Ruth Leon recommends… The Pregnancy Portrait of Elizabeth I – David Shakespeare
Ruth Leon recommendsThe Pregnancy Portrait of Elizabeth I – David Shakespeare
This is completely different. Also an art history film but here the historian David Shakespeare analyses an Elizabethan painting of a woman in precise detail.
The video describes a detailed analysis of the painting currently labelled “Unknown woman in Persian dress” by Marcus Gheeraerts, and hanging in the Haunted Gallery of Hampton Court Palace.
David Shakespeare is a prominent member of the DeVere Society, not a crackpot operation, but a serious association of scholars, writers and actors who believe that the works of Shakespeare – William, not David – were indubitably written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, a Tudor playwright praised by Queen Elizabeth I for his ‘outstanding mind and virtue’ and hailed by King James I as ‘Great Oxford’.
The 400-year old question surrounding the authorship of the plays exercises Shakespeare lovers everywhere and everyone, it seems, has a different theory as to who Shakespeare was if he wasn’t The Man From Stratford-Upon-Avon. This age-old argument spills over from the plays to every aspect of Elizabethan artifacts, from books to furniture to clothes to paintings and each theory has its own adherents. This video is a case in point.
In this video David Shakespeare posits that the subject of this painting is not an unknown woman but a pregnant Elizabeth 1. He decodes the complex allegories within the painting, including a link to Shakespeare’s poem The Phoenix and the Turtle. He proposes how the painting looked originally and how and why changes were made to it.
This closely reasoned interpretation of the painting, whether other experts agree with David Shakespeare or not, is worth watching. He certainly makes a convincing case.
Errrr. No. You lost me at “not a crackpot operation”. Most of the anti-Will brigade are a bunch of snobs who can’t bear the idea that a half-educated oik from the Midlands could possibly be the country’s greatest playwright. The evidence, if you can call it that, is thin.
And as for the idea that an unmarried woman in the 16th century, let alone an unmarried and famously Virginal Queen, would commission a portrait to celebrate her pregnancy – let’s just say that “crackpot” is generous.
Hear, hear… The idea that De Vere was the author was published in 1920, three hundred years after Shakespeare’s by J Thomas Looney – a suitable name. A single example – “The Tempest” was based on the events of 1609, by which time De Vere had been dead for 5 years.
It doesn’t seem to occur to them that although Shakespeare did collaborate on some plays, his obvious prose died out with him. And he was well-educated, probably better than many students today. His father saw to that. Many great writers never went to university. Just as many great artists, such as Raphael, honed their gift in apprenticeships. And of course by sheer talent.
Uh huh. That’s the standard lazy Stratfordian response. They’re all a bunch of snobs! It’s not a remotely true accusation, but it is a lot easier than trying to explain how an essentially uneducated man created the most erudite body of literature in the English language.
Shakespeare was actually well educated. His father saw to that. While he did collaborate on some plays his style of prose is too obvious for the bulk of his work to be from any other writer. Also when he died his output died with him. No other prominent playwright has this question hanging over his reputation because they didn’t come from the aristocracy. Why not Marlowe, Webster or Ben Johnson?