The playwright is portrayed in a 3.5-inch-tall drawing as a young, bearded and mustachioed man. Wearing a Roman dress and laurels in his curly hair, he holds an ear of sweetcorn in one hand and a fritillary, a flower of the lily family, in the other.
Detailed in the U.K.’s Country Life magazine, the controversial claim is based on a five-year investigation by botanist Mark Griffiths that echoes a Dan Brown novel.
“Griffiths cracked a many-layered Tudor code and revealed the living face of Shakespeare for the first time on the title page of 'The Herball' by John Gerard, a 16th-century book on plants, 400 years after it was first published,” Country Life said in a statement.
A 1,484-page volume, the "Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes" was the largest single volume work on plants published in English in 1597. On the title page it features an elaborate engraving by William Rogers showing four male figures amid heraldic motifs and emblematic flowers.
The four figures shown in the engraving were long thought to have been imaginary, but according to Griffiths, they are real people who had been involved in the creation of the book.
Decoding symbolic plants and heraldic motifs surrounding the figures, Griffiths identified three of them as Gerard himself, renowned Flemish botanist Rembert Dodoens and Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley. The three appear to be somewhat related as Dodoens was a source of inspiration to Gerard, who gardened for Burghley.
Griffiths was left with the fourth figure.
“He was dressed as a Roman and appeared to have something to do with poetry,” he said.
He noted the man carries a fritillary and an ear of sweetcorn -- a reference to Shakespeare’s poem Venus and Adonis, published in 1593, and the 1594 play Titus Andronicus. The laurel wreath is said to point to Apollo and the classical poets he inspired.
Griffiths noted that the bearded man is standing on a statue base marked with a code.
“It is coded in the style of clever men of the time but it says ‘William Shakespeare,’” he said.
But why would Shakespeare be portrayed in a botany book?
Griffiths believes the Bard was helped in his literary career by Burghley, the most powerful man in the country, and in his turn helped Gerard with Greek and Latin translations in the book. So the four figures would all be linked.
“This is the literary discovery of the century. We have a new portrait of Shakespeare, the first ever that is identified as him by the artist and made in his lifetime,” Mark Hedges, editor of Country Life magazine, said.
There is no definitive portrait of the Bard painted in his lifetime. Only two likenesses, both posthumous, are widely accepted as authentic: a bust on his tomb in Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church, restored and repainted several times, and the Droeshout engraving, used as a frontispiece to the Folio edition of his plays in 1623.
The 3.5-inch-tall figure is said to depict Shakespeare aged 33 at the height of his celebrity, shortly before he wrote “Hamlet” and after “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The depiction is a far cry from the bald man portrayed in the First Folio.
Read more at Discovery News
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