Shakespeare’s Faces

William Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout

The iconic engraving of Shakespeare in the First Folio (the first collected edition of his works, published in 1623) is hands-down his most famous portrait, the face most people attach to his name. I’ve never much liked it. While writing Interred With Their Bones, I let a little mockery spill into print:

The book lay open to the title page with the engraved portrait of Shakespeare, the one that gave him a wandering eye, a Humpty-Dumpty brow, and a head set so awkwardly on his ruff that it looked oddly decapitated, resting on a half halo. “Mr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARES COMEDIES, HISTORIES, & TRAGEDIES,” large letters proclaimed above the picture. “Published according to the True Originall Copies.” Below the picture, it read “LONDON. Printed by Isaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount. 1623.”

—Interred With Their Bones

 

Other portraits said to picture Shakespeare exist. To my eyes, the most beautiful, and the way I prefer to picture him, is the Chandos Portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London:

See more of the earliest and best portraits here, thanks to the BBC.

There’s no way to be certain that any of them, however, are good likenesses — not even the First Folio engraving, which dates from seven years after Shakespeare’s death. (Many people who knew him well had a hand in producing that book, however. Surely they wouldn’t all have stood by as a really awful likeness went to print… would they?) Given the global A-List status of the man’s celebrity across many centuries, it’s startling that we’re not really sure what he looked like. Best to go along with Ben Jonson’s recommendation to “look not on his picture, but his book.”

Soul of the Age!
The applause! Delight! The wonder of our Stage!
Thou art a Monument without a Tomb,
And art alive still, while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.

—Ben Jonson

For more, check out:

• “To Be or Not to Be Shakespeare” by Doug Stewart (Smithsonian Magazine, Sept. 2006)
• Searching for Shakespeare by Tarnya Cooper (Yale, 2006)