New Possible Shakespeare Portrait Contains Allusions to Ovid and As You Like It

Portrait of a Gentleman, privately owned (photograph from Bridgeman Images website)

I came across this portrait while rummaging through the website called Bridgeman Images. It was dated in their catalogue c. 1600 by artist unknown. The first detail that caught my eye was the sitter's linen collar (with decorative sun-ray bands) of the same style Shakespeare wore in the authentic Droeshout engraving. The doublet is also similar to the Droeshout's except that the shoulder wings are wider. Then I noticed the banner on the tree behind the sitter, which, taken in context with the sitter's melancholy pose (unkempt collar and hair) inside a pastoral setting called to mind the comedy As You Like It. It was in the mid 1590s that Elizabethan writers took to posing in melancholy disarray, sometimes with their doublets unbutton and the bombast stuffing exposed at the belly.

The banner behind the sitter contains a Latin quote from Ovid's Tristea, "Bene Qui Latuit Bene Vixit." The catalogue entry translates this roughly into, "He who lived hidden lived well." Tristea was Ovid's epistolary lament from exile. We don't know why Ovid was banished by Augustus, although the reason might be hinted at in the epitaph Ovid wrote for himself inside that same poem: "I who lie here, sweet Ovid, poet of tender passions,/fell victim to my own sharp wit."

The portrait has seemingly been scamped with a mound of crude overpaint applied behind the sitter's head. 

Mound of overpainted behind sitter (photo from Bridgeman Image)

Portrait tweaked (lightened) in Photoshop. Note the high bangs, brushed upward with gum, are obscuring something white, perhaps a shield, that is not connected to the banner. There appears to be a rope extended down from our upper left perhaps supporting some sign of heraldry that has been extirpated. Photo from Bridgeman Images.

With all this in mind, this portrait would seem to depict a writer who has been sent into a woodland exile due to the satirical content of his works. Or perhaps it's simply a portrait of a writer who employed a pen name to write satire anonymously. But you get the idea.

The sitter's face and clothing fit (somewhat) into the Chandos group, the early copies of which are considered more valid than the original portrait, but it's hard to make much of the similarities. As far back as 1824, James Broaden called the Chandos "the perhaps most-touched up painting in history."

The Ovid portrait (right, c.1600, Bridgeman Images) and the beautiful Ozias Humphrey's copy of the Chandos (c. 1780, Folger Shakespeare Library). Note the similarities in collar down to the detail of the ties.

Intrigued by all this, I posted the above comparison onto the Facebook group ShakesVere--Edward de Vere, Shakespeare By Another Name, knowing they'd be interested in the portrait, and some insightful suggestions followed, the best of which (in my opinion) was the observation that the sitter bore a good resemblance to the "Wizard" earl Henry Percy, the 9th Earl of Northumberland. Percy was a patron to Kit Marlowe's at one point so we know he was active in the literary world. Percy was also fond of posing in literary disarray. The comparison below involved a posthumous painting of Percy and therefore might be meaningless.

Unknown Man (left, image via Bridgeman Images) and Henry Percy (right) the 9th Earl of Northumberland, as painted posthumously by van Dyck c. 1641 (Petworth House, image via wikicommons)

It was also suggested the portrait might depict Tom Nashe, a writer who exiled himself from London after his books were burned by Elizabeth I, but as there is only one nondescript cartoon of Nashe, shackled for his offenses against power, it is hard to know if this could be Nashe.

The perhaps larger point is that here we have visual evidence that Elizabethan writers were concealing their identities to protect themselves from the dire consequences of writing satires. One of the aspect I dislike most about the traditional view of Shakespeare is that it erases the courage he constantly demonstrated by satiring the most powerful players in Elizabeth's court. Whoever Shakespeare was he was fearless, but this side of his personality has been ridiculed by traditional scholars who can't explain how a backwoods actor straight out of Stratford got away with satiring power players like Burghley, Cecil, and Queen Elizabeth herself. They have erased his great courage from history.