A Lecture on Some Portraits of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's Brooch (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from A Lecture on Some Portraits of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's Brooch

You Like It. Whether either of those surmises were correct or not, it should be borne in mind that tradition invariably assigned to Shakespeare the personation on the stage of characters of middle age, or in the decline of life. The face of the Droeshout portrait agreed with the bust in the church except in the beard and the hair, the beard in the print being shaved and the hair straight, while in the bust the chin was not shaven and the hair was curled. The eyes in the print appeared to have a hard and care-worn look, but that might, perhaps, be accounted for by the inartistic way in which they were drawn. The dress belonged to no historic period. The lawn ruff apparently opened at the back, and the whole dress might with reason be supposed to have been the production of some stage tailor of the period. As to the truthfulness of the features, there could be no better testimony than Ben Jonson's in the lines quoted.

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