More on the alleged Shakespeare Portrait

Robert Mackey of the New York Times's Lede column has been considering the alleged new portrait of Shakespeare, with specific reference to the possible meaning of the Latin tag principum amicitias! and its implications for Shakespeare. While several press reports translated the phrase - very loosely - as "beware the friendship of princes", in its original context (one of Horace's Odes) it refers to the first triumvirate, an uneasy alliance between Caesar, Crassus and Pompey which carved up the Roman Republic until it collapsed into civil war. Gaius Asinius Pollio, Horace's dedicatee, was writing a history of the period at the time of the poem's composition - and the passage in which the phrase appears describes those events.

Despite several ingenious efforts, above the line and below it, it's hard to see in this any obvious relevance to Shakespeare. The most natural allusion would be to one of his Roman tragedies - but Shakespeare did not write a play about the First Triumvirate, and I find myself thinking that the artist could have found a more directly applicable Latin tag. Of course, the phrase can be made to fit - but then so can the quatrains of Nostradamus be made to fit current events.

I was more struck by one of the comments, which drew attention to the supposed first owner of the painting, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. Wriothesley, pronounced "Risley" was Shakespeare's patron. The commenter suggested that the portrait might be of him - so I checked, and there is a certain similarity.


The first picture is the new "Shakespeare", the second a portrait of Southampton painted in 1603. The hairline, in particular matches fairly well, although the man in the second painting is thinner in the face. Here, by comparison, is the Cobbe portrait and the familiar "Chandos" portrait of Shakespeare, believed to be the source of the First Folio engraving.


Neither matches unambiguously, but the new picture strikes me as a bit closer to Southampton than to Shakespeare. Wriothesley was about ten years younger than Shakespeare, though probably still too old for a painting dated at 1610 (on the evidence of the 1603 picture). And, to be really subjective, the subject of the Chandos painting looks like a man of relatively humble origins who earns his living with his brain, whereas the man in the Cobbe portrait looks like a pampered young fop.

There's no proof either way, but given that Southampton would seem to be a distinct possibility for the portrait's subject - and is, on the face of it, a more plausible one - it would be interesting to know on what grounds it was excluded. The attribution would even provide a better meaning for the Horatian tag. An associate of the Earl of Essex, Southampton was implicated in Essex's disastrous revolt of 1601 and only narrowly escaped being beheaded. A dangerous "alliance of princes" indeed.