but Warwickshire, and it must have been well known to the poet. For he,
too, was a homager of the manor of Rowington, for one of the only two
tenements belonging to that manor in Stratford-on-Avon--the property in
Chapel Lane taken over by his brother Gilbert for him in 1602. For that
tenement, therefore, he should have been on the jury at Rowington, at
the Court in April 1614, when, immediately after his father’s death,
William claimed his inheritance; or in the following April, when he
claimed it as forfeited. Though, from reasonable causes, he might have
been excused attendance, the poet was certain to know of all the cases
brought before the Court. It is probable that he sympathized with the
elder brother, who had been ousted from the headship of the family,
a man of his own name, exactly of his own age, possibly related to
him in some degree, with the same number of brothers as he, and also
with one sister, Joan. One trifling fact suggests acquaintanceship and
sympathy--that William’s case was taken up by, and developed and signed
by, Thomas Greene, the poet’s cousin and attorney of Stratford-on-Avon,
when, a week after Shakespeare’s death, the younger brother interfered
with the course of Common Law by throwing it into Chancery.
_“Athenæum,” 18th and 25th August 1906._
FOOTNOTES:
[22] A William Shakespeare “paid 8/ to the Lay Subsidy, Walton super
Olde ... Co. Leicester,” 36 Hen. VIII, 133/144.
[23] Since writing above I have found among “Early Indictments,” 650,
the account of the death of William Shakespeare, shoemaker of Warwick,
by slipping into the Avon. “Coroner’s Inquests.”
[24] I find that reports of the case at issue are to be found in Act
Book No. 9, Consistory Court, on 22nd June 1614; 7th July 1614; 15th
July 1614; 28th July; 9th September and 23rd September 1614. And in Act
Book No. 10 the discussion is again resumed on 6th October 1614.
[25] Mentioned in the poet’s will and the overseer thereof.
[26] Some light is thrown on his position by the Sequestration books of
Warwickshire, 1646, Add. M.S. 35098, f. 12. There it is ordered that
“the rents payable out of the lands of Mʳ Betham, Mʳ Atwood, Mʳ Hunt;
and William Shackspere in Rowington shall be payed since the same was
sequestered.” On f. 38, 3rd March 1546-7, it was ordered that “William
Shackspere of Rowington shall hould all his lands which is given in by
ye oath of John Milburne to be £38 per annum ... for one yeare at £32.”
But they were too late. Sequestered for loyalty, he had departed beyond
their “orders” by that time.
XIII
THE TRUE STORY OF THE STRATFORD BUST
Our poverty in respect of authenticated likenesses of our great
dramatist, makes us the more eager to learn all that we can concerning
the only two that have been universally accepted, and even makes us
patient in hearing what can be said in favour of others more or less
doubtful in their pedigree. Therefore, it is all the more surprising
that one authentic rendering, produced by a Warwickshire man, who was
eleven years of age when the poet died, should have been entirely
ignored by all the numerous writers on “Shakespeare’s Portraits,”
especially as it has a most important bearing on the determination of
the facial characteristics of the great dramatist. To understand this
fully, due consideration must first be given to what are recognized as
the “undoubted portraits.”
That which was publicly put forward as the poet’s likeness, and
accepted as such by his contemporaries, was the inartistically
designed, and coarsely executed engraving of Droeshout, appearing as
frontispiece to the First Folio Edition of the Plays, brought out by
his fellows, Heminge and Condell, in 1623.
There was no English _art_ at the time worthy of the name, and
probably for this reason the people found a double charm in theatrical
representations. The actors supplied them with concrete images of the
characters whose life-stories interested them, and became to them more
closely identified than any historical portraits are to-day with their
originals. Artistic taste and judgment were unknown amongst ordinary
people, and even literary men, except such as had had special training,
could not be held as art-critics of any importance. Hence, we may be
justified in considering Ben Jonson’s fulsome praise of Droeshout, in
his desire to help the editors, as only possible to him through his
deficiency in artistic sense.
