Cobbe Portrait - Support and Criticism

Support and Criticism

The identification has received support from Shakespeare scholars Stanley Wells, Henry Woudhuysen, Jay L. Halio, Stuart Sillars, and Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and art historians Alastair Laing, curator of paintings and sculpture at the British National Trust, and Paul Joannides, Professor of Art History at Cambridge. The claims about the portrait have also met with considerable scepticism from other Shakespeareans and art experts, including Shakespeare scholar David Scott Kastan, who has questioned the portrait's provenance, and Dr. Tarnya Cooper, curator of 16th-century portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, who believes that both the Cobbe and Janssen portraits represent Sir Thomas Overbury. Other scholars have noted numerous differences between the Cobbe portrait and the authentic but posthumous Droeshout engraving that appeared in the First Folio of Shakespeare's works.

Supporters of the Shakespeare identification reject the arguments for Overbury. Research using tracings by Rupert Featherstone at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge, has led him to conclude that the Cobbe portrait and the only documented portrait of Overbury in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, depict two different sitters.

Since the publicity surrounding it, the portrait has appeared on the covers of several books, and even inspired the Chinese author Zhang Yiyi to have a series of cosmetic surgeries to have his face transformed into that of Shakespeare.