The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust: then and now.

Speaking of portraits

NOTE: Recent news about a window cleaner’s discovery of a painting in his living room allegedly of the man from Stratford inspires us to publish this piece by SAT Chairman, Professor Leahy.

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In 2016, to commemorate the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, I wrote a piece for the Guardian newspaper in the UK questioning the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s (SBT) promotion (since 2009) of the Cobbe Portrait as being a painting of William Shakespeare of Stratford.

“The claim that this was a portrait of Shakespeare was met with a mixture of incredulity and hilarity by many scholars, not least because it was already widely accepted as a portrait of Sir Thomas Overbury.” (From the original Guardian story)

One of my major problems (there were many) with the Birthplace Trust’s use of this image of someone else (Sir Thomas Overbury) to promote Shakespere of Stratford was the fact that it was reproduced endlessly on their own web site, and that the Droeshout engraving, which had been used up to then by them and everyone else had, if not disappeared entirely, certainly taken a back seat to this striking new image. The reasons for this displacement were, as I say in the Guardian piece, fairly obvious when one considers the words of the Birthplace Trust itself: “Thanks to the identification of the Cobbe portrait, the balding man we know from the Droeshout engraving, published in 1623 at the front of the First Folio, is no longer the closest representation we have of the playwright . . . this [Cobbe] Shakespeare is handsome and glamorous.” (my emphasis). That was eight years ago …