Is Deceptive Portrait Tied to Shakespeare?

[Dave Monroe]

>From Alan Riding, "Is Deceptive Portrait Tied to
Shakespeare?," NY Times, Monday, May 6th, 2002 ...

EAST CLANDON, England — Upper-class English families
frequently inherit dusty portraits of forgotten
ancestors, but Alec Cobbe's Anglo-Irish forebears left
him a richer legacy, a collection of major works of
art. It is now exhibited in two stately homes:
Newbridge House, outside Dublin, and Hatchlands Park,
30 miles south of London. Some family portraits are
also on display, but in the company of Poussin and
Luca Giordano they go largely unnoticed.

One such portrait, identified by a faded sticker as
"Lady Norton, daughter of the Bishop of Winton," shows
the face of someone in her late teens with smooth
skin, an eye-catching earring, long hair, rosy cheeks
and a cherry of a mouth. The work of an anonymous
painter, it served as a space filler at Newbridge,
even after an art expert concluded 10 years ago that
"Lady Norton" was in fact a young man. And it did not
merit a place in a recent exhibition of the Cobbe
collection.

But now, after an intense two months of research, Mr.
Cobbe says he believes he has found the earliest
extant portrait of Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of
Southampton, Shakespeare's patron from the early
1590's. Not only did Shakespeare dedicate his
narrative poems "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of
Lucrece" to Southampton, but he is also widely
presumed to have made this young noble the "fair
youth" of his sonnets, perhaps even "the
master-mistress of my passion" of Sonnet 20.

The debate over Shakespeare's sexuality is 150 years
old and will hardly be resolved by this
girlish-looking portrait of Southampton. But the
identification of the subject of this painting,
described by some British newspapers as "Southampton
in drag," has reawakened speculation over the possible
bisexuality of Shakespeare, who left his wife, Anne
Hathaway, in Stratford-Upon-Avon when he moved to
London.

In one sense, though, there is less than meets the
eye. While the sonnets may or may not be
autobiographical, experts say this portrait does not
show Southampton dressed as a woman. The first noble
of his generation to wear his hair long, Henry
Wriothesley was renowned as something of a dandy, but
Mr. Cobbe argues that red lips and pink cheeks were
common to every Elizabethan portrait. "Forget
cross-dressing," he added. "These are not women's
clothes."

[...]

With that, Mr. Cobbe contacted Anthony Holden, author
of "William Shakespeare: His Life and Work," who wrote
about the portrait of "Shakespeare's patron and
possible lover" in The Observer of London on April 21.
When Mr. Holden visited Hatchlands to inspect the
painting, he was also accompanied by an old friend,
Sir Frank Kermode, the Shakespearean scholar.

"If you believe that the young man addressed in the
sonnets was Henry Wriothesley," Mr. Holden quoted Sir
Frank as saying, "there is the additional thrill that
this could be the face that Shakespeare fell in love
with, perhaps wishing its owner was a girl. The
magnitude of the thrill depends on how much you think
the identity of the young person matters to the poems.
Many think it matters a lot."

[...]

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/06/arts/design/06PORT.html

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