?

And in Slate, Ron Rosenbaum starts off an essay by examining the portrait controversy, but then spins into a discussion of whether Shakespeare's attractiveness (or lack thereof) matters at all.

To Be (Shakespeare) or Not To Be?

That "portrait of Shakespeare" much ballyhooed last week may not be of the Bard at all, as many have suggested from the beginning. Today in the TLS, Shakespeare editor and biographer Katherine Duncan-Jones pours several gallons of cold water on Stanley Wells' identification of the "Cobbe Portrait" as Shakespeare.

Duncan-Jones calls the portrait "a splendid painting, whose sparkling colours have benefited from recent restoration." She suggests that the "italic inscription at the top of the picture, 'Principum Amicitias!' – 'the leagues of princes!' – appears too large in scale, as well as highly unusual in its deployment of an exclamation mark, and was perhaps added later." "It might have been helpful to examine the picture’s reverse for further inscriptions or telling marks," she suggests, "but at the preview the back was veiled with a brown paper screen." Finally, she believes that the man in the portrait is just "far too grand and courtier-like" to be Shakespeare: "When players dressed above their rank offstage, it tended to get them into trouble. It is hard to believe that Shakespeare would have been rash enough to permit himself to be portrayed in such grand array."

This refutation also makes a very good point about the copies made from this work: "all four versions on panel appear to have originated in the period 1610–20, while a fifth, a copy on canvas, is dated to c1630. It would seem that the subject was a man of huge interest in the Jacobean period, such that several noblemen wanted to possess a good copy of his image, but later ceased to be so. If knowledgeable contemporaries believed this to be an authentic image of 'Sweet Master Shakespeare', would there not have been a market for many further copies or engravings after Shakespeare’s literary re-birth in 1623, when the First Folio was published?"

Duncan-Jones also suggests that we must take seriously the views of National Portrait Gallery curator Dr. Tarnya Cooper and by David Piper that the Cobbe Portrait may actually be courtier Thomas Overbury, rather than Shakespeare (and I have to say it does bear a positively striking resemblance to the known original Overbury portrait, now at the Bodleian - image here, at the top of the page).

The case for Overbury seems to me to be just as good, if not better, as that for Shakespeare. Both are circumstantial, but if I had to make a call, I think Duncan-Jones has the stronger argument.

But the new Shakespeare attributions don't end there. The Telegraph reported yesterday that a new book suggests Shakespeare wrote six additional works than are usually credited to him. In Enter Pursued by a Bear, independent scholar (and psychotherapist) John Casson believes he's found Shakespeare's earliest published poem, his first comedy, and two early tragedies. Reaction to those suggestions is, I'm sure, forthcoming.

Shakespeare Portrait Found?

Big news from the Shakespeare world today, as a senior scholar "unveils" a portrait he believes to be that of the Bard, dating from c. 1610. Stanley Wells, professor emeritus of Shakespeare Studies at Birmingham University, says that after three years of research he's convinced that the painting, owned by the Cobbe family, represents Shakespeare at about 46 years of age. Wells, the chair of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, said of the painting: "The evidence that it represents Shakespeare and that is was done from life, though it is circumstantial, is in my view overwhelming. I feel in little doubt that this is a portrait of Shakespeare, done from life."

The current owner, Alec Cobbe, noticed what he thought was as copy of his family's painting in a National Portrait Gallery exhibit several year ago, "Searching for Shakespeare." He asked Wells to assist in authenticating the painting, and they had the portrait subjected to a battery of tests, the results of which, Wells says, make a decent case that this is the real deal (and the source for several copies).

Some paintings in the Cobbe family collection once belonged to the Earl of Southampton, a known Shakespeare patron, although it is not known if this particular one did.

The portrait will be temporarily displayed at the Shakespeare Birthplace in Stratford-on-Avon beginning next month, according to media reports.