Droeshout (or Drossaert or Drussoit, as he was sometimes known in his own time) is nearly always described as being from a family of Flemish artists, though in fact the Droeshouts had been in England for sixty years and three generations by the time Martin came along. Peter W.M. Blayney, the leading authority on the First Folio, has suggested that Droeshout, who was in his early twenties and not very experienced when he executed the work, may have won the commission not because he was an accomplished artist but because he owned the right piece of equipment: a rolling press of the type needed for copperplate engravings. Few artists had such a device in the 1620s.
Despite its many shortcomings, the engraving comes with a poetic endorsement from Ben Jonson, who says of it in his memorial to Shakespeare in the First Folio:
O, could he but have drawne his wit
As well in brasse, as he hath hit
His face, the Print would then surpasse
All that was ever writ in brasse.
It has been suggested, with some plausibility, that Jonson may not actually have seen the Droeshout engraving before penning his generous lines. What is certain is that the Droeshout portrait was not done from life: Shakespeare had been dead for seven years by the time of the First Folio.
That leaves us with just one other possible likeness: the painted, life-size statue that forms the centrepiece of a wall monument to Shakespeare at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he is buried. Like the Droeshout it is an indifferent piece of work artistically, but it does have the merit of having been seen and presumably passed as satisfactory by people who knew Shakespeare. It was executed by a mason named Gheerart Janssen, and installed in the chancel of the church by 1623 – the same year as Droeshout’s portrait. Janssen lived and worked near the Globe Theatre in Southwark in London, and thus may well have seen Shakespeare in life – though one rather hopes not, as the Shakespeare he portrays is a puffy-faced, self-satisfied figure, with (as Mark Twain memorably put it) the ‘deep, deep, subtle, subtle expression of a bladder’.
We don’t know exactly what the effigy looked like originally, because in 1749 the colours of its paintwork were ‘refreshed’ by some anonymous but well-meaning soul. Twenty-four years later, the Shakespeare scholar Edmond Malone, visiting the church, was horrified to find the bust painted, and ordered the churchwardens to have it whitewashed, returning it to what he wrongly assumed was its original state. By the time it was repainted again years later, no one had any idea of what colours to apply. The matter is of consequence because the paint gives the portrait not just colour but definition, as much of the detail is not carved on but painted. Under whitewash it must have looked rather like those featureless mannequins once commonly used to display hats in shop windows.
So we are in the curious position with William Shakespeare of having three likenesses from which all others are derived: two that aren’t very good by artists working years after his death, and one that is rather more compelling as a portrait but that may well be of someone else altogether. The paradoxical consequence is that we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don’t really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: he is at once the best known and least known of figures.
More than two hundred years ago, in a sentiment much repeated ever since, the historian George Steevens observed that all we know of William Shakespeare is contained within a few scanty facts: that he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, produced a family there, went to London, became an actor and writer, returned to Stratford, made a will, and died. That wasn’t quite true then and it is even less so now, but it is not all that far from the truth either.
After four hundred years of dedicated hunting, researchers have found about a hundred documents relating to William Shakespeare and his immediate family – baptismal records, title deeds, tax certificates, marriage bonds, writs of attachment, court records (many court records – it was a litigious age) and so on. That’s quite a good number as these things go, but deeds and bonds and other records are inevitably bloodless. They tell us a great deal about the business of a person’s life, but almost nothing about the emotions of it.
In consequence there remains an enormous amount that we don’t know about William Shakespeare, much of it of a fundamental nature. We don’t know, for one thing, exactly how many plays he wrote or in what order he wrote them. We can deduce something of what he read, but don’t know where he got the books or what he did with them when he had finished with them.
Although he left nearly a million words of text, we have just fourteen words in his own hand – his name signed six times and the words ‘by me’ on his will. Not a single note or letter or page of manuscript survives. (Some authorities believe that a section of the play Sir Thomas More, which was never performed, is in Shakespeare’s hand, but that is far from certain.) We have no written description of him penned in his own lifetime. The first textual portrait – ‘he was a handsome, well-shap’t man: very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant smooth witt’ – was written sixty-four years after his death by a man, John Aubrey, who was born ten years after that death.
Shakespeare seems to have been the mildest of fellows, and yet the earliest written account we have of him is an attack on his character by a fellow artist. He appears to many biographers to have spurned his wife – famously he left her only his second-best bed in his will, and that as an apparent afterthought – and yet no one wrote more highly, more devotedly, more beamingly, of love and the twining of kindred souls.
We are not sure how best to spell his name – but then neither, it appears, was he, for the name is never spelled the same way twice in the signatures that survive. (They read as ‘Willm Shaksp’, ‘William Shakespe’, ‘Wm Shakspe’, ‘William Shakspere’, ‘Willm Shakspere’ and ‘William Shakspeare’. Curiously, one spelling he didn’t use was the one now universally attached to his name.) Nor can we be entirely confident how he pronounced his name. Helge Kökeritz, author of the definitive Shakespeare’s Pronunciation, thought it possible that Shakespeare said it with a short a, as in ‘shack’. It may have been spoken one way in Stratford and another in London, or he may have been as variable with the pronunciation as he was with the spelling.
We don’t know if he ever left England. We don’t know who his principal companions were or how he amused himself. His sexuality is an irreconcilable mystery. On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was. We have no record at all of his whereabouts for the eight critical years when he left his wife and three young children in Stratford and became, with almost impossible swiftness, a successful playwright in London. By the time he is first mentioned in print as a playwright, in 1592, his life was already more than half over.
For the rest, he is a kind of literary equivalent of an electron – forever there and not there.
To understand why we know as little as we do of William Shakespeare’s life, and what hope we have of knowing more, I went one day to the Public Record Office – now known as the National Archives – at Kew, in west London. There I met David Thomas, a compact, cheerful, soft-spoken man with grey hair, the senior archivist. When I arrived, Thomas was hefting a large, ungainly bound mass of documents – an Exchequer memoranda roll from the Hilary (or winter) term of 1570 – onto a long table in his office. A thousand pages of sheepskin parchment, loosely bound and with no two sheets quite matching, it was an unwieldy load requiring both arms to carry. ‘In some ways the records are extremely good,’ Thomas told me. ‘Sheepskin is a marvellously durable medium, though it has to be treated with some care. Whereas ink soaks into the fibres on paper, on sheepskin it stays on the surface, rather like chalk on a blackboard, and so can be rubbed away comparatively