Martin Droeshout

Martin Droeshout (/ˈdruːʃaʊt/; April 1601 – c. 1650) was an English engraver of Flemish descent, who is best known as illustrator of the title portrait for William Shakespeare's collected works, the First Folio of 1623, edited by John Heminges and Henry Condell, fellow actors of the Bard.

"[1] Droeshout was a member of a Flemish family of engravers who had migrated to England to avoid persecution for their Protestant beliefs.

His father, Michael Droeshout, was a well established engraver, and his older brother, John, was also a member of the profession.

[2] Because of the multiple family members, including his uncle with the same name, it is difficult to separate out the younger Martin's biography from surviving information.

These included portraits and more complex allegorical works, the most elaborate of which was Doctor Panurgus, an adaptation of an earlier engraving by Matthaeus Greuter.

Droeshout would have been beginning his career as an engraver when he was commissioned to create the portrait of Shakespeare, who had died when Martin was fifteen years old.

[11] Droeshout created an illustration depicting the suicide of Dido which functioned as a frontispiece to Robert Stapylton's verse translation of the fourth book of Virgil's Aeneid.

Droeshout, or perhaps an unknown person who designed it, seems to have made a number of specific elaborations of the image, including extensive text, adding extra characters and English and Latin phrases, notably verses explaining how the doctor is purging the three figures of their respective moral illnesses.

Droeshout's ten known Spanish engravings are all on subjects with distinctly Catholic significance, differing dramatically in that respect to works he had been producing in Britain up to 1632, one of the last of which was an allegory of the theology of presbyterian Puritan Alexander Henderson.

The portrait of Francisco de la Peña is similar in its modelling and the drawing of head-shape to the Shakespeare print.

His most explicitly Catholic design depicts the "Church as Warrior stamping out Heresy, Error and Temerity", a frontispiece to the Novissimus Librorum Prohibitorum et Expurgatorum Index.