The only surviving image that may depict

Anne Hathaway Anne Jacqueline Hathaway (born November 12, 1982) is an American actress. List of awards and nominations received by Anne Hathaway, Her accolades include an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Primetime ...

(1555/566 August 1623), the wife of

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

, is a portrait line-drawing made by Sir Nathaniel Curzon in 1708, referred to as "Shakespear's Consort". It was probably traced from a lost Elizabethan original. The drawing is currently located in the

Colgate University Colgate University is a Private university, private college in Hamilton, New York, United States. The Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college was founded in 1819 as the Baptist Education Society of the State of New York ...

Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives, Hamilton, NY.Special Collections and University Archives, Colgate University Libraries; Shakespeare, William. ''Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, histories, and tragedies. Published according to the true original copies. The third impression. And unto this impression is added seven playes, never before printed in folio.''London, Printed for P.C., 1663. The image of the young woman with a 16th-century cap and ruff is contained on the verso of the original title page in the Colgate collection's copy of the

Third Folio The earliest texts of William Shakespeare's works were published during the 16th and 17th centuries in quarto or folio format. Folios are large, tall volumes; quartos are smaller, roughly half the size. The publications of the latter are usually a ...

(1663) of Shakespeare's works. Beneath it is inscribed "Delin N.C. 1708". "Delin" is an abbreviation of the Latin " delineavit", meaning "drawn by".

Sir Nathaniel Curzon

This edition originally belonged to Sir Nathaniel Curzon, Baronet, (1636-1719), who married Sarah, daughter of William Penn of Buckinghamshire. The work was handed down through the family to Curzon's great grandson, the Honourable Robert Curzon (1774-1863). His name is hand-printed in black ink on the top left of the initial flyleaf, "R. Curzon. 1850", and he wrote as marginalia on the second flyleaf: :The manuscript verses on the next page :refer to a drawing of Anne Hathaway which :had been made on the back of the blank 1st :title ----, by my great grandfather Sir Nathaniel :Curzon of Keddlestone. This drawing was :almost obliterated, and the remains of it are :concealed by mounting the page which was :loose, in the old family copy of this book = = = :The printed verses are most rare, if not unique :in this form, I have never met with another :specimen, they were intended for the very :rare edition of 1663 printed without the :seven additional plays for Philip Chetwinde :This copy seems to be Chetwinde's edition as :it has the title page, as well as the common :one, and it has the 7 additional plays :added at the end with a separate pagination As interesting is Curzon’s first attempt at penciling an explanatory note on the first blank recto, presumably made prior to the existing description above. Apparently, he started too far down the page and his script was too large for the remaining area since he ran out of space before finishing it. He erased it and started anew on the second flyleaf as reproduced above. However, a faint impression remains and George M. Friend, writing in 1972, examined the Folio first-hand and made out the following, which interestingly recounts that the image was “faintly traced.” :The manuscript verses on the :first leaf refer to a drawing :which was very faintly traced :on the title, which together :with the first three leaves was :loose, and were all mounted :to preserve them from further :damage. The first title of :all is of very faint clarity :as is also the leaf of verses :and only occurs in the 1st… ndecipherable text The " Philip Chetwinde" mentioned was the publisher of the Third Folio. As Curzon notes, the 1664 version of his edition contained seven extra plays, listed on an added title page, not included in earlier editions. The verses referred to are found on the third flyleaf beneath

Ben Jonson Benjamin Jonson ( 11 June 1572 – ) was an English playwright, poet and actor. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence on English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satire, satirical ...

's verse referencing

Martin Droeshout Martin Droeshout ( ; April 1601 – ) was an English engraver of Flemish people, Flemish descent, who is best known as illustrator of the The Droeshout portrait, title portrait for William Shakespeare's collected works, the First Folio of 162 ...

