Shakespeare’s True Face And Identity Discovered In The Strangest Of Places

Although over two-thirds of the world’s population may be able to quote you a line or two from the pen of William Shakespeare, nobody has really known what the great bard looks like, until now!

Country Life has exclusively revealed this week what its editor Mark Hedges has hailed as the “the literary discovery of the century.” An image which is claimed to be the only contemporary portrait of Shakespeare.

The words of William Shakespeare may have enchanted, dazzled, captivated, plagued, haunted, hounded, and bored large swathes of humanity for time out of mind, but even the most casual admirer or victim of Shakespeare’s catalogue of crimes or long litany of literature must have occasionally wondered what the great bard looked like.

Who at some point during a mind numbing and soul paralyzing English literature lecture on the meaning of love in regard to a Midsummer’s Night Dream has not wondered idly upon a despondent cloud, “What evil countenance, deformity of feature, and wicked glare of eye must the articulate monstrosity who penned these words that deaden my sense, furrow my brow, weary me eye and sicken my ear so, have possessed?”

Well wonder no more. An illustration in a 16th century book about plants which features an unnamed, bearded man has been identified as being a contemporary portrait of William Shakespeare, created when the playwright was just a young lad of 33.

The expert doing the identifying is botanist and historian Mark Griffiths, who whilst leisurely studying The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, a 1,1484 page volume penned in 1598 by the legendary botanist John Gerard, noticed that the title page had a picture of a bearded man with a laurel wreath on his head.

Beneath the picture of this idle dandy lay an Elizabethan cipher begging to be cracked, and Griffiths claims he did just that only to find it read, “This here is a genuine picture of the great Willy Shakes. Make no mistake about it mate, this is the real mccoy.” Or words to that effect. The cipher when translated simply reads “William Shakespeare.”

The portrait is thought by Griffiths to bear other symbolic fruit in the form of flowers and vegetables which Griffiths believes to be a coded reference to Shakespeare’s identity.

“At first, I found it hard to believe that anyone so famous, so universally sought, could have hidden in plain sight for so long,

“By the time that portraits of Shakespeare were at a premium, the significance of the Rogers engraving had faded from memory. Its camouflaged figures, coded plants and ciphers proved too clever for its own good.

“The title page, one of the richest and most important artworks of the English Renaissance, came to be seen merely as a bibliophile’s rarity and a fine, if stereotypical specimen of Elizabethan decoration. Nobody dreamed of finding Shakespeare in it.”

The Telegraph reports that Country Life’s editor, Mark Hedges, said, “This is the only verifiable portrait of Shakespeare in his lifetime.”

“Two-thirds of the world study Shakespeare, everyone knows Shakespeare, but nobody knows what he looks like. This is the most extraordinary discovery of the century.”

Wether Shakespeare actually looked like the dude pictured in the book is debatable but as Salvador Dali once said, “I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.”

(Image via Country Life)