The recent Morgan Library exhibition, “The Changing Face of William Shakespeare,” displayed the portrait known as the Cobbe portrait, which some scholars have argued is the only surviving portrait of Shakespeare dating from his lifetime (more about the Cobbe portrait can be found here). The Folger Shakespeare Library owns about forty likenesses of Shakespeare, among them the Janssen portrait.
Robert Bearman’s review of the revised edition of Shakespeare Found! A Life Portrait at Last, edited by Stanley Wells, will appear in the summer 2011 issue of Shakespeare Quarterly. We invited Dr. Bearman and Dr. Wells to discuss some of the issues and controversies about the Cobbe portrait, and Shakespeare portraiture in general, for the SQ Forum. Comments and responses by our readers are welcome.
The “Cobbe” Portrait of William Shakespeare
Robert Bearman
The most dramatic claim of recent years that new material relating to William Shakespeare has come to light must surely be the identification of him as the subject of a portrait currently exhibited at the Morgan Library, New York—and, what’s more, executed, it is claimed, in 1610 when he was forty-six. It is now for convenience referred to as “the Cobbe portrait,” having languished unnoticed since the mid-eighteenth century “in a dark corner” of the Cobbe family home in Ireland. Many doubts have been expressed as to the confident manner in which this attribution was so abruptly made in 2006 when the portrait was “unveiled” in England, including my own as outlined in my review of the book Shakespeare Found! A Life Portrait at Last, published in Shakespeare Quarterly in 2009. In response to these criticisms, a new edition of the book was published in 2011 to accompany the Morgan Library exhibition; however, in my view, this will serve only to increase skepticism, as I explain in a second review to appear shortly in SQ.
Critics have drawn attention to a number of difficulties in accepting such a confident attribution: there is, for example, no obviously discernible likeness between this portrait and the two authentic images which we already have—the Droeshout engraving in the First Folio and the bust in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. In particular, while the engraving and bust agree in depicting the subject as suffering from classic middle-age baldness, the Cobbe portrait, said to date from only six years earlier, shows him with a good head of hair. Nor does the subject look like a forty-six-year-old man. In any case, he is surely overdressed, even for a successful playwright.
Artist unknown, The Cobbe Portrait of William Shakespeare, ca. 1610, oil on panel. Collection of Archbishop Charles Cobbe (1686–1765); Cobbe Collection, Hatchlands Park.
Then there is the awkward fact that he looks more like Thomas Overbury (depicted in a portrait now at the Bodleian Library, Oxford) than either of the authentic images of Shakespeare. This is relevant because in the late eighteenth century, another portrait of Overbury is known to have existed at Southam Delabere, Gloucestershire. When, in 1947, a collection of paintings from the same house was sold, there was listed in the catalogue a portrait of a man “said to be Shakespeare.” However, its similarity to the Overbury portrait in the Bodleian Library led the eminent art historian David Piper to suggest that it might instead be the Overbury portrait earlier recorded at Southam, of which nothing further had been heard. Whether or not this was so, the portrait, now christened the Ellenborough” after its last previous owner, disappeared from view following the 1947 sale. Recently, however, it has not only resurfaced but has proved to be a direct copy of the Cobbe—the two near-identical portraits were exhibited alongside one another at the Morgan Library. But there does remain the possibility, of course, as first put forward by David Piper, that the subject of both portraits is not Shakespeare but Thomas Overbury. Not surprisingly, much effort has been expended, especially in the revised edition of Shakespeare Found! to discredit this idea, but in my opinion, for reasons given in my forthcoming review, this has served only to increase the probability.
Portrait of Sir Thomas Overbury, bequeathed to the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1740.
The supporters of the authenticity of the Cobbe portrait must also explain how it had come into the possession of the Cobbe family by the mid-eighteenth century. An attempt at this has been made by drawing attention to a tortuous link between the Cobbe family and the third Earl of Southampton, confidently identified as the commissioner of the 1610 painting, even though there is no evidence of any contact between him and Shakespeare, other than Shakespeare’s dedication of two poems to him back in 1593/94. But as I explain in my two reviews, the evidence for the eventual transmission of any significant heirlooms from between the earl to the Cobbes is so circumstantial as to be almost irrelevant.