Bad art as Droeshout’s is, it nevertheless conveys to us the
information that Shakespeare had a high forehead, prematurely bald,
fine eyes, long straight nose, small moustache and beard, clean-shaven
cheeks, oval face, and rather long hair. The dress is of rather less
importance, as it might have been his own, or that of some character
in which he had acted. The painting from which the engraving was
taken has long been sought for. Some thought it had been found in the
so-called Felton portrait. The right panel of this had been split off
in the middle of the collar, and the foot shortened to make it fit a
frame. It has some details _similar_ to, but not identical with, those
of the engraving, though it has a little more art in the workmanship,
and a little more expression in the features. On the back is written,
“Guil. Shakespeare 1597,” and two letters, “R.B.,” supposed to stand
for Richard Burbage. Notwithstanding much that was unsatisfactory in
its pedigree, Richardson restored the hair, collar, and dress after
Droeshout, and published it, whence have arisen many reproductions.
A much more important rival has, comparatively lately, turned up.
Though its pedigree also is hazy, the likeness to the Droeshout print
is undoubted, and Mrs. Flower of Stratford-on-Avon purchased it, and
presented it to the Memorial Picture Gallery in 1895. Mr. Lionel Cust,
Director of the National Portrait Gallery, read a paper about it before
the Society of Antiquaries, 12th December 1895, in which he accepted it
as genuine. It is, of course, open to the questions whether the picture
was painted _for_ the engraving or _from_ the engraving, and whether it
had been painted before or after the poet’s death. The expression is
better than that of the engraving.
The first reproduction of Droeshout, after the Second Folio, is that
which appeared as frontispiece to “Shakespeare’s Poems” in 1640.
The engraver, Marshall, turned the face the other way, increased
the inanity of the expression, flung a cloak over one shoulder, and
put a spray of laurel in the poet’s hand. “This shadow is renowned
Shakespeare’s,” etc. William Faithorne introduced it into the
frontispiece of “The Rape of Lucrece,” 1658. Very many varieties of
these two engravings have appeared.
The chief rival of the Felton and Flower Portraits is the Chandos
portrait, which has a long pedigree. If there is any weakness in the
chain of evidence for the authenticity of this portrait, it is only in
the first links. It was _said_ to have been painted either by Burbage,
or by Taylor, the player, to have remained in the possession of the
latter until his death, and to have been left by him to Sir William
Davenant. It is no objection to this likeness that it should have
rings in the ear, because the custom of wearing a rose in the ear was
so common among the _jeunesse dorée_ of Elizabethan times, that it
was quite natural that an actor should have his ears pierced. But one
always feels a little in doubt of the good faith of Davenant, because
of his known desire to be thought like Shakespeare. The picture passed
from Davenant to Betterton. While in that actor’s possession, Kneller
painted a _portrait_ from it, which was presented to Dryden. This came
afterwards into the possession of Earl Fitzwilliam. The original passed
from Betterton to Mrs. Barry, Mr. Keck, Mr. Nicholls, whose daughter
married the Marquis of Carnarvon, afterwards Duke of Chandos, and
thence to his daughter, who married the Duke of Buckingham. The picture
was bought by the Earl of Ellesmere in 1848, and presented to the
nation on the founding of the National Portrait Gallery.
The first engraving taken from it was by Van der Gucht for Rowe’s
“Shakespeare,” 1709.
Many other oil paintings and miniatures of unproven authenticity have
been put forward as likenesses of the poet, but so diverse are they
in their characteristics, that it is impossible that they can be all
genuine.
Some fine conceptions based upon composite ideas, others avowedly works
of imagination, have been evolved in stone, glass, and oil paintings
through the centuries. There is dignity in the Kent and Scheemacher’s
statue at Westminster, in the Roubiliac statue, genius in Lord Ronald
Gower’s group, and there is pre-Raphaelite art in Ford Madox Brown’s
rendering of 1849, but there is no space here to discuss these and
other artistic productions. They teach us no _facts_.
