Oxford University, Edward de Vere, and the Stratford Bust: Is This the Smoking Gun of Shakespeare Studies?

Above left: The Welbeck portrait of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (owned by Welbeck Abbey, image from Wikicommons). Above right: the Hunt or Stratford portrait of Shakespeare (owned by Stratford Birthplace Trust, public domain photograph from 1864).

This post picks up where my book STALKING SHAKESPEARE leaves off following its chapter on why the Hunt portrait of Shakespeare has a strong claim to Shakespeare ad vivum (painted from life) and was quite likely the template portrait used to create the iconic bust of Shakespeare in Trinity Church.

Above: the Stratford bust next to the Hunt portrait of William Shakespeare (both photos from Friswell's 1864 Life Portraits of William Shakespeare). In both likenesses Shakespeare is wearing a red jerkin beneath a black robe. No scholar as ever disputed the connection between the two artworks, but which came first?

STALKING SHAKESPEARE is not an authorship book. It's a memoir about my unruly obsession with identifying unknown courtiers in Elizabethan and Jacobean portraits. But the book does delve into the authorship debate whenever that controversy overlaps my portrait obsession (such as with the infamous Ashbourne portrait of Shakespeare) and I do my best to remain a neutral.

The Hunt portrait of Shakespeare is fascinating beyond measure and plagued with telltales scandals--for example, the portrait was discovered in a Stratford attic in the mid-19th century purposely disguised so as not to resemble Shakespeare; yet when cleaned with solvents the portrait turned out to be the spitting image of the famous town bust. No scholar has ever disputed the intimate connection between the portrait and the bust, which leaves us with two logical scenarios: either the portrait was used to create the bust or the bust was used to create the portrait. 

STALKING SHAKESPEARE takes up the claim by 19th century scholars that the portrait came first and was used to create the bust, and my book also argues the Hunt portrait needs to be tested by its owners at the Stratford Birthplace Trust. Because of their neglect, we don't know how old the portrait is or what lies beneath its overpaint (and we know via multiple expert testimony that the picture was immediately altered after its discovery, although we don't know why or to what degree it was altered). As to its age, the portrait descended from the aristocratic Clopton family collection in Stratford and had been stored in the Hunt family attic for at least a hundred years when it was discovered in 1860.

Now let's return to the famous bust at Trinity Church and ask ourselves whether or not that bust could be a tribute to Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford?

We know that the traditional Shakespeare of Stratford (the businessman/actor) was not a college-educated man and that there's no record of him even attending the local grammar school in Stratford. With that in mind, it's interesting that a traditional scholar is now conceding that the Stratford bust (and by extension the Hunt portrait) depicts Shakespeare wearing an Oxford University gown.

Lena Cowen Orlin, a professor at Georgetown University, has made this argument inside the pages of The Guardian that states:

The figure is wearing an Oxford University undergraduate’s gown, and the cushion detail is found in monuments memorialising lives of distinction in its college chapels.

She [Orlin] said the fact that he [Shakespeare] wanted to be memorialised with links to the university – despite never going to university himself – “now suggests some collegial association that we don’t know about”.

I'm not sure Orlin's logic holds up in the second paragraph, but the important point is that Shakespeare was immortalized wearing an Oxford gown when we know--and Orlin concedes this--that the traditional author did not attend Oxford. This is quite the monkey wrench tossed into the traditional narrative.

The first question that arises is why did it take centuries for scholars to figure out Shakespeare was wearing a gown that attached him to Oxford University? I would suggest that confirmation bias played a large role, which might also explain why this revelation came out of an American university instead of one in England such as, well, hmm, Oxford.

Edward de Vere, long rumored to have written the works of Shakespeare, did in fact attend Oxford University (hardly surprising for the 17th Earl of Oxford). Clearly the last thing traditional scholars want to do is connect their iconic bust to that infamous earl they despise.

But there's another type of confirmation bias at work here, I suspect, and this one can be found rooted inside the de Vere authorship camp which seems hellbent on denying any connection between their hidden author (de Vere) and the two most famous likenesses of Shakespeare: the Stratford bust at Trinity Church and the Droeshout engraving from Shakespeare's 1623 First Folio. The de Vereians vehemently want those two iconic likenesses to be red-herring representations of the actor/businessman they believe was used as a mask for the the real Shakespeare.