But it is not these themes that I want to develop here. In my view, this episode fits well into the long history of dubious claims about Shakespeare ranging from forgery or deliberate misconstruing of evidence to misplaced confidence arising out of preconceived ideas. One might suspect, simply upon opening it, that Shakespeare Found! is part of this tradition, for it at once becomes clear that, although superbly illustrated, it falls far short of what scholars would expect of a publication which announces such a major discovery. In fairness, one should add that the book is made up of a collection of papers variously authored, only the first four of which (37 pages out of 114) seek to establish the picture’s authenticity. But in this crucial section, no footnotes or references are supplied by which any of the statements can be verified by those wishing to pursue the matter further; when the more determined do eventually reach the sources (especially concerning the picture’s provenance, and its possible Overbury connection), the research is often found to be unsound and the manner in which the evidence is interpreted overhopeful, if not sometimes misleading. Of course, it’s just possible that a genuine portrait of Shakespeare has surfaced: but to have the case made with such confidence despite the many doubts that exist makes the book unacceptable as a work of scholarship, the lack of academic rigor serving instead merely to discredit the claims that are made. Ironically, it is even alleged that David Piper, who first drew attention to the possible Overbury connection, “suppressed” information (Shakespeare Found!, revised edition, page 17), a serious and unfounded accusation which in any case should hardly have been made by those who have occasionally been tempted to over-egg the pudding.
Many of those who have pondered what sort of man Shakespeare might have been have come to this point through a study of his work. So thoroughly have they become immersed in this that they imagine they already know their man. Early in the twentieth century, Frank Harris believed, after a lifetime of reading Shakespeare’s plays, that he could “distinguish more and more clearly the features of the writer.” Later, Caroline Spurgeon, after similar total immersion, attempted a complete character assessment summed up in five words: “sensitiveness, balance, courage, humour and wholesomeness.” However, detecting such qualities in the authentic images of Shakespeare, as served up by Martin Droeshout and the sculptor of Shakespeare’s bust, was no easy matter. How much easier would it have been for them to have detected such attributes in the fine Cobbe portrait: an image of a handsome, sensitive, and well-dressed man clearly well able to have lived up to their expectations. He would simply have been the man for them, despite anything which might be said to the contrary. One suspects that for some the same might be the case today.
Facsimile of the Shakespeare Memorial Bust, Holy Trinity Church, Stratford.
From the Folger Shakespeare Library. Photograph by Julie Ainsworth.
Washington Irving, in a delightful phrase, expressed the necessity of “resolute good-humoured credulity” in the face of the flood of Shakespeare folklore to which he was exposed on his visit to Stratford in 1815. No doubt he would have enjoyed listening to the arguments about the Cobbe portrait in the same indulgent manner; more interested in the people presenting the arguments, and their manner of and reasons for doing so, than in the credibility of the statements. Henry James, in his short story, “The Birthplace,” clearly inspired by a visit to Stratford, had fun implying that the more extravagant were the stories his fictional custodian fed to the visitors to his unidentified “Birthplace,” the better it was for “the receipts.” But for those who wish to get as near to an accurate picture as one can after four hundred years, it is a disciplined approach to the evidence and the deductions which can reasonably be made which are the important issues. Interpretation may vary over time, the result not only of new evidence but of our changing views of driving forces within our own society; but arguments are still better put if based on evidence rather than on unprovable hunches.
(For the comments by Harris, Spurgeon, Irving, and James quoted here, see David Ellis, That Man Shakespeare [Hastings, UK: Helm Information, 2005]).
Response
Stanley Wells
I have been invited to respond to Dr. Bearman’s contribution to the Forum which I’m told anticipates his second, unsolicited review of Shakespeare Found!, which will appear in a later issue of Shakespeare Quarterly and which I have not been permitted to see. It is clear, however, that it will be hostile. Dr. Bearman states that the subject of the Cobbe portrait is “surely over-dressed, even for a successful playwright.” I have to ask whether Dr. Bearman knows the portraits of Shakespeare’s colleagues John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, which show them richly costumed. Moreover, Dr. Bearman appears to me to be underestimating Shakespeare’s social status in his late years when, Katherine Duncan-Jones argues in her recent book Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan (2011), he was strongly regarded as a candidate for a knighthood. Furthermore, Dr. Bearman states that “there is no evidence, other than Shakespeare’s dedication of two poems to him back in 1593/94, of any contact between” Shakespeare and Southampton. On a strictly documentary level this may be true, just as it is also true that, for instance, we have no documentary evidence that Shakespeare was ever even in the presence of his son, Hamnet. But the poems with the dedications went on being reprinted throughout Shakespeare’s lifetime and beyond; Southampton was a courtier and Shakespeare’s company performed frequently at court; moreover, the company was invited to perform Love’s Labor’s Lost at Southampton House in 1604.
