LETTER OF THE MONTH
Mistaken identity?
The painting selected to illustrate William Shakespeare in the December issue (Encounters) is captioned: “A c1610 painting of William Shakespeare, kept in the Cobbe Collection, is thought to be the only portrait of the English playwright to have been taken from life.”
However, the Cobbe portrait (left) has never been proven to depict Shakespeare – and, in all likelihood, doesn’t. Research by Tarnya Cooper, former chief curator of the National Portrait Gallery, has shown that it is almost certainly a painting of the poet Sir Thomas Overbury, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s. Compare the Cobbe portrait to the portrait of Overbury by the Flemish painter Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger and there is very little doubt that they portray the same sitter.
The only confirmed portraits of Shakespeare that exist today are the Droeshout portrait, which appears in the First Folio, and the bust on his funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon. Even the famous Chandos portrait, which is more widely accepted to depict the bard, has never been definitively proven. However, the scarcely publicised Sanders portrait, which bears a contemporary label identifying the subject as a 39-year-old Shakespeare, has one of the best claims to being a painting of the playwright ‘taken from life’.
Frederick Clifford, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Napoleon: complex character...
Napoleon was not the 19th-century equivalent of the dictators who dominated the 20th (The Many Faces of Napoleon, Christmas). Although autocratic, he restored order after the chaos of the revolution without recourse to a police state, and laid the groundwork for a political system that has survived to today. He also showed toleration: when he occupied Malta in 1798, he abolished slavery and feudal privileges, while Jews were given equal rights to Christians.
His wars cost an immense number of lives, yet the vast majority of those conflicts were forced upon him by the monarchical states of Europe, who feared losing their privileges. Unlike those psychopaths Hitler and Stalin, he was a truly great military commander,
