This may be William Shakespeare at age 33
Botanist and historian Mark Griffiths, along with emeritus fellow Edward Wilson, claim to have discovered the only known portrait of
William Shakespeare made during his lifetime.
Griffiths made his discovery when he was researching the biography of pioneering botanist John Gerard (1545-1612), author of The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes.
The 1,484 page book, published in 1598, is described as the largest single-volume work on plants that has been published in English.
Griffiths said on Tuesday that he was aware of only 10 surviving copies of the first edition that contained the title page with an engraving by William Rogers.
According to Griffiths he was able to decipher "decorative devices" in the engravings that revealed the true identities of figures depicted.
They are the author Gerard, Rembert Dodoens, a renowned Flemish botanist, and Queen Elizabeth's Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley.
The fourth man holds a fritillary and an ear of sweetcorn - plants which Griffiths says point to Shakespeare's poem Venus and Adonis and his play Titus Andronicus.
Below the bearded fourth man - who wears a laurel wreath - was "an ingenious cipher of the kind loved by the Elizabethan aristocracy" which, when decoded, confirmed his identity as "William Shakespeare".
This would be quite a find, if it can be verified. Up until now there are only two known authentic likenesses of Shakespeare, and both of them were created posthumously:
the bust of Shakespeare in the chancel of the Church of Holy Trinity in
Stratford-upon-Avon and the
engraving that appears in the
First Folio.
Not everyone is convinced.
But Professor Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, said he was "deeply unconvinced" by the theory.
"I haven't seen the detailed arguments but Country Life is certainly not the first publication to make this sort of claim," he said.
Another scholar
pooh-poohed such leaps on Twitter:
The eminent Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells agreed, tweeting: ‘So apparently Shakespeare went around in fancy dress holding a fritillary in one hand and a cob of corn in the other.’
A little more detail on Griffith's reasoning below the fold.
The Guardian does a good breakdown of Griffith's decoding:
A figure four and an arrow head with an E stuck to it. In Elizabethan times, people would have used the Latin word “quater” as a slang term for a four in dice and cards. Put an e on the end and it becomes quatere, which is the infinitive of the Latin verb quatior, meaning shake. Look closely and the four can be seen as a spear.
“It is a very beautiful example of the kind of device that Elizabethans, particularly courtiers, had great fun creating,” said Griffiths.
• A W – for William? And Or? A few months before it was engraved, Shakespeare’s father was granted a coat of arms with a golden background. The heraldic term for gold is Or.
• He is holding a snake’s head fritillary (fritillaria meleagris), which had been discovered in France 20 years earlier and whose use in British gardens was pioneered by Gerard. “It was a sensational horticultural novelty, people were very excited. It was as hot as an equatorial orchid would have been to the Victorian sensibility,” said Griffiths. In Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare did not have Adonis metamorphose into an anemone after being gored by a boar, as tradition dictated. He turned him into a snake’s head fritillary.
“Believe me, there is only one piece of Elizabethan creative writing that refers to this extraordinary new flower and that is Venus and Adonis,” said Griffiths.
• Two irises, one French, one English, can be seen as referring to Henry VI Part One.
• An ear of sweetcorn the man is holding refers, Griffiths argues, to the play Titus Andronicus and the speech Marcus makes about gathering the sad-faced people of Rome, “this scatter’d corn into one mutual sheaf.”
This is a lot of fun. Of course, all of these theories seem very compelling until they don't.