Present Imperfect

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

August 19, 2003

Finding the underwear mines tiresome once again today (I'm getting lace lung!), I read The New York Times at lunch and found this article about the Folger Shakespeare Library's new exhibit called "Fakes, Forgeries and Facsimiles."

The bit that interested me most was this:

What may become the most controversial exhibit in the show is a portrait bought in 1931 by Folger's widow, Emily. The Folger book "Infinite Variety" (2002) says she probably thought it was a portrait of Shakespeare. It is known as the Ashbourne, and it has had a long and complicated restoration by the Folger over the last several decades. Alongside the portrait the results a full-size radiograph made last year by the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa shows what is now beneath the surface, and the institute's report is on display.

Also included with this exhibit is an article published in Scientific American in 1940 that, one way or another, changed minds about the Ashbourne forever. Using X-rays, Charles W. Barrell, a photo expert, found images under the surface paint that no one knew were there and, based on his findings, determined that the figure in the portrait was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, who was then and is still the most popular challenger for the authorship of the Shakespeare canon. An exhibit label says this article is "now discredited."

Tantalizingly, the article says nothing else about the Canadian Conservation Institute's report and I can't find it on the Web. I'm guessing it's the assertion that the portrait is really of some guy named Hugh Hamersley.

I did find this article in the Guardian about the CCI's investigation of a Canadian family's alleged Shakespeare portrait, though.

Anyway, the point is that the NYT article got me thinking about the whole Shakespeare authorship question. For me, it's a sort of a non-issue. The texts are rich enough, and trying to discover who wrote them simply takes valuable time away from reading them...over and over and over again.

The anti-Stratford camp takes a different view of this entirely, of course. The Shakespeare Fellowship explains that "First, the topic is of interest from the point of view of intellectual history. Does it matter that for more than two hundred years students have been memorizing a point of view which now seems, to an increasing number of informed scholars, to have been false? It would certainly seem so! To say that the subject does not matter is merely to follow the ostrich and bury one's head in the sand."

And, with the kind of off-putting statement that makes people dismiss such theories as nothing more than typical English intellectual snobbery, The De Vere Society insists that the man from Stratford could not possibly have written the Shakespeare canon because: "Q. The playwright was obviously a person of great education. What documentary evidence is there that Shakspere of Stratford had any education at any level? A. None. The records from Stratford Grammar School for the period are lost. He did not attend Oxford or Cambridge or the Inns of Court." De Vere did attend these venerable institutions, so clearly, he is intelligent enough to have written the plays and poems. I knew an Oxford-educated guy who wore sweatpants in public. So, whatever.

Then there's The Shakespeare Oxford Society, which takes great pride in noting that Derek Jacobi believes De Vere is the "real" Shakespeare. After all, the man is an actor.

It's all very interesting, and I guess if someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, it probably was De Vere. I can't buy the Marlowe-faked-his-own-death theory, but in the end, it doesn't matter.

No, really, it doesn't.