Dr. Bearman’s attempt to place the Cobbe portrait in the context of the forged Shakespeare images that appeared from the eighteenth century onward ignores the fact that the multiplication of the image and its identification as Shakespeare date back long before then, to the early seventeenth century. I submit that the case for the authenticity of the Cobbe Portrait as a lifetime portrayal of Shakespeare is by no means weakened by Dr. Bearman’s repeated attempts, the last of which the editors have withheld from me, to demolish it.
Martin Droeshout. Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare. Engraving, 1623 (Detail). Shelfmark STC 22273 Fo.1 no.01.
Well-respected as an archivist and local historian, Bearman asks for art-historical evidence that is almost nonexistent for English portraits of this period. However, on matters relating to the history of art, I defer to my collaborator on both editions of Shakespeare Found!, the distinguished art historian Alastair Laing, Curator of Pictures and Sculpture for the (British) National Trust (who has been for many years responsible for the largest body of English portraits anywhere), who writes:
“It is rather invidious for Professor Stanley Wells to be asked to respond to a short article by Dr. Robert Bearman about the Cobbe Portrait of William Shakespeare, while being told that a fuller article, in the shape of a review, will be appearing in the summer. Dr. Bearman’s article has the appearance of a puff for his own review; it would surely be better for just the latter to be published, so that Professor Wells could respond systematically to every point in it, rather than to be made to make two responses; the first of which would be to what is only a partial statement of Dr. Bearman’s case.
“As coauthor of Shakespeare Found! I should be grateful if you would allow me to enter the lists on Professor Wells’s behalf, if you do go ahead with the publication of Dr. Bearman’s short article in the SQ Forum.
“The greatest weakness in Dr. Bearman’s arguments is that he assumes as a given that the Droeshout engraving and the bust in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, are ‘the two authentic images’ of Shakespeare, yet both are posthumous. I know of no other cases save, perhaps, those of Christ and of Antinous when a posthumous portrait is regarded as reliable evidence for a likeness, however much contemporaries, with the subject no longer there to act as a touchstone, may have averred that it was.
“That is the whole point of the Cobbe portrait: it is an ad vivum likeness, painted at the height of Shakespeare’s celebrity, and a little after the time when we have a statement clearly indicating that a portrait of the poet/playwright might have been available: ‘O sweet Mr Shakespeare! I’le have his Picture in my study at The courte’ (1 Return from Parnassus [1603]). It is also the fact that it is an ad vivum portrait that helps to account for the extraordinary number of near-contemporary versions of it (many more than of any of the other purported portraits of the man), at least three and probably five of which are of early seventeenth century date. The original of all these is the Cobbe portrait, although it was later identified as a portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh (perhaps because of the inscription warning against association with princes). This was actually a cryptic quotation associating the sitter with playwrights. The Dorchester copy has a label indicating it was believed to be Shakespeare by its mid-seventeenth-century owner; and the ‘Janssen’ copy (now in the Folger Library) has an inscription, which (although it may have been repainted at the time of an alteration to the picture) is perfectly credible and makes it a portrait of Shakespeare at the age of forty-six in 1610. This is also the earliest picture besides the Chandos portrait (now in the National Portrait Gallery, London) to be widely known as a portrait of Shakespeare.
The Janssen portrait. Oil on panel, early 1610s. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, USA.
“Not one of these was ever known as a portrait of Sir Thomas Overbury with whose portrait in the Bodleian Library there is an at first blush beguiling similarity, that does not stand up to closer analysis and it is still not clear why Sir David (‘Peter’) Piper should have claimed that the Ellenborough copy (acquired in 2010 by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) should have ever been called Overbury, when it never had been. Nor, despite the latter’s notorious murder, is there any reason to think that there would ever have been such a proliferation of portraits of him indeed, there is not a single copy of his undoubtedly authentic portrait in the Bodleian Library.
