Shakespeare's Face: Unraveling the Legend and History of Shakespeare's Mysterious Portrait

From Publishers Weekly Nolen's scoop about the rediscovery of what is reputedly the only portrait of the Bard painted in his lifetime appeared in 2001 on the front page of the Toronto Globe and Mail and sparked international debate within the Shakespeare industry. Almost a century ago, the "Sanders portrait" was brought to the attention of a prominent Shakespeare scholar and was officially—and incorrectly—dismissed as an altered portrait with a comparatively recent label affixed to it. Its current owner, Lloyd Sullivan, a retired engineer from Ontario, believed that he had inherited a genuine artifact from his grandmother (who kept it under her bed), and Nolen follows his decade-long attempt to confirm the family tradition that it was painted by Sullivan's ancestor, Elizabethan actor-artist John Sanders. Sullivan enlisted chemical and radiological experts to rule out retouching and even one of the world's leading specialists in dendrochronology (the science of dating wood by the tree rings) to situate the portrait's wood panel at the turn of the 17th century. Although Sullivan could never confirm the portrait's provenance, this book's alternating chapters ballast Nolen's account of his quixotic quest with eight essays by such scholarly heavy hitters as Stanley Wells (on the Bard's fame), Jonathan Bate (on the "anti-Stratford" author conspiracies) and Marjorie Garber (on how we read significance into Shakespearean iconography). Nolen refreshingly includes well-considered counterarguments. Encompassing the very debate that its story sparked, Shakespeare's Facecombines potentially dry art history with agreeable historical and journalistic investigation. 16 pages of color and b&w illus. not seen by PW. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review “Nolen…deserves a lot of credit for restricting herself to her part of the story and leaving the rest to the experts, who weave in and out of her tale with separate essays as lively as they are illuminating….So is Shakespeare’s Face really much ado about nothing? Not on your life. For one thing, nothing’s settled, and the story of the forensic evidence is utterly fascinating. For another, what really makes the book are all the experts circling round and round the identity of Shakespeare and bringing us closer and closer to the man. Even if the fuss over the portrait turns out to be ephemeral,