Historian Mark Griffiths claims to have cracked a code in an Elizabethan book on botany, to discover a true portrait of Shakespeare made within the bard’s own lifetime. The find has been hailed as “the literary discovery of the century” by the editor of Country Life—the magazine in which the details of Griffiths’s process will be revealed. Yet other scholars, including the director of the Shakespeare Institute, professor Michael Dobson, remain skeptical.
Shakespeare didn’t take selfies or have an Instagram account (imagine!), so we'll never know what he actually looked like. But we do know what other people thought he looked like. Scholars like Erin Blake have done lots of hard work cataloging portraits of Shakespeare, thinking about who made them, and assessing how reliable they are.
