Shakespeare first folio portrait12/13/2023 ![]() ![]() The Folio Shakespeare portrait as a whole consists, then, of a bad(ly) copied head, and, under it, an ungainly body apparently supplied by Droeshout himself. The body takes up a good half of the picture, and yet conveys no information: the dark clothes are without ornamentation or jewellery and the arms do not extend to hands, so cannot display rings or hold tools of the craft – pens, books, actors’ parts. It gives Shakespeare massive upper arms and shoulders that edge so far under the rebato (the starched collar used to protect clothes and highlight the face) that there is barely or no neck, hinting at Shakespeare’s future as a Bobblehead toy. Containing no points of light at all, it seems to have an entirely different origin from the face. The lower half of the picture has different problems. Was the portrait behind the picture itself unflattering, perhaps showing Shakespeare when he was ill? Or were the spots of light Droeshout’s early, unsuccessful, experiments with visual contrast? Droeshout’s engraving will have been based on a portrait, as was usual at the time (he was fifteen when Shakespeare died and is unlikely ever to have seen his subject). But that hardly explains why Shakespeare’s face is so … damp, light pooling on a sweaty spot on the bald upper temple, a shiny crevice under the left eye, the greasy sheen along the length of the nose, a dot of moisture on the lower lip. An engraving by Martin Droeshout, it may well be apprentice work (Droeshout was twenty-two when the Folio was printed and was perhaps still learning his trade). The question of which Martin Droeshout did the engraving of Shakespeare remained unresolved until 2007 when, in an essay in.Let’s start with the above picture. Schuckman's reproductions of several of these alongside Droeshout's English prints suggested that all the copperplate engravings were by the same hand-a hand he assumed was that of Martin Droeshout the younger. But she was apparently unaware of an essay published a few months before hers in Print Quarterly entitled "The Engraver of the First Folio Portrait of William Shakespeare." In it, Christiaan Schuckman reported his discovery in Madrid of a dozen engravings by Martin Droeswood. In the course of her research in London, Edmond uncovered valuable information on the Droeshouts. Moreover, she observed, "there is absolutely no positive evidence that the younger Droeshout ever practiced as an engraver." (3) But given the younger man's age at the time of the Folio publication-just 22-she thought it improbable that it was he. Until then, the assumption had been that it was the younger Martin Droeshout, the elder's nephew, who was born in London in 1601. In "It was for gentle Shakespeare cut," she argued that Martin Droeshout the elder, a member of the Painter-Stainers' guild in London and John and Mary's son, was responsible for the engraving. In 1991, Mary Edmond published what might have been the definitive work on the Folio engraving. And it proposes a scenario that could account for the "artist's ineptitude." While such research, along with new findings presented in this paper, does not definitively respond to Schoenbaum's question of why the young Martin was given the commission, it does secure Martin Droeshout's place within the early modern artistic world, thus moving us closer to understanding how he could have come to engrave the Folio Shakespeare. But since 1991, research has uncovered information on three generations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Droeshouts, one of whom-John (Jan/ Hans) Droeshout-left the Low Countries with his wife Mary (Mayken) De Looze and emigrated to London. In 1970, when Schoenbaum offered his remarks, we knew little about Martin Droeshout, and much of what we thought we knew was erroneous. What could one expect, Schoenbaum asks, of this "clumsy, third-rate engraver": the defects of the engraving are "all too gross" and can only be ascribed to the "artist's ineptitude." Schoenbaum expresses his bewilderment: "How young Martin, who was only twenty-two when the First Folio appeared, secured a commission to furnish the portrait to adorn that momentous volume we do not know." (2) Schoenbaum's description of Martin Droeshout's engraving of Shakespeare that fronts the 1623 First Folio could hardly be less charitable. , creating] an odd crescent under the right eye. Light comes from several directions simultaneously: it falls on the bulbous protuberance of forehead. The mouth is too far to the right, the left eye lower and larger than the right, the hair on the two sides fails to balance. A huge head, placed against a starched ruff, surmounts an absurdly small tunic with oversized shoulder-wings.
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