Of Drayton's three known portraits the earliest shows him at the age of
thirty-six, and is now in the National Portrait Gallery. A look of
quiet, speculative melancholy seems to pervade it; there is, as yet, no
moroseness, no evidence of severe conflict with the world, no shadow of
stress or of doubt. The second and best-known portrait shows us Drayton
at the age of fifty, and was engraved by Hole, as a frontispiece to the
poems of 1619. Here a notable change has come over the face; the mouth
is hardened, and depressed at the corners through disappointment and
disillusionment; the eyes are full of a pathos increased by the puzzled
and perturbed uplift of the brows. Yet a stubbornness and tenacity of
purpose invests the features and reminds us that Drayton is of the old
and sound Elizabethan stock, 'on evil days though fallen.' Let it be
remembered, that he was in 1613, when the portrait was taken, in more or
less prosperous circumstances; it was the sad degeneracy, the meanness
and feebleness of the generation around him, that chiefly depressed and
embittered him. The final portrait, now in the Dulwich Gallery,
represents the poet as a man of sixty-five; and is quite in keeping with
the sunnier and calmer tone of his later poetry. It is the face of one
who has not emerged unscathed from the world's conflict, but has
attained to a certain calm, a measure of tranquillity, a portion of
content, who has learnt the lesson that there is a soul of goodness in
things evil. The Hole portrait shows him with long hair, small 'goatee'
beard, and aquiline nose drawn up at the nostrils: while the National
portrait shows a type of nose and beard intermediate between the Hole
and the Dulwich pictures: the general contour of the face, though the
forehead is broad enough, is long and oval. Drayton seems to have been
tall and thin, and to have been very susceptible of cold, and therefore
to have hated Winter and the North.[25] He is said to have shared in the
supper which caused Shakespeare's death; but his own verses[26] breathe
the spirit of Milton's sonnet to Cyriack Skinner, rather than that of a
devotee of Bacchus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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