Is This Really the Only Portrait of William Shakespeare Made in His Lifetime?

The Art Newspaper ^ | 22 November 2022 | Ivan Macquisten

[nickcarraway]

I've never heard of gay men wearing manbuns. For some reason it's worn by straight men, I don't know why. I remember even some women's magazine was bashing manbuns. I found this: Best Celebrity Man Buns

Seems like a lot of them are Australians.

[Tucker39]

That was the way they wrote the letter “s” at that time. That carried through to our Colonial and early nationhood days. The Declaration of Indepedence among other documents contain that same penmanship.

[jz638]

There’s a whole lot about Shakespeare that isn’t actually known for certain. The very few signatures attributed to his own handwriting spell his own name differently, so we don’t really know for sure how to spell Shakespeare. His portraits may not have been of him or made by people who ever met him in life, so we don’t really know what he looked like. There’s a lot of persistent controversy about the authorship and attribution of his plays, so we don’t know for sure that he wrote what he is credited with writing, yet.. there he is, a super prominent figure in history with numerous contributions to western culture and language.

[pepsi_junkie]

Please tell me that isn’t a man bun...

"I pity the fool that calls this hair style a man bun"

[Tucker39]

Oooops! My bad! The D of I doesn’t have the f/s mixup, but some colonial documents do.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

On Freevee, you can stream "Shakespeare: The Truth Behind the Name". It's a compelling and enjoyable documentary whose thesis is that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by Edward DeVere, Earl of Oxford. Over the years I have heard that suggested, but until I saw this documentary I didn't believe it.

That being said, here is a portrait of the man who wrote the plays:

[PAR35]

I was guessing the 44th year of Queen Elizabth’s reign, but that would have been 1602 or 03; so off by half a decade from 1608. So that can’t be it.

[cantfindagoodscreenname]

I’m with you. I know straight married men who have those.

[nickcarraway]

It's a compelling and enjoyable documentary whose thesis is that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by Edward DeVere, Earl of Oxford. Over the years I have heard that suggested, but until I saw this documentary I didn't believe it.

Don't believe it. Don't believe it at all. DeVere's known writing is nothing like Shakespeare's. Shakespeare had a facility with meter unmatched by an other poetry. That's why poets like Worsdworth can tell which lines were written by Shakespeare, and which were filled in by others.

[Tax-chick]

It looks like he wore sunglasses.

[WHATNEXT?]

Yes, look at our founding documents and you will see the long F as an S.

[CatHerd]

Yes, it’s called a “long S”:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

1608 was past the time of Middle English, though, and during the period of Early Modern English.

The earliest Caslon typeface has cool long S’s — and it comes with Adobe Caslon Pro, which is fun. (Sorry, I’m a font geek, and Caslon is one of my favorite fonts. You guys might like it better after learning Caslon was also a gunsmith!)

[enraged]

I believe it was common to paint the whole scene first then do the faces and hands. These weren’t polaroids. It took many days to paint the background then they would sit for the actual portrait. Or so my know it all mother told me. She knows everything, just ask her.

[Oklahoma]

Believe it. Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare. They don’t even know if the glove maker’s son could read and write.

[Albion Wilde]

Beautiful green/gray eyes.

[RetiredTexasVet]

Wonder what his pronouns were?

[Tax-chick]

Pish.

[redshawk]

Do you know what the AE mean/ stand for?

[IrishBrigade]

‘Middle English often replaced “S” with “F”.’

what is called Middle English by Shakespeare’s time had developed into what we know today as Modern English through morphological changes such as the Great Vowel Shift and other linguistic issues...early ModE often used the marker resembling a small ‘f’ within words containing ‘s’...this can be seen in some colonial printings...

[Dr. Sivana]

There is NO WAY that he can be gay. But then again, he was certainly ‘creative’.

Have you read some of those sonnets?