The Stratford bust should possess a stronger claim to antiquity and
authenticity even than the Droeshout engraving. It is referred to in
the First Folio by Leonard Digges, as having been already set up by the
time he wrote. It was designed under the supervision of Shakespeare’s
widow, daughters, and sons-in-law, amidst his friends and kinsfolk, who
knew him as a man, not as an actor, and they had it _coloured_, so that
the likeness, if at all good, should have been much more striking than
the work of the engraver. They, too, suffered from a plentiful lack of
art in their sculptor, Gerard Johnson, and from their own deficiency
in critical judgement. But there is every reason to believe that they
did their best to represent him to the life. They loved him, and they
were rich enough to pay for the best they could get.
Yet every one who approaches the Stratford bust is more disappointed
in it, as a revelation of the poet, than even in the crude lines of
Droeshout. There is an entire lack of the faintest suggestion of poetic
or spiritual inspiration in its plump earthliness. The designer has put
a pen and paper into the hands, after the manner of the school-boy,
who wrote under the drawing of something-on-four-legs, “this is a
horse.” The pen strives to write “this is a literary man,” but there
is nothing to support the attribution. The intensely disappointing
nature of this supposed simulacrum of the poet, made me, years ago,
commence a careful study of all his known representations, whether
founded on fact or based on imagination. A good deal has been written
on the subject from the time of Boaden’s “Inquiry,” 1824. In 1827
Mr. Abraham Wivell brought out a book upon Shakespeare’s portraits,
criticizing the opinions of Steevens, Malone, and Boaden, and since
then many successive writers have more fully classified and illustrated
the varieties, and brought our knowledge of them up to date. But none
of them gave me what I wanted, an early representation of the Stratford
original bust. I therefore commenced to search with a purpose, and in
the very first book I opened I found what I sought, a representation
of the tomb as it appeared little more than twenty years after its
erection.
This was, of course, in Sir William Dugdale’s great “History of
the Antiquities of Warwickshire.” He seems, judging from the notes
in his diary, to have prepared his work in the neighbourhood of
Stratford-on-Avon about 1636, though the publication was delayed by the
civil wars for twenty years.
His representation of Shakespeare’s bust is therefore entitled to
respect as the earliest known engraving, though it has never been
calendared, compared, or criticized. The unsatisfactory, or rather,
in some aspects, the satisfactory fact is, that _it differs in all
important details from the bust as it appears now_. We have here
also, doubtless, to grapple with the lack of art-perception in
the draughtsman and of the engraver, but there are simple leading
distinctions, that could not have been imagined, if there had not been
something to suggest them. Far from resembling the self-contented
fleshy man of to-day, the large and full dark eyes look out of cheeks
hollow to emaciation. The moustache drops down softly and naturally
instead of perking upwards, there is no mantle on the shoulders, no pen
in the hand, no cushioned desk. The arms are bent awkwardly, the hands
are laid stiffly, palms downward, on a large cushion, suspiciously
resembling a _woolsack_. It is not unlike an older Droeshout, and the
Death-mask might be considered anew beside it. The engraving is, of
course, open to the interpretation that Dugdale, or his draughtsman,
was careless and inexact in details. In order to compare his work in
other examples, I asked a friend to take a photograph of Sir Thomas
Lucy’s tomb, as pictured in Dugdale, and another from the original,
which has been very little restored since it was sculptured in
Shakespeare’s time. He took that from the book, but found that the tomb
itself was in a very bad light for photography, and sent me instead
a pencil outline. This supports Dugdale’s rendering of important
details, though he failed somewhat, naturally, in catching the
expression. It allows us to believe that he reproduced Shakespeare’s
bust with some degree of fidelity. He was appreciative of his fellow
countryman’s fame, and would not pass him by as a nobody. It is quite
possible, indeed, that he had seen the poet in habit as he lived, and
any divergence from the tomb would be more than likely to be in the
direction of the reality.
