Portrait of the Artist as an Enigma
Shakespeare in love vs. Shakespeare in life.

By Neil Seeman, NRO associate editor
May 15, 2001 9:35 a.m.

hat light through yonder window breaks? Tis — allegedly — the only portrait to have been taken of William

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Shakespeare while he was alive, unveiled like the morning sun last Friday somewhere in Ontario. (The Toronto Globe & Mail, which broke the story has chosen not to publish the owner's name or city of residence for security reasons). Handed down from one generation to the next, the portrait has survived the centuries since it was painted, ostensibly, in 1603 by one John Sanders, an elusive figure. Sanders is said to have belonged to the same stage company as the great bard and to have painted the likeness in anticipation of his friend one day becoming famous — what prophetic vision!

The painting appears to be authentic. Radiocarbon dating reveals it to be 340 years old, give or take 50 years. It shows a ruddy-haired, hazel-eyed young man sporting a short beard, sideburns, a hint of a mustache, and a bilateral receding hairline of fluffy sprouts. Shakespeare would have been 39 years old in 1603, four years after the opening of the Globe theatre. The eyes in this portrait seem somewhat unaligned, pensive. And there was much to be pensive about. The ink was still wet on the tragedies: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. And it was the age of those harrowing sonnets: deeply personal expressions of love's labors lost and unrequited. Could this serene portrait reflect the same person who asks: "Why should false painting imitate his cheek"? (Sonnet #67) Who self-flagellates: "I never saw that you did painting need"? (Sonnet #83) It seems not. This visage, oddly, is of a well-kempt, confident young man, a far cry from the self-confessed "I, sick withal, the help of bath desired"(#153).

Did the painter on purpose make his subject appear younger than the bard's own self-appraisal? "In me thou seest the twilight of such day as after sunset fadeth in the west" (73). There is no indication of the "hours that drained his blood and filled his brow with lines and wrinkles" (63). No sign of "vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow" (112) from "wretched errors" (119) of the heart. Can this carefree visage be the true likeness of one who describes himself as "day by night and night by day oppress'd" (28); "weary with toil" (27); and straining to "keep my drooping eyelids open wide"? There's nary a whiff of the "wink" that "do my eyes best see" (43). No inkling of the "deep-sunken eyes" (2) of "forty winters" besieging the brow and digging "deep trenches in the beauty's field" (2).

And what of the shocks of auburn hair? We see no "sable curls all silver'd o'er with white" (12), but there, perhaps, Shakespeare was not speaking of himself. Nor does the easel reveal a man "made lame by Fortune's dearest spite" (37); nor his solitary grief when "I all alone beweep my outcast state, and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries" (29). Was such sorrow born of fakery? Or the mannered sadness that Elizabethans so much savored? Perhaps the painting was drawn in a rare moment of respite, when "my sun one early morn did shine with all triumphant splendour on my brow" (33) and before "my glass showed me myself indeed, beated and chapt with tann'd antiquity" (62).

"Authentic" or not, no portrait can show the artist for who he truly is. No one knew this more than Shakespeare. "Much liker than your painted counterfeit, so should the lines of life that life repair which this, Time's pencil or my pupil pen, neither in inward worth, nor outward fair, can make you live your self in lives of men" (#16). Nor can men in love, especially men in love, be relied upon to indite their true appearance — since poetry, by definition, is allegorical, a reflection of a higher state not easily captured on canvas or, in this case, on oak. Shakespeare owed much to Petrarch. Both reveled in longing and the bittersweet taste of romantic self-indulgence. When the artist sees himself in love, he speaks in dreams; the text, however brilliant, is a fun-house mirror.