“Finally, Dr. Bearman’s dismissal of the carefully explained probable descent from the Earls of Southampton, through the Nortons, to Archbishop Cobbe, in the course of which it lost its true identity, as did the Cobbe portrait of the young third Earl (who became ‘Lady Norton’), is cursory, unargued, and illustrative of a failure to comprehend the afterlives of portraits in family collections.”
Shakespeare Quarterly Forum 
Although it is not central to his disagreement with Stanley Wells, Robert Bearman mentions Henry James’s 1903 story “The Birthplace,” saying James “had fun” with it. But “fun” hardly seems the right word for the tragic true story that lies behind James’s fiction. James wrote “The Birthplace” soon after he read the obituary of James Skipsey (1832-1903), and learned Skipsey had a breakdown after a few years of giving tours of Shakespeare’s alleged birthplace, when the authorship doubts of some visitors became too much for him. James’s own skepticism as to the traditional author is apparent in his 1907 introduction to The Tempest. He said “we are reduced to behaving as if we understood the strange case” of Shakespeare choosing the spend his final years in retirement from his writing career. James adds, “speaking for myself, its power to torment us intellectually seems scarcely to be borne.” If James had not written this introduction for a series edited by Sidney Lee, James might have been more direct with his authorship doubts.
I am delighted to learn that the ever-diligent Stanley Wells has already perused my new book, Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan, which has yet to receive reviews in the print media. I am horrified, however, by the distorted use he makes of the third chapter, “Poet and Gentleman.” I never say that Shakespeare “was strongly regarded as a candidate for a knighthood.” Rather, I assemble allusions suggesting that both Burbage and Shakespeare “were being spoken of as aspiring to knighthood,” but failed to receive such an honour, or even the lesser honour of “esquire.” For either man to permit himself to be portrayed as a nobleman when he was not one would be an appalling blunder.
Professor Duncan-Jones denies writing that Shakespeare ‘was strongly regarded as a candidate for a knighthood.’ Allow me to quote from her book: ‘In Chapter 3 I suggest that early in the reign of James 1 Shakespeare and his friend and colleague Richard Burbage were both being spoken of as likely to achieve some kind of honour, probably that of knighthood.’ (p. xi); ‘the company’s leading men, Shakespeare and Burbage, appear to have been considered for further honour and elevation [than that of being ‘assigned red cloth to wear as livery as royal servants.’] (p. 117;) ‘it appears that Shakespeare and Burbage … had been considered for some further advancement.’ (p. 121). I rest my case.
To support the contention that at some point in his career Shakespeare was considered for some form of social advancement, there is only inconclusive contemporary allusion. Shakespeare inherited the title of gentleman as the result of a grant of arms to his father, and died fifteen years later claiming for himself no higher status. There may have been gossip to the effect that he deserved better, but in fact he was never even admitted to the ranks of the squirearchy. It is therefore not unreasonable to expect that any depiction of him would reflect simple gentlemanly status – as indeed does his monument in Holy Trinity Church. This consideration was the prompt for my original comment that the subject of the Cobbe portrait might appear to be too well dressed to be Shakespeare.
Katherine Duncan-Jones (May 13, 2011) and Robert Bearman (June 17, 2011) write that Shakespeare was not admitted to the ‘squirearchy’ or to the ‘honour of “esquire” ’ and of the consequent impact they imagine this would have on his apparel. Their contentions are at odds with an opinion from the centre of learning on such matters, the College of Arms – namely that of Thomas Woodcock, Garter Principal King of Arms (private communication June 18, quoted with permission):
“Much has been written on the distinction between Esquire and Gentleman. Barristers for instance claimed to be Esquires but there was no formal admission ceremony and the idea that they would dress differently because of any technical difference in status is wrong. There has always been more social mobility in England than the rest of Europe and one’s appearance would be governed most by one’s wealth and the clothes you chose to wear.”
The facts in the matter are that by 1610 Shakespeare was wealthy, bore arms, and was a land-owning gentleman We know that his residence in Stratford, New Place, contained ten firepaces which indicates that it must have had around thirty rooms. In the Cobbe Portrait he wears a costume not very different from that delineated in the engraving by Martin Droeshout the Younger, the latter of which has been estimated by costume historians to have cost around £7000 in today’s money.