I had reached this stage when I consulted Dr. Richard Garnett. He
reminded me that the little red lions that held the railings on
the outer front pavement of the British Museum had been wont to be
considered great works of art, but modern critics could not praise
them. On their being taken down a few years ago, however, in order to
broaden the pavement, one of them was subjected to a severe cleansing
process, which proved that it was nothing but the successive coats
of paint, liberally applied every three years, which had obscured
the art of the original conception. His question therefore was, had
Shakespeare’s bust been repainted frequently enough to cause the plump
unpoetic appearance it now has. I could not think so, because no amount
of painting would alter the position of the arms, the shape of the
hands, or throw a mantle over the figure.
I had therefore to have recourse again to engravings, and went through
those in the Print-room of the British Museum. There I found a curious
engraving in the Slade collection, signed “Grignion sculps,” which
support’s Dugdale’s rendering. I then went through every illustrated
copy of Shakespeare in the British Museum, a large order for the
attendants. Rowe, in his first edition of Shakespeare’s works, 1709,
has a very bad representation of the tomb, which conveys the idea of
a certain amount of decay in the original. There is absolutely no
expression in the face, which is not quite so thin as Dugdale’s, but
the figure agrees with the early rendering in all points in which
it differs from the modern one. Rowe’s edition of 1714 presents a
bad copy of his first edition. In Pope’s edition of 1725, we find a
remarkable variation. Vertue did not go to Stratford but to Rowe for
his copy. Finding it so very inartistic, he _improved_ the monument,
making the little angels light-bearers rather than bearers of spade and
hour-glass, and instead of the bust he _gives a composition from the
Chandos portrait_, altering the arms and hands, and adding a cloak,
pen, paper, and desk. It retains, however, the drooping moustache and
slashed sleeves. In Sir Thomas Hanmer’s edition, 1744, Gravelot copies
from Vertue the monument and the figure, while he alters the face
into what seems to be the original of what is called _The Birthplace
Portrait_.
Dr. Thomas in 1730 expanded Dugdale’s “Warwickshire” into two volumes,
but used the original block of the tomb unaltered.
Before the middle of the eighteenth century we know that the tomb
was “very much decayed.” Mr. John Ward, the grandfather of Mrs.
Siddons, was in Stratford in 1746, and gave the whole proceeds of a
representation of “Othello” in the Town Hall on 8th September towards
the restoration of Shakespeare’s tomb. Orders were given “to beautify”
as well as to repair it. We are left altogether in the dark as to the
degree of decay and the amount of reconstruction, but that it was
considerable seems evident. By 1749 the repairs were completed, and
the colours repainted by Mr. John Hall, a limner of Stratford-on-Avon.
Probably they worked with the _new_ edition of Shakespeare before them
as a guide, depending upon Gravelot and Hanmer of 1744. Alas for the
result! We may apply Browning’s words, in another sense than he meant
them, to the fate of this honoured memorial:
Wherever a fresco peels and drops,
Wherever an outline weakens and wanes,
Till the latest life in the painting stops,
Stands one whom each fainter pulse-tick pains;
One wishful each scrap should clutch its brick
Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster
--A lion who dies of an ass’s kick
The wronged great soul of an ancient master.
Whoever the sculptor was who so much _improved_ the figure, it is
more than likely he restored the face by the aid of some cement. It
is curious that none of the other editions of the eighteenth century
reproduce the tomb either as Vertue or Gravelot rendered it. None,
indeed, reproduce it at all, until we come to the second edition of
Bell’s “Shakespeare,” 1788, into which he introduces the “Life” from
Rowe’s second edition of 1714, and in the “Life” the representation of
the tombstone according to that edition. It was engraved by Reynold
Grignion, and “printed for Bell’s ‘Shakespeare,’ 1st Dec. 1786.” This
fact, printed on the plate itself, is important, as Grignion died in
1787, and the book came out in 1788. He rather improved on Rowe’s
print, as Bell’s other engravers improved upon the Droeshout and the
Marshall copies. Bad as it is, it represents the same figure as Dugdale
did, falling into decay. This engraving is the same as that in the
British Museum, “Grignion sculps,” so the latter may have been a proof
copy.
