All the world’s a stage, but who’s this guy?
Janssen’s alleged 1610 portrait of “Shakespeare” was later chromed, so to speak, to, uh, make him look “more like Shakespeare”.
The Great “Did Shakespeare Write Shakespeare?” Debate is revisited this month in a Smithsonian magazine article by Doug Stewart, with the focus on an exhibition of portraits of the bard … or someone borrowing his name.
The side argument about who the bloke is in all the Shakespeare paintings does nothing to dilute my recent point that there’s a “Shakespeare” death mask, so we know what we “he” looked like, but Will’s identity crisis makes for an interesting furor nonetheless.
The bickering has seen Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles and Sir John Gielgud, among many others, cheering for the professors of the Oxfordian army, who refuse to believe that a barely educated actor from the English boonies who was the son of an illiterate glove maker wrote any, let alone all, of the 154 sonnets and 37-odd plays ascribed to the Shakemeister. See the rest.
