Friday June 16, 2006
Sir, - With reference to Dorna Bewley's letter (June 2) and, more especially, previous correspondence by Katherine Duncan-Jones and Tarnya Cooper about portraits of Shakespeare, I too have viewed (twice) the splendid Searching for Shakespeare exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and attended the stimulating related conference there on May 18-19. Amid all the focus on alleged portraits of Shakespeare, however, there was no mention whatsoever made of an important early witness to Shakespeare's image. This is the sketch of Shakespeare's original monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, made by the antiquary William Dugdale in 1634.
This drawing, which is preserved in the original autograph manuscript of Dugdale's Warwickshire (Volume IV, p933) in the Dugdale library at Merevale Hall, Warwickshire, is reproduced in Diana Price's article "Reconsidering Shakespeare's Monument" in Review of English Studies, 48 (May 1997), p171. It was the basis for Wenceslaus Hollar's more or less faithful engraving that appeared in the published edition of Dugdale's Warwickshire in 1656 (reproduced in Price, p170).
It has long been known that the existing Shakespeare monument at Stratford was restored, repainted and altered, in the eighteenth century (making Shakespeare look like what has been described as a self-satisfied pork butcher). It seems to be rather less known that evidence of the original monument exists.
The striking differences are that Dugdale's drawing shows a figure, not holding a pen and paper (a later interpolation), but resting both hands upon what looks like a long cushion or woolsack. Far from being that of a self-satisfied butcher, the face looks somewhat stern, gaunt and austere, with a rather long, drooping moustache, the head with the familiar receding hairline. He wears a jerkin of slightly different aspect than, but basically in conformity with, the present monument.
Why was this evidence of Shakespeare's image ignored in the NPG exhibition and conference? It would be ungracious to suppose that the omission was deliberate in order not to confuse or complicate the NPG's (plausible) claim that their own portrait, the "Chandos Portrait", was genuine. Certainly the character of the Dugdale drawing supports no particular extant supposed portrait of Shakespeare, virtually all of which reflect the Droeshout engraving in the First Folio of 1623.
What is clear is that, next to that engraving, the Dugdale drawing offers us the earliest undisputed and independent evidence of what Shakespeare might have looked like.
PETER BEAL
Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, Senate House, London W1.
Friday June 23, 2006
Sir, - Peter Beal is hardly ever wrong, but there is a dangerous slip in his letter about William Dugdale's sketch of Shakespeare's monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon (June 16). He says that the drawing "shows a figure, not holding a pen and paper (a later interpolation), but resting both hands upon what looks like a long cushion or woolsack".
This does not reflect what Diana Price wrote in her 1997 article on the sketch, cited by Beal. The pen is not "a later interpolation": it was a removable accessory, as on other funeral monuments of writers (e.g. John Stow), which over the years has been frequently taken by souvenir-hunters. As for the paper, it is not entirely certain that its outline is missing from the sketch and, besides, as Price says, "Dugdale may have simply missed the paper. He was sketching in a badly lit chancel, and no one knows what the condition of the paint was in 1634; the paper may not have stood out". The cushion, though, is undoubtedly a cushion, not a woolsack: in Dugdale's sketch it clearly has tassels on each of its four corners. Who ever heard of a tasselled woolsack?
Comparison between Dugdale's sketches of other Warwickshire monuments and their originals shows that he was a poor draughtsman (save in the matter of armorial bearings), rather as comparison between other drawings by Arendt van Buchell and their originals shows that the oft-reproduced drawing of the Swan Theatre, also included uncritically in the recent National Portrait Gallery exhibition, Searching for Shakespeare, is more or less worthless. The most accurate image of Shakespeare's monument prior to its restoration in 1749 is in fact the sketch made by George Vertue, now in the British Library, where pen and cushion are clearly visible.
Why does any of this matter? Because the absence of a pen in Dugdale and the "woolsack" canard have been used by anti-Stratfordians as supposed evidence that the Stratford man was a wool-dealer rather than a dramatist and that someone else wrote the plays (though they struggle to explain why a wool-dealer's monument would have an epitaph making comparisons to Socrates and Virgil, to "all he hath writt" and to the "living art" he has left behind). Alarmingly, Price herself became an authorship sceptic some time after writing her admirable account of Dugdale's sketch.
