And The Flower Portrait Of William Shakespeare Is Genuine After All

In her book 'The true face of William Shakespeare', critically acclaimed as a groundbreaking work, the renowned Shakespeare scholar Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel proved that there are four genuine likenesses of Shakespeare taken during his lifetime or immediately after his death, among them the Flower portrait (1609). When Dr Tarnya Cooper, a curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London, cast doubt on the authenticity of this picture, the author undertook a renewed comprehensive investigation of the Flower portrait, once again involving an array of international experts including a criminologist, an expert on Old Masters, a dermatologist, a radiologist, a conservator, a picture restorer, an expert on inscriptions, and another Shakespeare scholar. A joint inspection of the painting in the Royal Shakespeare Company's depository in Stratford-upon-Avon, and the analysis of the BBC film 'The Flower Portrait', demonstrate strong powers of observation and a thorough multidisciplinary approach, which make for a suspenseful read.

A darkly humorous and spellbinding detective story that chronicles one Mississippi man’s relentless search for an authentic portrait of William Shakespeare. Following his divorce, down-and-out writer and Mississippi exile Lee Durkee holed himself up in a Vermont fishing shack and fell prey to a decades-long obsession with Shakespearian portraiture. It began with a simple premise: despite the prevalence of popular portraits, no one really knows what Shakespeare looked like. That the Bard of Avon has gotten progressively handsomer in modern depictions seems only to reinforce this point. Stalking Shakespeare is Durkee’s fascinating memoir about a hobby gone awry, the 400-year-old myriad portraits attached to the famous playwright, and Durkee’s own unrelenting search for a lost picture of the Bard painted from real life. As Durkee becomes better at beguiling curators into testing their paintings with X-ray and infrared technologies, we get a front-row seat to the captivating mysteries—and unsolved murders—surrounding the various portraits rumored to depict Shakespeare. Whisking us backward in time through layers of paint and into the pages of obscure books on the Elizabethans, Durkee travels from Vermont to Tokyo to Mississippi to DC and ultimately to London to confront the stuffy curators forever protecting the Bard’s image. For his part, Durkee is the adversary they didn’t know they had—a self-described dilettante with nothing to lose, the “Dan Brown of English portraiture.” A lively, bizarre, and surprisingly moving blend of biography, art history, and madness, Stalking Shakespeare is as entertaining as it is rigorous and will forever change the way you look at one of history’s greatest cultural and literary icons.

Offers a convincing solution to the centuries-old problem of the appearance and identity of William Shakespeare and answers previously open questions concerning what made him abandon his celebrated career, and what may have caused his death.

Shakespeare and the Victorians explores the place of Shakespeare in Victorian culture, and shows how the plays and the man became central to all levels of Victorian life and thought.

Investigates the authenticity of the Chandos portrait and five others as true likenesses of playwright William Shakespeare, and explores Shakespeare's life and world, presenting and describing individual costumes, theater models, manuscripts, and maps from his time as well as portraits of his contemporaries.