[SunkenCiv]

Note: this topic is from 3/01/2006. Thanks nickcarraway.

[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