Summary
Stephanie Nolen's "Shakespeare's Face" ("The face of genius?" Books, Sunday) may be interesting and fun on its own, but even if the portrait in question is an authentic image of the man from Stratford, it is not evidence that he was the dramatist.
The two other images of William Shakespeare with any claim to authenticity are not without problems, either. Nobody knows whom the sculptor of the Stratford funerary monument used as his model or whom Martin Droeshout used for his 1623 engraving in the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays. If Droeshout (the younger) was "not very skilled to begin," we might ask why an inexperienced artist was commissioned for such an expensive book. If, on the other hand, the artist was Droeshout the elder (the younger's uncle and an experienced engraver), we might ask why he created such a "dull," not to say disproportioned and unsatisfactory, portrait.See the full content of this document
Extract
The Question Is: Was the Bard Bald?
Because he addressed the authorship problem, ...
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