JONATHAN BATE
Department of English, University of Warwick, Coventry.
Friday June 30, 2006
Sir, - I'm afraid that Jonathan Bate (Letters, June 23), setting out to correct Peter Beal (Letters, June 16), himself falls into error. The 1634 sketch by William Dugdale of a monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, subsequently published in his massive Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated (1656), does indeed show the subject with arms akimbo, resting both hands upon a woolsack or woolpack, which the OED defines as "a great number of Fleeces made up together in a cloth tied at the four ends". The four knots (not tassels) are made by tying small stones into the corners with string, so creating "ears", which were easier to grasp when lifting the sacks. They are always found in representations of the woolsack, a frequent emblem in the coats of arms of institutions or organizations connected with the wool trade, from London Companies in the seventeenth century (Woolpackers, Dyers, Watermen) to Borough and County Councils in our own day (Guildford, Rochdale, Wolverhampton).
Dugdale's accuracy has been doubted by those trying to wish the woolsack away, but when Dr William Thomas republished the Antiquities in 1730, having personally checked all the church monuments represented, he found that only one of Dugdale's sketches needed correcting in its main detail. When Nicholas Rowe produced the first newly edited Works of Shakespeare in 1709 he commissioned a new version of Dugdale's engraving, hands on woolsack, with the fingers of the right hand certainly not "disposed as if holding a pen", as Sidney Lee claimed in 1908.
The first sketch to show the subject of this monument holding a pen and a piece of paper (the hands still resting, absurdly enough, on a woolsack or cushion) was made by George Vertue in 1723 for Pope's Shakespeare, and was evidently based on the Chandos portrait. The position of the face, elbows and hands is quite different from those in the monument as we know it today, which may date from the extensive restorations carried out by Joseph Greene in 1749.
Richard Kennedy, the scholar who first identified John Ford as author of the "Funerall Elegye", has put all these facts together and drawn the conclusion that the original monument represented Shakespeare's father, John, a "considerable dealer in wool", who held several civic offices between 1557 and 1571 (Alderman, Mayor, JP), before getting into financial and legal difficulties. He returned to favour following his son's grant of arms in 1596, and had been restored to the borough council by the time of his death in 1601. A monument to his memory would not have been out of place in the local church. Dugdale recorded two other monuments in Holy Trinity to woolmen, one to a "woolen draper", the other to a mercer.
Dugdale's sketch also included three leopards' heads, as found in Stratford's coat of arms, an appropriate detail for a man who, unlike his son, had held high civic office.
Mr Kennedy's essay may be found by entering the term "Woolpack Man" into an internet search engine. It deserves serious consideration.
Bate is worried that the anti-Stratfordians may seize on this evidence to deny that Shakespeare was the most famous dramatist of his generation. I would be more worried that, by distorting the evidence, we might perpetuate the myths attached to his biography.
BRIAN VICKERS
7 Abbot's Place, London NW6.
Friday July 07, 2006
Sir, - Brian Vickers supports the suggestion that the monument in Stratford-upon-Avon sketched by Dugdale in 1634 may have depicted not William Shakespeare but his father, John. Is it conceivable that the townspeople of Stratford, including the dramatist's widow, his two daughters, his son-in law, and the church authorities, all of whom knew what Shakespeare looked like, permitted the erection of a monument depicting John Shakespeare to be inscribed with verses in both English and Latin that clearly refer to his son? Moreover, both Professors Bate and Vickers ignore the crucial point that there is no reason to believe that the appearance of the figure on the monument was materially different in 1634 from what it is now. At the time the monument was restored, in or around 1748, Joseph Greene wrote that -as we should expect -great pains were taken to preserve its integrity. He says that "care was taken, as nearly as could be, not to add to or diminish what the work consisted of, and appear'd to have been when first erected: And really, except changing the substance of the Architraves from alabaster to Marble; nothing has been chang'd, nothing alter'd, except (the) supplying with (the) original material, (sav'd for that purpose,) whatsoever was by accident broken off; reviving the Old Colouring, and renewing the Gilding that was lost". The colouring is immaterial since Dugdale's drawing is uncoloured. Long ago, E. K.
