The Shakespeare code

Why the Bard portrait 'discovery' is provable guff :

by Jonathan Jones

Has the only authentic portrait of Shakespeare been recognised, hidden in plain sight, in a 16th-century garden book? That's the story that has swept the media this week, with huge excitement about the cracking of the 'Shakepeare code'.

It might be wise to pause at that hyperbolic image of cracking a code. "How one man cracked the Tudor code", the cover of Country Life magazine, which broke the story, announces. Inside, scholar called Mark Griffiths does indeed reveal how he identified an image of Shakespeare in the illustrated title page of John Gerard's 1597 book The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes through a feat of code cracking that evokes, deliberately, Dan Brown's bestseller The Da Vinci Code.

But wait. The Da Vinci Code is not a history book. It is fanciful tosh. Quests for 'codes' in history and art almost always are. Before Dan Brown, there was the 1980s bestseller 'The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail' that claimed to find coded references to Rosicrucianism in the art of Poussin. Such interpretations of symbols fascinate us because they seem to reveal hidden mysteries behind appearances. But they are mostly absurd. Country Life's big Shakespeare story is no exception.

I found the evidence quoted in newspaper reports curiously slight, so I studied Griffiths's article in full. It is, I am sorry to say (after all, who doesn't want to look on Shakespeare's face?) an overexcited farrago of stretched interpretations and unprovable speculation. There is no "proof" at all here that the moustachioed man in the engraving is Shakespeare.

First, we need some perspective on the image into which Griffiths has read so much. Many Renaissance books had ornate, complex illustrated title pages like this one. They are curious and lovely things. I have looked at many up close, and I'd caution against taking any such image too seriously. They are above all intended to give the book authority and dignity. Sure, they use emblems. But if you started treating each one as a deep allegory this would be losing yourself in what is really a printer's hack job.

That's what Griffiths has done. His complex strings of argument are massive acts of overinterpretation. Thus he claims the figure at the top of the picture is Queen Elizabeth, rather than some garden goddess. It doesn't look like her, but he adduces royal flower symbolism to "prove" it is her. Let's say that's fair enough. But he then claims on the basis of flower symbolism that Elizabeth also appears in the garden at the bottom of the page. Really? But it is just a simple picture of a garden and the woman is a tiny little generic Renaissance woman.

This is wilful stuff. Renaissance art often impresses us as "symbolic" and it often is. A whole school of 20th-century art historians including EH Gombrich studied such hidden meanings. But these "iconologists" knew the dangers of getting carried away; they laid out very careful rules to keep their interpretations from becoming wild speculation. Griffiths has not followed those rules.

His theory keeps building from one hypothesis to another, using the first speculation as "evidence" for the next. This is a classic error.

By the time we get to Shakespeare, a lot of logic has been sidestepped. And now we really do enter Dan Brown territory. Starting from the heraldic tradition of the "sign of 4", he embarks on a series of elaborate moves involving Latin and coats of arms to produce the name "Shakespeare."

And that's just it - he produces this name, rather than it leaping out naturally. There's no way that conclusion would come to mind without our wanting it to be there. To see the mistaken logic you only need to ask yourself: would Shakespeare have come up as a name from this "code" if we had never heard that name before? Nope.

The 'Shakespeare code' may not even be a code at all, just a bit of fun in an old book. And besides, this image is by no means a "portrait".

For Griffiths has lost sight of what he is looking at. Even if we accept that various personages are allegorised in this curious artwork, they are not, as he claims, "portrayed". These are abstract emblematic images - not detailed portraits.

Shakespeare? That face in the garden may as well be the Green Man for all his vague features tell us about what the dramatist actually looked like.

-Guardiva UK