Talk:Shakespeare authorship question/Archive 3

message: I've tried some edits for balance, but the whole thing needs to be rewritten.  The current article suggests that there is some serious scholarly basis for the claim that Shakespeare did not write the plays, which is as absurd as creationist claims that evolution is a hoax.  There is no serious scholarly debate on this subject, any more than on the subject of evolution.(KevCureton 01:12, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I propose non-Stratfordians making at least decent arguments here.  The case for the Stratford man is very cohesive, the case against him often contradictory and haphazard. We at least know there was only one Stratford man; how many shady aliases must we have before the case for that one alternative heavyweight candidate is decided upon by no-Stratfordians. Mandel 21:06, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: More on Article Balance

message: OK, let's look at this caption:
:Most sources state that the engraver was Martin Droeshout (born 1601). This has often been surprising to historians, since the Shakespeare portrait was called "true to life" by Ben Jonson, yet Droeshout was only fifteen years old when Shakespeare died. It has also been considered odd that Droeshout was only 22 years old when the portrait was made, an unusually young age for an engraver. Anti-Stratfordians find these ambiguities suspect and note features in the engraving that make it appear more of a "mask" than a true represention of an actual person.
It is certainly generally accepted that the engraver was Matin D the younger (In fact there are two Martin D's, but Martin the elder was a more skilled artist). Martin D the younger came from a family of engravers and would have been trained in the family workshop from childhood. His age at Shakespeare's death is irrelevant. 22 is certainly not "an unusally young age for an engraver". That's a virtually meaningless statement. They didn't have to complete a PhD before starting! It is generally assumed that the engraving was copied from a drawing, so truth to life is rather irrelevant to how old D was when S died, unless we are to suppose he created it from memory from someone he hadn't seen for years - which would be a remarkable feat no matter how old he was. The stuff about the mask and the "reversed" jacket and the collar is all from within the sub-culture of authorship doubters, not from "historians", certainly not specialist art historians, who have written about this at some length. See the NPG catalogue of their Shakespeare portraits exhibition. Paul B 14:25, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I am well aware of the specific claims - the shape of the left side of the doublet and the head-on-body connection. Professional art historians typically explain these features by reference to the way such images were constructed at the time. It was quite common to insert faces or figures from drawings into contexts created by the engraver - often somewhat incongruously, so that heads appear to be stuck clumsily on bodies, or one part of the image seems to be in a different style from another. See some of Marcantonio Raimondi's engravings after Raphael and Michelangelo, or the seriously distorted perspective in William Marshall's 1649 Eikon Basilike print, for example. It's to do with the way engravers were trained and worked - mostly as copyists (analagous to professional reproductive photographers today, who might "photoshop" images when photographing a picture for reproduction, possibly cropping and resizing as they did so). Here are some examples of bad head-body connections from the 17th C.   . Engravers were essentially trained in the technical skills of the craft, not in modelling and perspective. Paul B 09:06, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

text: Gainsborough was a rather better artist than Droeshout. Of course he thought it was rubbish, because it is rubbish by Gainsborough's standards. I have not read Marcus, no. I have read the NPG cats on the subject, and articles in Shakespeare Quarterly, plus much literature on 17th century printmaking. Have you? Also, I am a professional art historian, as it happens, and though I have never researched Droeshout, I have researched and lectured on the work of Marshall, who is nearly contemporary. What you call a four day growth of beard is a mixture of stipple-modelling and the depiction of his tache. I have looked at his other productions (though you ignore the fact that it remains uncertain which Droeshout was the artist). They are not masterly by any means. Paul B 16:11, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

text: Well, I popped into the library to look at Leah Marcus. Didn't take very long, as she has very little to say about Droeshout, who's only mentioned on a couple of pages. She lists some unflattering things said by writers of the 18th-19th centuries, a time when 17th C engraving in England was generally considered to be crude. She notes that William Blake, the only actual professional engaver whose opinion is listed, actually said it was rather good. At another point she lists some common Baconian/Oxfordian assertions about the the image, clearly without any endorsement of them. That's it. Nothing about "four day's growth of beard". I guess you made that up yourself. If you think Marty's "control of perspective... was complete" I suggest that you look at the 11 examples of Marty's work contained in  Hind's Engraving in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Paul B 19:51, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Droeshout