Reflections of an Exultant Pessimist: Shakespeare's portrait: a metonym for his ambiguous life

The image I selected that relates to my role as an English major is a portrait of William Shakespeare. This portrait, a classic, has descended for centuries in the same family, the Cobbes, hanging in their Irish home until the 1980’s when its newest owner, Alex Cobbe, had the family heirlooms transferred into a trust. He later visited the National Portrait Gallery which was having an exhibition entitled “Searching for Shakespeare” in which he found a painting that resembled his own to a tee. This portrait, which now hangs in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, had been thought to be the original, but has fallen from grace because Cobbe was able to prove that this painting was a copy of the one in his family collection. Research shows that the Cobbe painting was passed down through the Cobbes’ cousin’s marriage to the great granddaughter of Shakespeare’s only patron, Henry Wriothesley. Several other copies have been found and all are less detailed than Cobbe’s.

This portrait is a metonym for Shakespeare’s ambiguous life. Little is known about the writer, and what we think know about him is constantly being attacked and questioned. For instance, some argue over the accuracy or likeness of the portrait, stating that it may not even be Shakespeare featured in the picture. However, with the finding of the Cobbe portrait, more people believe it is indeed Shakespeare in the picture because it is inscribed with a quotation from the Classical writer, Horace, taken from ode addressed to a playwright. Dating of the wood panel and an X-ray examination placed the origin around 1610, when Shakespeare was 46, six years before his death. This painting may, with good possibility, the only portrait of Shakespeare painted during his lifetime. With so little known about him, knowing his appearance brings the public forward a gigantic gap. Yet, still, so little is known about his life—many people even consider him to be a fraud. The ambiguous nature of this newly discovered authenticity mirrors the quest to uncover more about Shakespeare’s hidden life. The painting is simply a representation of the larger, more complex mystery that is William Shakespeare.