LONDON — The Bard, or not the Bard? That is the question posed by the unveiling Monday of a centuries-old portrait of a dark-eyed, handsome man in Elizabethan finery.
Experts say it is the only portrait of William Shakespeare painted during his lifetime — in effect, the sole source of our knowledge of what the great man looked like.
But they can’t be certain. In the shifting sands of Shakespeare scholarship, where even the authorship of the plays is sometimes disputed, nothing is written in stone.
“We’re 90 percent sure that it’s Shakespeare,” said Paul Edmondson, director of learning at the Shakespeare Learning Trust, which plans to exhibit the portrait in Stratford-on-Avon. “You’ll never be entirely certain. There will always be voices of dissent.”
The portrait has been in private hands for several centuries but the owners — the Cobbe family — had no idea who the man in the painting was.
All that changed three years ago, Edmondson said, when one of the Cobbes (he won’t say which one) walked into the National Portrait Gallery in London’s Trafalgar Square to see a traveling exhibit called “Searching for Shakespeare.”
One of the first things he saw was a famous portrait of the Bard that usually hangs in the renowned Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.
“His jaw dropped,” Edmondson said. “He realized he had one at home. And the one he had at home turned out to be the original.”