By contrast I think, within the Oxfordian framework, it begs to be argued that one or both of these two traditional likenesses (the bust and the engraving) were created, as much as possible within imposed limitations, to celebrate Edward de Vere. The physical similarities in the photographic comparison at the top of this post seems to my eye more than coincidental and raise questions that are never going to be answered as long as both camps keep their religious blinders on. 

If I were an Oxfordian, the question I'd be asking right now is: has Shakespeare been hidden from us in plain sight?   

Related links:

https://lostshakespeareportraits.blogspot.com/2019/10/a-curious-portrait-of-man-stabbed-57.html

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/mar/19/shakespeare-grave-effigy-believed-to-be-definitive-likeness 

Note: all photographs in this post are used for identification purposes under Fair Use laws. I apologize for not using a color photograph of the Hunt portrait, but the Stratford Birthplace Trust does not make these available.

 

The Vertue Stratford Bust of William Shakespeare Remains a Beautiful Mystery

Drawing of the Stratford bust in 1734 by George Vertue (Folger Shakespeare Library)

Politicworm has posted an excellent article concerning the antiquarian George Vertue and his strange relationship with Shakespeare portraits. In it, the author argues that Vertue was involved in a plot to sabotage the traditional image of Shakespeare and replace it with another likeness. I can't say whether that's true or not, but it does seem clear Vertue had an active interest in all things Shakespeare, and there's no doubting his authority.

Above is one of my all time favorite renderings of Shakespeare. Vertue drew the Stratford bust in profile inside Stratford's Trinity Church around 1734. This seems odd when you consider that the Stratford bust today looks nothing like this sitter, and in fact this portrait would seem to be based on the Chandos portrait (NPG1) or any number of the very Jewish-looking Shakespeare candidates portraits kept at the Folger Shakespeare Library.  

How did the highly respected Vertue wander into Trinity Church and emerge with this drawing? To even understand this mystery you have to explore the history of hijinks related to the Stratford bust, including the many accusations the original bust was switched or stolen or broken and repaired.   

We know that the Stratford bust was sketched as early as 1636, some 20 years after Shakespeare’s demise, by the antiquarian William Dugdale. When this sketch was later engraved by Hollar for publication in Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), another debate was born, one I will not much dwell on here (an entire book could be filled with its particulars). Suffice to say, the sitter of the Hollar engraving (and two subsequent engravings by other artists) did not at all resemble the bust said to be Shakespeare currently worshiped at Trinity Church.

In 1918 the scholar Charlotte Stopes was the first to point out that either the Dugdale-Hollar representation was incorrect or the bust had been radically modified or replaced.  The battle ranged on, but it wasn’t until 1997 that Diana Price’s article “Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Monument,” offered an intelligent counterargument by stating that 17th century antiquarians were not literalists. I'm not sure I buy that theory, but it's worth considering. 

In 1748 the Stratford schoolmaster Reverend Joseph Greene, who had recently signed as a witness to the planned renovation of the Stratford monument, stole into the chancel with a cohort and made a plaster mould of the bust.  Twenty-five years later Greene confessed his crime while arranging to ship the stolen mould to his brother.  

"In the year 1748 the Original Monument of Shakespeare in the Chancel of Stratford Church was [to be] repair’d & beautifi’d; as I previously consider’d that when that work should be finish’d no money or favour would procure what I wanted, namely a mould from the carv’d face of the Poet; I therefore, with a Confederate, about a month before the intended reparation, took a good Mould in plaster of Paris from the Carving, which I now have by me . . ."

After shipping the stolen mould, which has since been lost, Greene then penned an even stranger letter to his brother in which he disparaged the Shakespeare monument at Westminster and introduced a new player to this drama, Methuselah: 
 
"I think a bust from the Original Monument, as your is [the stolen one], must be much more valuable & satisfactory, than one from his pompous Caenotaph in Westminster Abbey; which . . . though in a venerable & majestic attitude, is more likely to represent Methuselah, than our Poet, who died at the age of 53."
 
Methuselah was Noah’s grandfather who the Torah assures us died at age 969. The Westminster statue portrayed Methuselah, Greene wrote, whereas “our poet” was immortalized in the mould stolen from Stratford, begging the question: did Greene steal his mould because he suspected the Stratford bust was about to be transformed too?

 Good luck solving those mysteries.