[2] At some point the portrait was altered to cater to public demand for more pictures of the bard and to conform to 19th century ideas of Shakespeare.

According to Kingston, "a friend in London sent me word that he had seen a portrait of Shakespeare, that he was positive it was a genuine picture, and that the owner only valued it as being a very fine painting.

Kingston told Wivell that the design on the book held in the subject's hand was a combination of "the crest of the Shakespeare family and the tragic mask".

He concluded that the aristocratic nature of the portrait did not conform to Shakespeare's status as a playwright, and that the painting's historical subject was a mystery.

[8] In 1932, the writer Percy Allen argued that the painting originally depicted Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, but had been later retouched.

Allen was a supporter of J. Thomas Looney's theory that the works of Shakespeare were written by de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

He argued that the features of the man in the Ashbourne portrait corresponded to those of de Vere and that the costume suggested a date earlier than 1611.

[8][14] Ketel had in fact been commissioned in 1577 to paint a series of 19 portraits for the Cathay Company,[15] in which Oxford had invested and lost a large sum of money.

It is conjectured that if they were there, they probably stood for "Clement Kingston", the original owner who profited from the "discovery" of a new portrait ostensibly depicting Shakespeare.

In removing the overpaint, he uncovered the coat of arms, and his assistant Lisa Oehrl made a sketch of it, unaware of the sitter's identity.

[22] He had not, at that time, been granted his coat of arms, and art historian William Pressly conjectures that they were either included in anticipation of the honour, or painted in later.

[10] The original alterations to the Hamersley painting, to make it look like what people would expect of a portrait of Shakespeare, is thought to be the handiwork of Clement Kingston, who was also a painter.

Oxfordian Barbara Burris published articles arguing that the Folger had deliberately erased the CK monogram and "that the fashions the sitter wears in the painting date to about 1580, when Hamersley would have been 15 and Oxford 30, and when Ketel [who returned to Holland in 1581] was working in England.