Art's False Borrowed Face

[princeofcairo]

So the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has decided that the "Cobbe Portrait" is an authentic painting from life of William Shakespeare in 1610.

I don't think so. It doesn't look much like the Droeshout First Folio engraving that we know has to be an authentic likeness (since about 25 people who knew W.S. personally signed off on it), and even less

Comments

[scholargipsy]

Amen -- I am similarly skeptical. I also have my doubts that the Birthplace Trust is as interested in accurate Bardic scholarship as it is, say, drumming up tourism for Straford-on-Avon.

Re: and

[princeofcairo]

But it doesn't even look like the tulpa that Dee, Marlowe, Raleigh, and the rest of the School of Night created.

[mattcolville]

Why then, Ken Hite, he likes it not!

[anonymous]

Apparently every man in Elizabethan England with a receding hairline was William Shakespeare. That explains how he could turn up in every time-travel story or historical novel set in that era, yet still have time to write plays.

Cambias

[gdw]

Perhaps the whole confusion over the identity, likeness, or existence of the Bard isn't due to the vagaries of historical evidence, but that what we know as the personage & works of William Shakespeare is merely the anthropic manifestation of some hitherto unidentified cultural principle of the universe itself, a la the Delta Green interpretation of Hastur. Having already thorougly embedded itself in the mass unconscious of Western society, it is attempting to gradually retcon anything vaguely tangetial to the Bard into being a genuine artifact, thereby colonizing what parts of the historio-cultural space it has yet to inhabit.

Then again it could be that people's desire for cash can outweigh/subvert their commitment to the veracity of the historical record.

[anonymous]

Yo Ken, when's Ragnarok coming out?

[princeofcairo]

Day After Ragnarok should be out at the tail end of March or the first week of April. Much depends on the art.

[anonymous]

Cooool. Lookin' forward to it!