I didn’t expect anyone to interpret my earlier posting (17 June) as literally to imply that there was such a thing as formal admittance to the squirearchy, or that this would entitle a man who felt able to adopt such a style to wear distinctive clothing. But, leaving that aside, a more important, and interesting, line of enquiry, as Marc Broch recognises, would be to establish quite how wealthy Shakespeare was when he died. The loss of the inventory taken on his death is clearly a major obstacle to assessing this but we do at least know that he owned New Place and 107 acres of land and that he had a half-interest in a long lease of a portion of the Stratford tithes. He must, then, clearly have been thought a man of sufficient credit to have been able, until 1605 at least, to raise the considerable sums necessary for such investments. What this might have yielded in disposable income is, however, a different matter, bearing in mind that in the early years loans might have had to be repaid. But the fact that his daughters (after Hamnet’s death the effective heiresses to his estate) married, in their maturity, only the second son of a doctor and the third son of a mercer, suggests that they were not regarded as first-choice partners for the sons of land-owning gentry. The charge Shakespeare made on his estate as a marriage portion for his younger daughter (£150, on conditions, and a further £150 after three years) was also modest when set alongside similar provision by other Stratford gentry. Thomas Combe (died 1609) gave £100 to his wife and provided marrriage portions of £400 apiece for his two daughters, and one of £250 for a ‘daughter-in-law’, as well as arranging for the payment of annuities of £15 to each of his daughters and another of £30 to his younger son. His younger brother John Combe, who died two years before Shakespeare, charged his estate with well over £1,000 in bequests to relatives and friends, and set aside £60 for the erection of his tomb. Anthony Nash, who died in 1622, charged his estate with payments totalling over £1,000. Shakespeare’s monetary bequests are much smaller, totalling less than £400, including the modest £20 to his sister and £5 apiece to her three sons. Such comparisons suggest that, even in the context of Stratford’s local gentry, Shakespeare was by no means pre-eminent. This does, however, raise an interesting issue in connection with his monument in Holy Trinity Church. This may not depict him as anything grander than a local gentleman but, given that John Combe had set aside the very large sum of £60 for the erection of his own tomb, Shakespeare’s monument, though smaller, must also have involved a considerable outlay. This was not allowed for in his will: in fact, Shakspeare, unlike many fellow Stratford testators, particularly those of means, didn’t even specify burial in the churchyard, let alone in the church, merely committing his body ‘to the Earth’. But it does not automatically follow that his family came up with the money for the production and installation of the monument. Dugdale attributed the work to Gheerart Janssen, a member of the family of stonemasons whose workshop was in Southwark, not far from the Globe. Its ambiguous and unsatisfactory inscription could therefore be explained as the result of work commissioned by Shakespeare’s theatrical colleagues, carried out at a distance in the expectation, as suggested some years ago by Diana Price, that it would be placed over a recognisable tomb.
Stanley Wells, in his response to my posting about the Cobbe portrait, includes what appears to be a letter or email to him from Alastair Laing, one of the coauthors of Shakespeare Found!. I am not sure whether Mr Laing realised his communication would be posted in its entirety—it contains one or two unscholarly, not to say flippant remarks—but I am sure he will not mind my clarifying a statement which has the potential to mislead. He says that the “Dorchester” version of the Cobbe portrait “has a label indicating it was believed to be Shakespeare by its mid-seventeenth-century owner.” What it would be more helpful to have said is that the Dorchester bears a mid-nineteenth-century label describing it as a portrait of William Shakespeare and tracing its descent from the Marquess of Dorchester then the Duke of Kingston, then Kingston’s illegitimate son, Evelyn Cotton, then his nephew, R.R. Ward, and then the maternal grandfather of the man who wrote the label. One assumes that, if the attribution is known to have been made earlier, then this would have been mentioned in Shakespeare Found!. But, as it was not, one can only conclude that it cannot be documented earlier than the mid nineteenth century.
