Shakespeare’s portrait

Bill Bryson’s recent Shakespeare bio begins with some delightful descriptions of extant portraits of the bard. The Droeshout engraving, Bryson writes, “is an arrestingly – we might almost say magnificently – mediocre piece of work. Nearly everything about it is flawed. One eye is bigger than the other. The mouth is curiously mispositioned. The hair is longer on one side of the subject’s head than the other, and the head itself is out of proportion to the body and seems to float off the shoulders, like a balloon. Worst of all, the subject looks diffident, apologetic, almost frightened.”

And of the painted statue in Holy Trinity Church: The artist, Gheerart Janssen “may well have seen Shakespeare in life – though one rather hopes not, as the Shakespeare he portrays s a puffy-faced, self-satisfied figure, with (as MarkTwain memorably put it) the ‘deep, deep, subtle, subtle expression of a bladder.’”