The True Face of William Shakespeare: The Poet's Death Mask and Likenesses from Three Periods of His life

By Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel

Within his own lifetime, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was praised and revered as a writer of genius. By the late 1590s he had already reached a high point of his brilliant literary career in London... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1904449565
• ISBN13: 9781904449560
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: Chaucer Pr
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 2.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.8" x 1.0" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Fascinating!

The professor makes a convincing...and very well supported...case for her major premise. Briefly, she establishes the authenticity of the Flower and Chandos portraits of William Shakespeare and the Davenant Bust as the work of people who saw or even knew William Shakespeare. Most importantly, she makes a convincing case for the authenticity of the Darmstadt death mask, which means it probably was taken from a plaster mold of Shakespeare's face made the day after he died. Why is it important to know what Shakespeare looked like? Mostly for the sake of natural human curiosity. But also because the authenticity of these four items helps to prove that Shakespeare was a well known and important person in his own time, not simply an obscure nobody from a small town, as claimed by those who favor alternative authorship of the canon.