Some might take the view that this label hardly establishes beyond reasonable doubt the authenticity of the claims that are being made. But taking a charitable view of its accuracy, we should nevertheless endeavor to interpret what the label says in a dispassionate manner. The Duke of Kingston of the inscription must be Evelyn Pierrepont, 1712–73, who succeeded his grandfather, also Evelyn, in that title in 1726. Before becoming Duke of Kingston in 1715, Evelyn the elder had been made Marquess of Dorchester in 1706. One might therefore reasonably conclude that he was the former owner of the picture as given on the label. However, this time slot does not suit the authors of Shakespeare Found!, who argue instead that it must relate to an earlier Marquess of Dorchester, Henry Pierrepont, who died in 1680, thus allowing a claim to be put forward that it was “believed to be Shakespeare by its mid-seventeenth-century owner.” This is not impossible, but the earlier marquis died without male heirs, at which time the marquessate had become extinct. He is thus not the obvious candidate. And needless to say, there is no contemporary evidence that he did own the picture, let alone that he believed it to be Shakespeare.
However, the Dorchester is worthy of further study. Those familiar with the detail of this complicated story will know that it depicts the sitter as bald. This is also how the sitter was shown in the so-called Janssen version of the same painting, now owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library. In the 1770s, when this latter portrait surfaced, it was said to be Shakespeare. However, it was later found that the bald pate had in effect been painted over a full head of hair. Fraudulent intent was suspected, and in 1988 this overpainting was therefore removed and the Shakespeare claim abandoned. The date of the Dorchester, also depicting a bald subject, thus becomes of some importance. Even if it can only be pushed back to the early eighteenth century, it could still predate the resurfacing of the Folger copy and thus be used to strengthen the proposal—albeit hopeful—in Shakespeare Found! that the painting over of the hair on the Folger portrait was an early and genuine attempt to “improve” a known portrait of Shakespeare and that the alteration was not an attempt at forgery at all. On the other hand, as X-ray examination of the Dorchester is said to show that the subject was originally painted as bald, rather than converted to that state as the Folger copy certainly was, one might suspect deliberate artfulness. Either way, an examination by an independent expert would be a very worthwhile undertaking.
Mr Laing closes his communication with a dismissive remark about my summary treatment of the descent of the Cobbe portrait. If he is referring to the discussion of this in my review, to which readers are referred, I would not agree it is “cursory” and “unargued.”
I await an apology from Katherine Duncan-Jones. In the mean time Alastair Laing has asked me to post the following from him:
I wouldn’t want to bandy words with Dr. Bearman in a blog, but would prefer to await what one hopes will be more reasoned arguments in his forthcoming review of the revised edition of Shakespeare Found ! (even though the editors of the Shakespeare Quarterly do not admit letters in response to the articles or reviews in its pages). It might, however, be worth correcting one or two of his misapprehensions, to save him from perpetuating them in that.
Concerning 17th-century versions of the Cobbe portrait showing bald pates rather than the head of hair seen on the original, Dr Bearman seems at least to accept that the existence of these skews the idea that the alteration of the version in the Folger Shakespeare Library from one state to the other should have taken place at the end of the 18th century. However it is irrelevant whether each or any of them was painted bald from the start or altered from ‘hair-state’ to ‘bald-state’. The very fact that such versions of the Cobbe portrait were in currency during the 17th century is sufficient to cast doubt on the period generally ascribed to the change to the Folger picture.
It is, of course, of secondary interest to whom these 17th-century versions belonged, though the probable later provenance of one from David Garrick is noteworthy. However Dr Bearman has chosen to take issue with our account of the 19th-century provenance label on the reverse of another, the Dorchester version, which states that it first belonged to the ‘Marquess of Dorchester’. He accuses us of selecting the Marquess of Dorchester that ‘suits’ our ‘time slot’ and then goes on to make an implausible and unorthodox suggestion to suit his own; namely that ‘the Marquess of Dorchester’ should be taken to mean the 1st Duke of Kingston (who in 1706 had been previously made Marquess of Dorchester of the second creation before being elevated to Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull in 1715).
