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Shakespeare & Beyond

Excerpt: The Private Life of William Shakespeare

Last spring, research by Lena Cowen Orlin was featured in an article in The Guardian, “‘Self-satisfied pork butcher’: Shakespeare grave effigy believed to be definitive likeness.” Orlin’s work suggested that the memorial bust of Shakespeare in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon may have been commissioned by Shakespeare himself. If so, the bust is more likely to show what he looked like or how he liked to be portrayed. A replica of the bust (shown below) is mounted on a wall of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s historic reading room.

Orlin, who was Executive Director of the Folger Institute from 1982 until 1996, was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Folger from 2011 to 2012, working on her book The Private Life of William Shakespeare, which was published in the US today. Her book examines different aspects of Shakespeare’s life, including detailed looks at Shakespeare’s father, as well as Shakespeare’s wedding, his home, his will, and the memorial bust.

As Orlin writes, if Shakespeare commissioned the bust, “nothing we have encountered heretofore is as autobiographical as the artefact in Holy Trinity Church—a design for death that gives evidence of a life of learning and literature.” The following passage is near the start of her chapter-long discussion of this work—including a look at how well it was preserved for 130 years after his death, as his grave became an early tourist site.

Comments

I notice that the word “GANST” is included here, rather than CANST. “Canst,” meaning “can,” would make more sense. Is GANST a typo? The first letter does look more like a G, however. Is Prof. Orlin reading it as a G? Thank you.

Andrea Campana — November 17, 2021

Good eye! Today, the inscription reads “ganst” thanks to a restoration by modern painters. But Dr. Orlin writes in another part of the book not excerpted here that close inspection reveals that the original was “canst.”

Shakespeare & Beyond — November 18, 2021

I don’t know if the body of evidence has been so much unexplored as uncollated, and she does a masterful job of putting everything together to come to a novel and–to me at least–convincing thesis. (Also the height of the monument undoubtedly contributed to its preservation. The Clopton monument was within reach of every casual visitor, while Shakespeare’s is so high a ladder is necessary to touch it.)

Tom Reedy — November 20, 2021