Waiting for William

If its him,were going to have to rethink the hair. The styled courtier who gazes out of the portrait is undeniably a seducer,bouffant...

If its him,were going to have to rethink the hair. The styled courtier who gazes out of the portrait is undeniably a seducer,bouffant and handsome with his doily of a collar and come-hither expression. And we always thought William Shakespeare was a bald pudge.

The Cobbe portrait,oil-on-panel circa 1610,is the centrepiece of a controversial exhibit through the first week of October in Stratford-upon-Avon titled Shakespeare Found. The claim,backed by renowned scholar Stanley Wells,is based partly on the strange coincidence by which it was discovered: It is a dead ringer for a portrait held by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington,a picture that from 1770 to the 1940s was considered legitimately Shakespeare,until it was declared a forgery. Now its possible that the Folger may not own a sham at all,but a true likeness of the bard painted during his lifetime.

For more than 250 years,the Cobbe portrait was a nameless head hanging obscurely in an Anglo-Irish country house outside of Dublin. The Cobbes trace their genealogy to the Third Earl of Southampton,Shakespeares known literary patron.

At Oxford University,Alec Cobbe,64,decided on a career as an art restorer and met an equally art-obsessed schoolmate,Alastair Laing. Laing became a curator of the National Trust,and it was he who in 2006 invited Cobbe to an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in London,titled Searching for Shakespeare.

What Shakespeare looked like in his prime is just one of the many things disputed about him,along with how many plays he wrote and in what order,whether he was a nice guy or a jerk,if he was a bisexual,or a secret Catholic,and what killed him at age 52. Just two images of Shakespeare are considered authentic,both done after the playwright died. A clumsy funerary bust over his tomb in the chancel of Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford depicts a portly man in robes with a quill in his hand. The other is the cartoonlike engraving on the cover of the First Folio,the authorised collection of his plays published in 1623. The engraving,by Flemish artisan Martin Droeshout,shows a neckless man with an absurdly domed forehead,pouches under his eyes and a hint of flab around his chin.

To some Shakespeareans,a portrait is an irrelevance: Why do we need a picture of him when we have his art,37 timelessly riveting plays and 154 sonnets with his heart in every line? But to others,a portrait is the face of genius, says Jonathan Bate,author of an acclaimed new biography Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare.

One thing scholars agree on is that Shakespeare probably sat for a portrait in his early to mid-40s,when he was the most popular dramatist in England. Trouble is,no one can find the portrait. Up to now,the painting with the most credible claim is the Chandos portrait,the star of Londons National Portrait Gallery. The Searching for Shakespeare exhibit was therefore really about likely and,mostly,unlikely contenders. Cobbe and Laing wandered through the viewing,until they arrived at the Janssen portrait on loan from the Folger. The Janssen showed a close-bearded man in a scallop-edged lace collarin almost every detail,a replica of an unnamed courtier on the Cobbe familys wall. Laing said,Dont you have one of those? Yes, Cobbe said,nonplussed. Rather a better one,actually.

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Which is how Alec Cobbe wandered off into the deep morass of Shakespeareland,a three-year journey employing a team of researchers to prove that he had found the poets true face. Cobbe decided to call Stanley Wells,79,arguably the worlds preeminent Shakespeare scholar. Wells was persuaded it deserved higher consideration than the other impostors although he acknowledges,Ive never declared myself absolutely finally certain.

In The Soul of the Age,Jonathan Bate depicts Shakespeare as a cool professional who viewed everything as material. His Shakespeare was consumed with craft and wished to disappear inside of his art,that endlessly mirroring enigma,real and unreal,pretense yet utter truth. The man in the Cobbe-Folger image is flashier than the Shakespeare envisioned by Bate. Thats undoubtedly the portrait of someone making a bid for patronage, he says. Still,Bate refuses to rule out the possibility the portraits are authentic.