Far from suiting time slots, in our interpretation of the label we were advised and are supported by the eminent genealogist, Thomas Woodcock, Garter Principal King of Arms, whom we consulted during our research and who now dismisses Dr Bearman’s idea that a Duke of Kingston would be posthumously referred to in such a context solely as Marquess of Dorchester as ‘ridiculous and unthinkable’. Just as in cards, in which a King trumps a Queen, so, in peerage titles, the possessors of titles are always subsequently referred to by the ultimate and highest of them, save in the context of the discussion or narration of some event contemporary with the preceding and lower one. Such is evidently not the case with a label giving the provenance of a picture. The only Marquess of Dorchester to have been that, and nothing higher, was Henry Pierrepont, 2nd Earl of Kingston, who was created Marquess in 1645 and died in 1680; whose known interests also happen to make him very likely to have owned a portrait of Shakespeare because of its historical significance.
Thus the label recording the descent of the picture from the ‘Marquess of Dorchester’ could not possibly have meant the 1st Marquess of the second creation, a title he held from1706 until 1715 when he was elevated to Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull, as Dr Bearman suggests, any more than it could have meant the latter’s grandson (Marquess by courtesy title, for 11 years, from 1715 until 1726 when he succeeded as the 2nd Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull), who in any case is correctly referred to in the label as the last Duke of Kingston.
Dr Bearman further betrays his uncertain grasp of family descents and usage of titles by stating that the Marquess of Dorchester of the first creation died without male heirs. That is untrue; it was only Henry Pierrepont’s marquisate that was without a successor. The older earldom of Kingston, his other titles, and the anciently-held Pierrepont family properties at Holme Pierrepont and Thoresby devolved on Robert Pierrepont who was described in Henry’s will as his ‘deare’ [great] nephew, and who on Henry’s death became 3rd Earl of Kingston. The earldom and properties passed on through two of Robert’s brothers, the younger of whom, Evelyn Pierrepont, 5th Earl of Kingston, as we have seen, was successively created Marquess of Dorchester and Duke of Kingston.
Alastair Laing
Dr. Laing is right—Shakespeare Quarterly does not print letters in response to published essays or reviews. Instead, this Forum is designed to be an extension of the journal’s pages, precisely for disseminating letters and other comments. Readers of Shakespeare Quarterly are welcome to post comments here or on our Facebook page.
In discussing the provenance of the ‘Dorchester’ version of the Cobbe portrait, Alastair Laing appears to argue that I am questioning assertions by the authors of Shakespeare Found in order to advance a theory of my own. On the contrary, I have no position other than that of wishing to establish what may reasonably be deduced from the only material evidence currently before us, namely, the label on the reverse of the picture frame. This was written at least 150 years after the first event it records, or, in Mr Laing’s opinion, after some 200 years. Many attributions from the Victorian period have later been found to be inaccurate and this particular label dates from a time when doubtful Shakespearean claims were being made. Many would argue that in this case some earlier corroborative evidence is therefore necessary.
The label was written by Rowland German Buckston, 1828-1903, perhaps around 1875. His account of his forebears, back to his maternal grandfather, Richard Rowland Ward, and to Ward’s uncle, Evelyn Rowland Cotton (1742-1795) is easily substantiated and, as Ward was Cotton’s sole heir, and as it was Ward’s only child who married into the Buckston family, his note that the portrait descended via the same family members is therefore plausible. Before then, there are difficulties. According to the inscription, the portrait was given to Evelyn Cotton by his godfather, Evelyn Pierrepont, second Duke of Kingston. In the 1820s, the descent of the Cotton family estates was much debated in the courts due to the failure of the male line, and the evidence then produced does indeed confirm a close link between Evelyn Cotton’s father, William, and the colourful 2nd Duke of Kingston. The fact that Cotton’s son and the Duke bore the same Christian name clearly gave rise to talk that the Duke was the boy’s godson; and the latter’s proven baptism in 1742, at Cuckney, in Nottinghamshire, only a few miles from the Duke’s seat at Thoresby, provides further confirmation of this link between the two families at that time. The authors of Shakespeare Found, however, significantly up the stakes at this point by stating that the boy was also the Duke’s illegitimate son. They do not give their authority for this vital fact but, for the record, Evelyn was baptised as the child of William Cotton (as were his siblings over the period 1739-49) and the Duke made no mention of Evelyn Cotton in his will of 1770. Allegations of illegitimacy in the Cotton family did surface in the family dispute of the 1820s referred to above, focussing on whether Evelyn’s elder brother (born two years earlier and who had died a lunatic in 1819) was born before his parents had married.
