Seeing Shakespeare for the First Time All Over Again in the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery

Abstract

On Thursday April 21, 2005, international news broke that one of the best known and previously believed to be contemporaneous portraits of William Shakespeare was, in the words of the London Associated Press’s subhead, a “fraud.”¹ Named for its longtime owner Sir Desmond Flower, who originally bequeathed it to the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Flower Portrait depicts the Bard wearing a broad white collar and traditional Elizabethan dress. Widely reproduced on many covers of the plays, the painting has long been regarded as one of the most accurate representations of what Shakespeare might have looked like.