What the “Shakespeare portrait” controversy can teach us about our relationship with reality

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is having the portrait of William Shakespeare removed from No. 10, according to various reports across the legacy media.

This has “sparked a backlash”according to the Evening Standard.

People on social media are asking “What does this mean?”

The Telegraph quoted former-Culture Secretary Sir Oliver Dowden:

The Prime Minister spent the election loudly proclaiming his patriotism, but now the election is over he’s succumbing to the usual Left-wing cringing embarrassment about our past […] Not content with removing Thatcher, Gladstone, Raleigh and Elizabeth I, he’s now consigning Shakespeare to the dustbin.

If you want my opinion – well, here it is…

The portrait was removed (or is said to have been removed) simply to create more fuel for the “Labour hates Britain” fire.

The “controversy” is  a psy-op designed to outrage those people who probably  don’t read Shakespeare but do read Tommy Robinson’s twitter account. It’s another irrelevant non-issue designed to get people screaming at each other in impotent rage.

Just garbage.

Of much much more interest is the portrait itself.

Firstly, it’s not exactly a painting of “William Shakespeare” the playwright.

It’s at absolute best a copy of a painting of Shakespeare, but in fact is quite unlikely to even be that.

It was painted circa 1758, around a hundred and fifty years after the author’s death, and is  a (bad) copy of the famous “Chandos Portrait” seen here:

…but the Chandos portrait probably isn’t of Shakespeare either.

Or at least it has zero provenance before 1719, and nobody knows exactly who painted it, when they painted it or who it’s intended to portray.

A note in the margin of a book owned by antiquary George Vertue, dated 1719, purports to give a brief history of the painting. It reads as follows (idiosyncratic spelling and random punctuation is in the original):

This note, written 103 years after Shakespeare is said to have died, is the ONLY provenance linking the portrait to him. The rest is “hearsay and assumption”, according to art historian Tarnya Cooper’s book on the subject:

The early history of the painting relies upon hearsay, half-remembered facts and assumptions”
Tarnya Cooper – Searching for Shakespeare, Yale University Press, 2006 (p 54)

And from  Wikipedia, emphasis added:

It has not been possible to determine with certainty who painted the portrait, or whether it really depicts Shakespeare.

None of its claims have been independently verified at this time. There is no evidence the painter John Taylor painted this picture. His will is extant and does not include any mention of a portrait of Shakespeare being left to sir William Davenant or anyone else (Cooper, ibid).

There is no hard evidence it was passed on from Davenant to a man called Baterton (or Betterton), no hard evidence it went from him to a man called Keyck (or Keck).

But even if we take this completely unsupported “provenance” as true it only leads us back to William Davenant. To describe this man as a somewhat unreliable narrator would be a profund understatement. He was in fact a “Shakespeare fantasist”, who claimed on different occasions, and on the basis of no evidence, to be William Shakespeare’s godson and/or his illegitimate  child.

Again, from Cooper’s “Searching for Shakespeare” (p.55, emphasis added):

There are a number of unanswered questions that make us want to challenge the chain of events recorded by Vertue. For example, who decided this particular picture was a portrait of Shakespeare, and not another fashionable Jacobean urban dweller? William Davenant [who] was known to embroider upon his association with Shakespeare.

So even if “Sir Will. Davenent” did once own this picture and claim it was a portrait of his “godfather/dear old dad”, that does little to nothing to validate it as a genuine artefact.

In a rational world that really should be the end of it shouldn’t it?

Very bad picture of unidentified man with no provenance is worth nothing evidentially and must be dismissed out of hand unless or until some further provenance emerges.

Oh but hold on there. You’re forgetting something way more important than facts and reason.

You’re forgetting the urgent and irresistible need to believe…

You know that lovely warm cozy feeling you get when you decide those pesky facts don’t matter any more, because you just don’t want them to.

The National Portrait Gallery know that feeling well. They think it’s “certainly fairly likely” that completely anonymous, unsourced uncorroborated picture does depict the Bard.

Why? Well, the subject is about the “right age” (though how you determine that without knowing when the portrait was painted is hard to ascertain), might resemble other paintings alleged to be the Bard and…

In 2006, art historian Tarnya Cooper of the National Portrait Gallery completed a three-and-a-half-year study of portraits purported to be of Shakespeare and concluded that the Chandos portrait was most likely a representation of Shakespeare. Cooper points to the earring and the loose shirt-ties of the sitter, which were emblematic of poets

Forget the total absence of any evidence whatsoever. Wipe that from your mind. The sitter’s totally subjective age, his earring  and those loose shirt-ties  are all we need to tell us it’s “most likely” Shakespeare after all!

Because how many non-poets  aged somewhere in their 30s or 40s EVER wore earrings or loose shirt-ties? I would guess NONE!

And if he must be a poet – well then he’s probably THE poet – Shakespeare

Deductive reasoning at its finest.

Most curious and telling might be that the Tarnya Cooper who makes these strained claims for the authenticity of this picture is the same Tarnya Cooper we quote above, making  the eloquent point that it is entirely unauthenticated!

She points out the “hearsay and assumptions”, the “unanswered questions” and that a key witness has a history of “embroidering his association with Shakespeare” and then concludes the painting is  “certainly fairly likely” authentic…because of the earring.

Welcome to the world of Shakespearian history, where a little fact goes a very long way and “allegedly”, “may have”, “probably”, and “could be” do serious power-lifting as a matter of course.

The final level of strangeness is the same thing that overlays all discussion of Shakespeare – the meta-weirdness of “the authorship question”.

There is good evidence to suggest “William Shaksper, the man from Stratford” and “Shakespeare the playwright” were not the same person, and the name “Shakespeare” was  a pen-name for someone else (or multiple people).

So, when analysts discuss the sitter “appearing to be the right age” because Shakespeare was 36-46 when this painting was supposedly painted, they could well be talking about entirely the wrong person anyway.

In summary, for those keeping score at home, the painting everyone is so upset about:

Is a later copy of an earlier work…

…that has no reliable provenance…

…and was painted by an unknown artist…

…at an unproven time…

…for an unknown patron…

…of an unnamed subject.

We’re so many layers deep in speculation and doubt and articles of belief that the truth has long vanished over the horizon.

And to top it all off, the whole story about Starmer having the painting taken down might just have been made up to annoy people.

To return to an earlier question: What does this mean?

Absolutely nothing.

That kind of thing is just interesting to me.