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.
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