Shakespeare Died of Rare Cancer? (British Gallery Unveils Shakespeare Image)

Discovery Channel ^ | March 1, 2006 | Rossella Lorenzi

[nickcarraway]

William Shakespeare died in pain of a rare form of cancer that deformed his left eye, according to a German academic who claims to have discovered the disease in four genuine portraits of the world's most famous playwright.

As London's National Portrait Gallery prepares to reveal in a show next week that only one out of six portraits of the Bard may be his exact likeness, Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, from the University of Mainz, provided forensic evidence that there are at least four contemporary portraits of Shakespeare.

Hammerschmidt-Hummel, who will publish in April the results of her 10-year research in "The True Face of William Shakespeare," used forensic imaging technologies such as trick image differentiation technique, photogrammetry, computer montages, and laser scanning to examine nine images believed to portray the playwright.

Four of these portraits were found to share 17 identical features.

"The Chandos and Flower portrait, the Davenant bust and the Darmstadt death mask, all showed one and the same man: William Shakespeare. They depict his features in such precise detail and so true to life that they could only have been produced by an artist for whom the poet sat personally," Hammerschmidt-Hummel told Discovery News.

The portraits showed a growth on the upper left eyelid and a protuberance in the nasal corner, which seemed to represent three different stages of a disease

"At Shakespeare's time, the artists depicted their sitters realistically and accurately, absolutely true-to-life, including all visible signs of disease," Hammerschmidt-Hummel said.

A team of doctors analyzed the paintings and concluded that Shakespeare, who died aged 52 in 1616, most likely suffered from a rare form of cancer.

According to ophthalmologist Walter Lerche, the playwright suffered from a cancer of the tear duct known as Mikulicz's syndrome. A protuberance in the nasal corner of the left eye was interpreted as a small caruncular tumor.

Dermatologist Jost Metz diagnosed "a chronic, annular skin sarcoidosis," while the yellowish spots on the lower lip of the Flower portrait were interpreted as an inflammation of the oral mucous membrane indicating a debilitating systemic illness.

"Shakespeare must have been in quite considerable pain. The deformation of the left eye was no doubt particularly distressing. It can also be assumed that the trilobate protuberance in the nasal corner of the left eye, causing a marked deviation of the eyelid margin, was experienced as a large and painful obstruction," Hammerschmidt-Hummel said.

Her findings have stirred a controversy in England.

The National Portrait Gallery, who conducted a four-year study of possible surviving portraits for the exhibition "Searching for Shakespeare," stressed that "today we have no certain lifetime portrait of England's most famous poet and playwright."

Hammerschmidt-Hummel's conclusion was based on a "fundamental misunderstanding" since "portraits are not, and can never be forensic evidence of likeness," the gallery said.

Most experts, including those at the National Portrait Gallery, agree that only the Chandos painting may be a likely Shakespeare portrait.

The terracotta Davenant bust, which has been standing for 150 years in the London gentleman's Garrick Club, was long believed to be work of the 18th-century French sculptor Roubiliac.

Hammerschmidt-Hummel traced it back to the times of Shakespeare through the diary of William Clift, curator of the Royal College of Surgeons' Hunterian Museum in London.

She learned that Clift found the bust in 1834 near a theatre which was previously owned by Sir William Davenant, Shakespeare's godson. Davenant owned many Shakespeare mementoes, including the Chandos painting.

The most controversial seems to be the Flower portrait, which the National Portrait Gallery dismissed as a fake as it featured a pigment not in use until around 1818.

Hammerschmidt-Hummel contents that the painting is nothing else than a copy of the portrait she examined 10 years ago. The original Flowers had evidence of swelling around the eye and forehead, while the one about to go on display at the gallery does not have these features, she said .

The Darmstadt death mask, so-called because it resides in Darmstadt Castle in Germany, has been long dismissed as a 19th-century fake.

But according to Hammerschmidt-Hummel, the features, and most of all the impression of a swelling above the left-eye, make it certain that it was taken shortly after Shakespeare's death.

"A 3-D technique of photogrammetry made visible craters of the swelling. This was really stunning evidence," Hammerschmidt-Hummel said.