Chambers found it "incredible that the monument should ever have resembled Dugdale's engraving". That verdict stands.
STANLEY WELLS
Shakespeare Centre, Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon.
Friday July 07, 2006
Sir, - Brian Vickers is hardly ever wrong, but he too has been misled by the "woolsack" myth of the anti-Stratfordians (Letters, June 30). The 1623 First Folio includes a poem by Leonard Digges, step-son of Thomas Russell (a Stratford man who oversaw the signing of Shakespeare's will), referring to the "Stratford monument" of "the deceased author Master William Shakespeare". This is hard evidence that disposes of the risible theory that the monument actually represents Shakespeare's father. As I noted in my previous letter (June 23), the monument bears an inscription referring to the subject's writings and comparing him to Socrates and Virgil -an unlikely accolade for John Shakespeare, however worthy a burgher he may or may not have been. That inscription was there when Dugdale made his sketch in 1634.
The shoddy essay by Richard Kennedy cited so admiringly by Vickers incorrectly claims that George Vertue was "not an eyewitness" of the monument. It is true, as Vickers states, that the engraving by Vertue in Pope's edition of Shakespeare superimposes the head of the Chandos portrait on to the figure on the monument, but Vertue's original drawing, mentioned in my previous letter, is clearly an eyewitness sketch of the chancel of Holy Trinity, complete with original head (and quill). To repeat: whether or not the object in Dugdale's dodgy sketch resembles a knotted woolsack, the monument itself represents William Shakespeare with a quill and paper resting on a tasselled cushion, bolster or tablet. You can see it today, just as Leonard Digges saw it when it was new.
JONATHAN BATE
Department of English, University of Warwick, Coventry.
Friday July 14, 2006
Sir, - In my original letter about the Dugdale drawing of the Shakespeare monument at Stratford (June 16), I had no axe to grind apart from wishing to see recognized an important piece of early documentary evidence which I thought should not be airbrushed out of the Shakespeare iconography.
Jonathan Bate and Stanley Wells (Letters, June 23, July 7) seem eager to do virtually this, however, by dismissing the drawing out of hand. They perpetuate a tradition established by one of the most intemperate arguments ever written by the great E. K. Chambers, who could not bear to think for a moment that the original monument could have been any different from the one preserved today.
The well-documented and illustrated online article "The Woolpack Man" by Richard J. Kennedy, to which Brian Vickers refers (Letters, June 30) and which (granted it is not flawless) Professor Bate unfairly dismisses as "shoddy", leaves no doubt whatsoever that the hands in the Dugdale drawing are pressing into a woolsack. In the present monument, this object has become some kind of "cushion, bolster or tablet", as Bate notes -a curiously unsuitable writing surface for the poet now represented with pen in hand, and perhaps more akin to a prie-dieu. In any case, these features bear no resemblance to one another and, in all reasonableness, could hardly ever be mistaken for one another. Neither could the positioning of the arms and hands, the shape of the head, or the moustache (long and drooping in the drawing, short and upturned in the present monument). These differences are too great to be dismissed simply as "dodgy" drawing on Dugdale's part. They are more akin to transformations.
When printers and publishers of the period boast of the accuracy and authenticity of their editions, scholars often view such claims with scepticism -and with good reason. Yet Professor Wells expects us to accept literally the rather fulsome account by the antiquary Joseph Greene that the monument was restored (c1748?) exactly as it "appear'd to have been when first erected", with not the faintest suspicion that this account might be in any way exaggerated or have overlooked a detail or two. One antiquary can be trusted implicitly, another rejected as mistaken or incompetent, depending on preference.
While it is clear enough that the monument drawn by Dugdale, with inscription and all, was accepted in his day as being that of William Shakespeare, mysteries and problems still persist. Why, in particular, are certain features of the monument, clearly signalled by Kennedy, more befitting the profession and civic status of the playwright's father, John Shakespeare? This and other questions raised by the Dugdale drawing can only be answered if it is taken seriously by scholars and not consigned indignantly to the waste bin because it does not tally with cherished conceptions.
PETER BEAL
Institute of English Studies, Senate House, London WC1.