But, whatever the truth behind these rumours, it is still a considerable step to assert, without the support of further material evidence, that the portrait must have come from the Duke of Kingston’s collection. It could as easily be argued that Buckston, fairly well briefed about the more recent family upset of the 1820s, but less well informed about the Cotton family’s connection with the Duke of Kingston some eighty years earlier, was merely weaving the Shakespeare portrait into a family tradition which linked his forebears with the nobility, a link which the label then explained extended back to the Marquess of Dorchester – either the Duke’s grandfather, who had enjoyed that title until 1715, before his creation as Duke of Kingston, or the previous Marquess (of the first creation) his great-great-great uncle who had died in 1680. Mr Laing takes issue with me for keeping the first option open on the grounds that Buckston would not have referred to a deceased member of the peerage by a superseded title. This might well have been the case if Buckston were referring to a man of whom he had direct knowledge; but surely it cannot automatically be assumed that the tradition he was recording so long after the event would reflect such niceties. And, in any case, as I was previously at pains to point out, even if we opt for the later Marquess (assuming, that is, we accept the portrait came from his family), this still puts a sufficiently early date on it to support the Shakespeare Found claim that a ‘bald-headed’ version of the Cobbe portrait was circulating well before other known examples.
One can, of course, with Mr Laing, still press for the alternative, that Buckston really did have in mind the earlier Marquess who had died in 1680. Mr Laing is right to point out that, though the Marquess had no surviving son to succeed him, his entailed estates, and his earlier title of Earl of Kingston, did pass to the descendants of his younger brother. Other effects might therefore also be thought to have followed a similar path. However, this is not easy to substantiate. The Marquess and his brother William had taken opposite sides in the Civil War and in post-Restoration politics. By 1680, when the Marquess made his will, William was dead as was his son Robert. The Marquess’s male heir was therefore his great-nephew, Robert’s eldest son, also Robert. The Marquess does include mention of Robert in his will but not as his heir, only (inaccurately) as one of three nephews; and, in common with other relatives on that side of the family, he simply received a routine and modest bequest of £50 – in contrast, for instance, to legacies of £100 and £80 to the Marquess’s two stewards, and the £500 which he set aside for his own funeral. The Marquess had already given his fine library to the Royal College of Physicians and all the rest of his moveable goods (his money, plate, jewellery and furnishings – rounded off with the phrase ‘and all other Goods and Chattels whatsoever and of what nature or kinde soever’) went to his unmarried daughter Grace. When she died, in 1703, the bulk of her estate was bequeathed to her nephews (sons of her sister) with nothing to the Earl of Kingston (by then Evelyn following the death of his two elder brothers without issue). In such circumstances, it is surely not safe to assume that, if the Marquess did have a portrait of Shakespeare in his possession, it would have passed along the route necessary for it to have reached that side of the family.
The label, on its own, thus provides little, in my view, to substantiate the possible transmission of the painting from earlier than the second half of the eighteenth century; and even if we accept that it had previously belonged to the Pierrepont family, there are particular difficulties in the way of claiming it had passed from the Marquess who had died in 1680 to the younger branch of the family. More material evidence may exist, for instance, to flesh out the intriguing relationship between William Cotton and the Duke of Kingston and to clarify the precise circumstances of Evelyn Cotton’s baptism; and the Cotton/Ward family dispute of the 1820s created a mass of documentation which may not as yet have been thoroughly investigated. But, again as I have already suggested, an examination of the painting itself by independent experts might prove of more direct assistance.
In sculpting both the death mask and the Cobbe portrait. I discovered that the death mask had to be manipulated to obtain the overall dimension of the Cobbe portrait. However this is consistent with early (and more recent death masks) which would A. suffer from the fact the target was lying down and flesh area would naturally fall back widening the face. 2 the actual mold would suffer some widening on its removal from the target. Overall as a sculptor experienced in the human face I believe that the two objects are likely to be the same person. Who that person is of course I leave to you guys.
Garrick Huscared Stratford
If I may, I’d be interested to know how Professor Wells and Mr. Laing would reconcile the sitter’s very youthful appearance (lack of baldness aside) with their claim that the portrait was executed when Shakespeare was 46.