[Salamander]

Absolutely not.

Ian has always been adamantly anti-drug and several of the original Tull members were fired for using drugs.

He does not even allow drinking during a concert.

Dude is straight arrow.

[Salamander]

During two of his concerts that I attended, he *stopped* playing and demanded that the stoners in the front rows put their crap away.

He did not resume playing until they’d done so, due to extreme “audience pressure”.

[Larry Lucido]

(I was joking)

[Salamander]

Oh.

I am overly protective of Ian.

:D

[Larry Lucido]

Understandable.

(Ian would say you’re “living in the past.”)

(Joking again) :-)

[Salamander]

I will give you the “Benefit” of the doubt, as that is what is cranking through my Cerwin-Vegas right now.

/cry you a song

[Larry Lucido]

I don’t have anything that nice but lately I found myself listening to a lot of Jethro Tull and Procol Harum on YouTube.

[Salvation]

Shakespeare Died of Rare Cancer? (British Gallery Unveils Shakespeare Image)
Radar Scan of Shakespeare's Grave Confirms Skull Apparently Missing
Shakespeare First Folio from Catholic College to Be Exhibited in London
A Brief History of Catholic Claims to Shakespeare
Why is Shakespeare so mysterious? Because he was a Catholic in an age of vicious persecution
William Shakespeare Was Probably a Catholic, Says Archbishop of Canterbury
Shakespeare Did Write Lear; What is More, He Was a Catholic
Was Shakespeare A Secret Catholic? The Evidence Is Mounting…
Cryptic Signatures That ‘Prove Shakespeare Was a Secret Catholic’

[Salamander]

Got ‘em off Amazon for like $90.

Have had them for going on 6 or 7 years, no problems.

They’re a *lot* cheaper than the Logitech setups people buy and were cheaper than the Bose speakers I switched these out for.

[Redcitizen]

In 1616, Shakespeare actually died peacefully in his sleep, not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car. :)

[Pelham]

Shine on Brightly

[Larry Lucido]

That whole album is awesome.

[Bigg Red]

Whenever we go out, you can hear the people shout....

[SunkenCiv]

It showed a corpse crowned with a laurel wreath – traditional tribute to a dead poet – and lying in state. Becker believed that it depicted Shakespeare, who died in 1616, but it is far more likely to represent Ben Jonson who died in 1637, the year in which the miniature appears to have been painted. Becker managed to reconcile the date with his claim that the picture showed Shakespeare by proposing that 1637 was merely the year in which it had been copied – an obvious fudging of the evidence. He learned that Kesselstadt had also owned a Plaster of Paris cast of a face, which he claimed he had tracked down and bought from a junk dealer. He believed that the cast showed the same person as the painting. Not everyone agreed, if only because the mask bears the date 1616 – the year of Shakespeare’s death – not 1637. Probably the date was added at a later date in order to bolster the claim that the mask represented Shakespeare. The mask raises a number of questions. Was Becker telling the truth? If it is Shakespeare’s death mask, how did it get to Germany and why doesn’t it look more like the Droeshout engraving and the bust? ...The mask was put up for sale in 1960, but remained in Darmstadt. Its cause was taken up in 1995 by Professor Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, who initiated forensic tests which claimed to demonstrate its authenticity. She describes all this exhaustively in her book The True Face of William Shakespeare (2006), where she interprets an apparent blemish on the right eye of the mask as evidence that he suffered from eye cancer. To my mind it might just as well be a stray drop of plaster. I’m very sceptical about the whole story.

Shakespeare Death Mask | Stanley Wells | 2/09/2010

[SunkenCiv]

Apparently, no one knows anything about Shakespeare for sure—his hair color, his sexual orientation, how he spelled his name, whether he liked his wife, etc. Some people aren’t even sure whether he wrote his plays or not. So this rendering, taken from a death mask found in Germany, is bound to be controversial. But if it is Shakespeare, it’s pretty intriguing. It shows a man who suffered from cancer and had a sad, soulful face. (Dat hottie)

10 Facial Reconstructions of Famous Historical Figures by AGuineaPig Dec 28 2013