Mr. Greenwood {183b} quotes Halliwell-Phillipps’s _Works of Shakespeare_
(1853), in which he says that the design in Dugdale’s book “is evidently
too inaccurate to be of any authority; the probability being that it was
not taken from the monument itself.” Indeed the designer is so
inaccurate that he gives the first word of the Latin inscription as
“Judicyo,” just as Oudry blunders in the Latin inscription of a portrait
of Mary Stuart which he copied badly. Mr. Greenwood proceeds: “In his
_Outlines_ Halliwell simply ignores Dugdale. His engraving was doubtless
too inconvenient to be brought to public notice!” Here Halliwell is
accused of suppressing the truth; if he invented his minute details about
the repeated reparation of the writing hand,—not represented in Dugdale’s
design,—he also lied with circumstance. But he certainly quoted a
genuine “contemporary account” of the orders for repairing and
beautifying the original monument in 1748, and I presume that he also had
records for what he says about reparations of the hand and pen. He
speaks, too, of substitutions for decayed alabaster parts of the
monument, though not in his _Outlines_; and I observe that, in Mrs.
Stopes’s papers, there is record of a meeting on December 20, 1748, at
which mention was made of “the materials” which Hall was to use for
repairs.
To me the evidence of the style as to the date of both monument and bust
speaks so loudly for their accepted date (1616–23) and against the
Georgian date of 1748, that I need no other evidence; nor do I suppose
that any one familiar with the monumental style of 1590–1620 can be of a
different opinion. In the same way I do not expect any artist or
engraver to take the engraving of the monument in Rowe’s _Shakespeare_
(1709), and that by Grignion so late as 1786, for anything but copies of
the design in Dugdale, with modifications made _à plaisir_. In Pope’s
edition (1725) Vertue gives the monument with some approach to accuracy,
but for the bald plump face of the bust presents a top-heavy and
sculpturally impossible face borrowed from “the Chandos portrait,” which,
in my opinion, is of no more authority than any other portrait of
Shakespeare. None of them, I conceive, was painted from the life.
The Baconians show a wistful longing to suppose the original bust, copied
in Dugdale, to have been meant for Bacon; but we need not waste words
over this speculation. Mr. Greenwood writes that “if I should be told
that Dugdale’s effigy represented an elderly farmer deploring an
exceptionally bad harvest, ‘I should not feel it to be strange!’ Neither
should I feel it at all strange if I were told that it was the
presentment of a philosopher and Lord Chancellor, who had fallen from
high estate and recognised that all things are but vanity.”
[Picture: From Vertue’s Engraving of the Monument (1725) (By permission
of John Murray, Esq.)]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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