Eye Cancer Killed Shakespeare, Professor Says

LONDON – Shakespeare scholarship, lively at the best of times, saw the fur flying yesterday after a German academic claimed to have authenticated not just one but four contemporary images of the playwright – and suggested, to boot, that he died of cancer.As the National Portrait Gallery planned to announce that only one of half-a-dozen claimed portraits of William Shakespeare can now be considered genuine, professor Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel said she could prove there were at least four surviving portraits of the playwright.Startlingly, she said swellings close to Shakespeare’s left eye that she says are clear in several of the contested portraits is evidence that he had lymph cancer.By dating the portraits, she said, it was likely that he had suffered for around 15 years in increasing pain and died from it.Little is certain in Shakespeare studies – nothing is known about his death in 1616 and much of his life is a mystery – but if Ms. Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s claims win backing, they will throw the National Portrait Gallery’s three-year research project into the authenticity of Shakespeare portraits into serious doubt.But the first reaction to her claims in Britain was not positive. An emeritus professor of Shakespeare studies at Birmingham University, Stanley Wells, called the German’s findings “rubbish.” And the portrait gallery claimed that Ms. Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s work was based on a “fundamental misunderstanding.”Ms. Hammerschmidt-Hummel, who teaches English literature and culture at Marburg and Mainz University, took the unusual step of using forensic tests used by German detectives to study the morphology of paintings and sculptures that are claimed to be of Shakespeare.Measuring facial features – nose, eyes, lips, chin, etc. – and the relationships between them she claimed that two paintings, a bust, and a contested death mask of the playwright show identical characteristics.The features are so similar, she claimed, that they must be the result of sittings with Shakespeare himself.The four images with the morphological similarities are, she writes in a book to be published in Britain in April, the “Flower Shakespeare,” named after the brewery family that gave the picture to the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1895, the “Chandos Shakespeare,” presented to the country by Lord Ellesmere in 1856, the terracotta “Davenant Bust,” which stands in the Garrick Club in London, and the “Darmstadt Death Mask.”So called because it resides in Darmstadt Castle in Germany, the mask is dismissed by many as a 19th century fake but Ms. Hammerschmidt-Hummel said the features, and most notably the impression of a swelling above the left eye, make it certain that it was taken within days of Shakespeare’s death. She said: “The cancerous growths grow bigger as the dates progress.“Everybody else has missed them, but how else would an artist know they were there unless they had seen Shakespeare?”Research for the book has taken 10 years and she says pathologists, doctors, opthalmologists, dermatologists, and imaging engineers have helped her build 3-D images to demonstrate the similarities. The professor, who has previously claimed that Princes William and Harry are directly descended from Shakespeare, will have trouble persuading doubters about at least two of the images, however. Research by the NPG last year found that the “Flower Shakespeare” was a 19th-century fake using pigment not in use until about 1818. And the “Davenant Bust” has long been attributed to an 18th-century French sculptor, Louis Francois Roubiliac.Ms. Hammerschmidt-Hummel says the bust was mistakenly attributed. As to the “Flower Shakespeare,” she risks even more controversy. She claims the picture in the RSC’s collection and rejected by the NPG must be a fake or a copy of the picture that she tested in 1996.The NPG’s own research into six possible contemporary portraits of the playwright has concluded that only one, the “Chandos Shakespeare,”is a likely candidate. All six considered will be displayed for the first time together in an exhibition at the gallery opening next week.Ms. Hammerschmidt-Hummel told the Daily Telegraph: “I am absolutely certain of my findings. I dispute the evidence of the portrait gallery, and Stanley Wells is not an art historian.” Dr. Tarnya Cooper, in charge of the NPG’s research, said: “My view about using measurements of facial features from portraiture is that this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of visual art. Portraits are not, and can never be forensic evidence of likeness.”Shakespeare’s lymph cancer would have caused a slow and eventually painful death, and it could be an explanation for the playwright’s decision to stop writing and leave London for Stratford-upon-Avon three years before he died in 1616. But so could many other things.“Yes, I have heard that one [cancer] before. I don’t believe it. We simply have no idea how or why he died or can even be certain where he died,” one of the Britain’s top Shakespeare scholars, Professor Stanley Wells, said.Plausibly, syphilis and typhoid also have been put forward as causes of death. It has also been suggested that the playwright caught a fever after a particularly drunken night on the tiles with Ben Jonson, and another story is that he was poisoned by his son-in-law, John Hall.Mr. Wells believes that this is the easiest to rule out. “Hall was a very distinguished physician. I think that one is pure fantasy,” he said.Hall treated many people in and around Stratford, keeping notes of his consultations in notebooks. The pity is that no notebook has been found for the period he might have treated his father-in-law.Recently, a group of American academics suggested digging up Shakespeare’s tomb inside Holy Trinity, Stratford, to take DNA samples. Mr. Wells is not opposed to this.

Eye Cancer Killed Shakespeare, Professor Says

Eye Cancer Killed Shakespeare, Professor Says

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