All later renderings are of the modern type. Then commenced a new
series of vicissitudes for the _restored_ bust. Not so very long after
the repairs it was taken down from its pedestal, so that Mr. Malone
might take a cast from it. More than likely that was the time when
some accident removed the tip of the restored nose, which has left the
“long upper lip” a marvel to many since the days of Sir Walter Scott.
William Henry Ireland, in his “Confessions,” 1805, states that he had
been down taking drawings from various tombs in Stratford, and “greatly
reprehended the folly of having coloured the face and dress of the bust
of Shakespeare, which was intended to beautify it, whereas it would
have been much more preferable to have left the stone of the proper
colour.” He applied for leave to “take a plaster-cast from the bust
as Mr. Malone had done,” but the necessary delay in petitioning the
Corporation for permission made him give up the idea. In his drawing
of the bust, he makes Shakespeare an eighteenth-century gentleman,
moustache turned up, a pen in one hand, paper in the other, and the
cushion like a desk. An engraving was made by Mr. William Ward, A.R.A.,
from a painting by Thomas Phillips, R.A., after a cast taken by Bullock
from the bust, and published by Lake on 23rd April 1816, the second
centenary after the poet’s decease. This has the cloak, the pen, and
the paper.
We are, therefore, in the bust likeness confronted by greater
difficulties than the mere obscuring of the truth by paint, such as
occurred in the case of the British Museum lions. We have to consider
the much more serious question, the degree to which the features and
surroundings of the original, deliberately or unconsciously, have been
tampered with. It would seem that the sculptor who collaborated with
Hall in 1746 was the culprit who deprived us of the original outlines
of a memorial so dear, either through ignorance, vanity, or culpable
carelessness. He had Dugdale to consult had he so pleased, but he
contented himself with Hanmer. The decay must have been serious, and
the alteration fundamental, to have so obscured the design. Mr. John
Hall, who was responsible for the colouring, was believed to have
followed the tints of the original. Be that as it may, Mr. Malone, like
Mr. Ireland, disapproved of them, and in order to suit his own taste,
and the fashion of his age, he persuaded the Corporation to have it
painted white in 1793. One contemporary, however, wrote in the album of
Stratford-on-Avon Church the lines:
Stranger, to whom this monument is shewn,
Invoke the Poet’s curse upon Malone
Whose meddling zeal his barbarous taste displays
And daubs his tomb-stone as he marred his plays.
The bust was repainted in 1861 after the _original_ colouring by the
artist who _discovered_ what has been called The Stratford Portrait,
still reverently preserved at the birthplace, though it has no claim
to authenticity. Its strong resemblance to the bust is of itself
suspicious.
We suffer now, therefore, from the combined action of the various
improvers and restorers of Gerard Johnson’s clumsy workmanship. Though
the crude colours of Hall shocked the sensibilities of Malone, he
thought it no sacrilege to have the bust taken down, and submitted
to the moulder’s mercenary hands. Several others have been allowed
to sin in a similar way. Many have written discourses upon its
physiognomy, and based arguments and fancies upon it, unwitting of
all these facts.[27] It is comforting to be able to go back to the
simple rendering of Dugdale from the original--not a picturesque or
poetic rendering, of what was probably a poor representation. But in
it there _is_ something biographical, something suggestive; it shows
us the tired creator of poems, exhausted from lack of sleep, “Nature’s
sweet restorer,” weary of the bustling London life, who had returned,
as soon as possible, to seek rest at home among his own people, and
met an over-early death in the unhealthy spring-damps of 1616. A happy
suggestion of the thoughtful poetic soul, of which the modern restored
and adapted representation had deprived us, but only a suggestion. We
sadly ask, where is the true likeness of our Shakespeare? and Leonard
Digges speaks for us when he says that it is to be found in
Thy works, by which outlive
Thy tomb, thy name must, when that stone is rent
And Time dissolves thy Stratford Monument,
Here we alive shall view thee still, This booke
When brasse and marble fade, shall make thee looke
Fresh to all ages.
_“Murray’s Monthly Review,” April 1904, and pamphlet
reprinted from it, same date._