Cobbe portrait
It is displayed at Hatchlands Park in Surrey, a National Trust property, and the portrait is so-called because of its ownership by Charles Cobbe, Church of Ireland (Anglican) Archbishop of Dublin (1686–1765).
[3] Support for the identification is drawn from several strands of evidence: The identification has received support from Shakespeare scholars Stanley Wells, Henry Woudhuysen, Jay L. Halio, Stuart Sillars, and Gregory Doran, chief associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and art historians Alastair Laing, curator of paintings and sculpture at the National Trust, and Paul Joannides, professor of Art History at Cambridge.
Since the publicity surrounding it, the portrait has appeared on the covers of several books, and even inspired the Chinese author Zhang Yiyi to have a series of cosmetic surgeries to have his face transformed into that of Shakespeare.
Other scholars have noted numerous differences between the Cobbe portrait and the authentic but posthumous Droeshout engraving that appeared in the First Folio of Shakespeare's works.
It belongs to Washington's Folger Shakespeare Library, and was on exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery in London; it bore a striking resemblance to the one owned by his family.
However, the state of the painting that Cobbe viewed was not the one that showed the greatest resemblance to the standard engraved Droeshout image of Shakespeare with a high, balding forehead.
Over a three-year period, a research project headed by Stanley Wells and Alastair Laing, performed a number of authentication studies on the portrait.
It, or more likely a copy such as the Janssen, is possibly the source of Martin Droeshout's familiar engraving on the title page of the Shakespeare First Folio (1623).
But even if it were, he said, the traditions of Elizabethan portraiture meant that it would be unwise to conclude that Shakespeare actually looked like the figure depicted in the portrait.
[14] Sir Roy Strong, former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, and a leading scholar of Elizabethan and Jacobean portraiture, has called Wells's claims "codswallop".
Features such as a distinctive bushy hairline, and a slightly malformed left ear that may once have borne the weight of a jewelled earring, appear identical.
Even the man's beautifully intricate lace collar, though not identical in pattern, shares overall design with "Cobbe", having square rather than rounded corners.
[18] Wells and his colleagues have responded to the criticisms, arguing that David Piper's original 1964 identification of the Janssen as Overbury was based on the misreading of an inventory.
The fact that the word "friendships" appears in the accusative case in the inscription (rather than in the nominative, as one would expect if it were to stand alone), underscores the fact that the inscription was meant to allude to the passage in Horace 2.1. bellique causas et uitia et modos ludumque Fortunae grauisque principum amicitias et arma nondum expiatis uncta cruoribus, periculosae plenum opus aleae, tractas et incedis per ignis suppositos cineri doloso.
The coincidence of distinctive features, the extraordinarily long hair, the high forehead, the long nose terminating in a bulb and the slender upper lip with known portraits of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, led to the conviction that it depicted Shakespeare's patron the 3rd Earl of Southampton himself, whose great-granddaughter was Lady Elizabeth Norton.
