Stephanie Nolen: Shakespeare's Face

By MARGIE THOMSON

For 400 years or so, the Sanders family believed, they had owned a marvellous thing: a painting of Shakespeare, done by one of their ancestors while the great Bard was still alive, with "AN 1603" written in red paint in the top right-hand corner of the work.

An ancient note on the back (illegible now, but its message recorded by an art expert in 1908) declared that this was indeed "Shakspere, born April 23, 1564, died April 23, 1616, aged 52. This likeness taken 1603. Age at that time 39 ys".

Down the ages the painting travelled, ending up in Ottawa, Canada, wrapped in brown paper, under the bed of Agnes Hales-Sanders, the grandmother of Lloyd Sullivan who, on his retirement in 1991, decided at last to investigate the history of this family heirloom, and to prove that it really was a picture of Shakespeare. What better place to start than by comparing it to other life-portraits of the man?

He was astonished to find that they do not exist - "Shakespeare was indeed the man who invented us but did not leave us a record of his face," as the critic Harold Bloom has lamented.

For all his fame, the only images we have of Shakespeare were prepared after his death: the famous engraving by Martin Droeshout, who almost certainly never met Shakespeare, printed on the title page of the First Folio of 1623 (long nose, deep-set eyes, fine-arched brows, stiff white collar); and the memorial bust above Shakespeare's grave in Stratford-upon-Avon, carved by Geraert Janssen, who may or may not have seen Shakespeare and who perhaps worked from the same model as Droeshout.

A painting done in his lifetime, therefore, would be of almost inestimable value - and it's no surprise that Sullivan next discovered a robust history of forgers of portraits of Shakespeare, most of which have been discredited, with only two - the "Flower" and the "Chandos" - not having been. Doubts, however, remain about both.

Sullivan began the long, slow (and impossibly expensive) process of verifying the painting and his family's ownership of it, but then, in May 2001, he was overtaken by fate in the form of the daughter of a neighbour, a reporter for the Toronto Globe and Mail, Stephanie Nolen.

Nolen was chatting to her mother when her mother mentioned her neighbour Lloyd Sullivan "who's got this picture ... " Mrs Nolen ended her recount by saying: "I thought it might make a good story."

A couple of weeks later Stephanie Nolen got on to it, not really expecting anything, and to her surprise found herself on the edge of such an excellent story that, when the Globe published it a couple of days later (her editor so excited he kept bringing her deadline forward until she had a mere couple of hours to write her piece) as a front-page article with a huge headline and half-page picture, it made headlines from New York to Beijing.

Shakespeare's Face is Nolen's subsequent attempt to make sense of this painting, the arcane worlds of Shakespearean scholarship and debate (did Will Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon even write those plays, for instance; and, why would Shakespeare have chosen 1603 as a good time to have a portrait painted?) and the art world, of Shakespeare himself, his life, times and meaning to us.

Nolen plays the role of host to a panel of experts who each contribute chapters alternating with her own.

It's a wonderful technique for a book like this, giving readers access to experts who speak in their own voices (some very technical, but never impenetrable), yet managed by Nolen into a sense of story that moves ever forward.

She's not afraid of contending viewpoints, and is happy to incorporate disparate views and opinions as part of her overall story.

Those looking for a neat ending must go elsewhere; yet there is a strong body of opinion that enduring mystery is no bad thing where Shakespeare is concerned. Maddeningly elusive he may be - "Infuriatingly, whenever Shakespeare does something other than buy a lease or write a play, history shuts her jaws with a snap," grumbled Anthony Burgess in his Shakespeare biography - but at least we can believe what we want and are not disappointed as, say, Keats was when he met the pompous and egotistical Wordsworth.

An astonishingly thrilling read, the tension of Shakespeare's Face mounts as Sullivan's painting is subjected to more and more physical tests - by a dendochronologist, to authenticate the age of the oak board on which the portrait is painted, by counting tree rings in the wood; by x-ray; by chemical analysis; by fluorescent and infra-red photography; by carbon-dating the linen rag paper of the label on the back - and the painting is revealed as utterly authentic in terms of its age, and untouched by more recent forgers' brushes.

But the questions remain: is it Shakespeare? And does the family's story, of it having been painted by their ancestor John Sanders, stand scrutiny? To these, the answers remain, as one reviewer has noted, "a resounding 'maybe"'.

What strikes almost everyone who looks at this painting, known as "the Sanders", is how alive, how engaging, intelligent, emotionally expressive is this sitter, whoever he may have been.

I for one was keenly aware of wanting this man to be Shakespeare - he is so much more appealing than the more familiar contender, that middle-class burgher in the severe white ruff.

"Every age gets the Shakespeare it wants," comments one of Nolen's contributing experts, professor of English at Harvard University Marjorie Garber, and there are many reasons why we should want to believe this painting is indeed of "the god of our idolatry", as Shakespeare was described in 1769.

Romance is a big factor - the desire for "a new Bardic heart-throb" the equal or more of Ralph Fiennes - and because, actually, this one looks as if he could have had the delight in life, the passion, mischief and humanity to have written the works that have become beloved the world over. "There's a poet in that face," as one observer approvingly noted after the painting went on display in June 2001 at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

As Nolen says, the search for provenance goes on and may yet turn up some answers. I hope the researchers pursue the line of thinking raised by Jonathan Bate of the University of Liverpool - that it is the victim of a kind of "Chinese whispers" process and, while authentically of the period, is perhaps of someone else connected with the early-17th-century theatre world, perhaps Shakespeare's more youthful collaborator John Fletcher. Whatever the outcome, it's a great story. Highly recommended.

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