's famous portrait engraving of Shakespeare on the facing page.Tannenbaum (1942). Inscribed in ink by Sir Nathaniel, followed by his initials and the year 1708, they are: :This figure, that thou there seest put ::It was for Shakespear's Consort cut :Wherein the Graver had a strife ::With Nature to outdo the Life :O had he Her Complexion shewn ::As plain as He's the outline Drawn :The plate, believe me, would surpass ::All that was ever made in brass ::N.C. 1708 These lines are a pastiche of Jonson's poem about the Droeshout portrait, replicating several of its lines verbatim.Schoenbaum, Samuel, ''William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life'', 1977, Oxford University Press, p. 92

Provenance

The volume in question is in a nineteenth-century binding with the baronial seal of Robert Curzon, 14th Baron Zouche of Harringworth, stamped in the center of its front cover. It incorporates the motto LET • CURZON • HOLDE WHAT • CVRZON • HELDE • encircled around it.“Anne Hathaway Drawing Found in Colgate Shakespeare Folio.” ''Colgate Maroon''. May 8, 1942. p. 1. The implication is that the volume would remain within the Curzon family and that Robert Curzon’s notes were intended for future Curzon family members. Despite Curzon’s intentions, in the early 20th century, rare book collector James C. Colgate (23 May 1863 - 26 February 1944) purchased the volume. A longtime member of the board of trustees, he gave the Curzon Third Folio, along with 55 other volumes of Shakespeare including the First, Second and Fourth Folios, to Colgate University in 1942. The Third Folio is extremely rare, more so than the First Folio, due to a large number of copies having been destroyed in the

Great Fire of London The Great Fire of London was a major conflagration that swept through central London from Sunday 2 September to Wednesday 5 September 1666, gutting the medieval City of London inside the old London Wall, Roman city wall, while also extendi ...

in 1666. In this Third Folio on the initial flyleaf, under Robert Curzon's printed name, someone - a bookseller or Colgate - wrote in pencil several paragraphs about the volume's provenance and its unique contents, noting, "The portrait is also signed and dated 1708, but it is quite obvious that it is copied from some Elizabethan or Jacobean painting or drawing that is now unknown to exist."

Authenticity

There is no independent evidence that the original portrait traced by Curzon depicted Hathaway. Samuel A. Tannenbaum's editorial in the ''Shakespeare Association Bulletin'', discussing the Colgate acquisition in 1942, suspected that the "whole business (portrait, notation, and verses) is probably a comparatively modern fake" on the grounds of oddities in the text and handwriting, notably the fact that the ink inscription seemed to have been covering an earlier version in pencil and that parts of it seemed "meaningless or absurd". However, the bulletin reserved judgement. Later scholars have not supported the forgery theory. Assistant Professor of English George M. Friend, funded by the Colgate Research Council, conducted an investigation documented in 1972.Friend, George M. (1972) "A Possible Portrait of Anne Hathaway." ''Philobiblon'' (9) Spring 1972. pp. 42-51. After seeing the drawing in 1969,

Agnes Mongan Agnes Mongan (January 21, 1905 – September 15, 1996) was an American art historian, who served as a curator and director for the Harvard Art Museums. Career Mongan received her B.A. in 1927 from Bryn Mawr College with a degree art history and E ...

, a curator at Harvard University's

Fogg Art Museum The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Fogg Museum (established in 1895), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (established in 1903), and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (established in 1985), and four research ...

and an authority on drawings, stated that there was “no doubt about the drawing being eighteenth century” based on a January 1970 report written by Marjorie B. Cohn, Fogg’s Conservator of Works on Paper, which reads as follows:

I looked at the Shakespeare folio drawing of Anne Hathaway. The drawing looks to me entirely appropriate for the 1708 date; I don’t see any reason to think the initials and date were added later. The drawing has the sort of flatness and regularity of line I usually associate with a copy, so the tale of it being a copy of an earlier picture is reasonable enough. The ink of the inscription and the bulk of the drawing seem identical.

Finally, Friend draws the following conclusion: “Since the entire tradition of worshipping everything connected with Shakespeare was only a development of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is improbable that Sir Nathaniel or his source for the drawing were products of infatuation or that they intended to deceive. One hopes that what was at work was a genuine curiosity and an amateur’s disinterested wish to preserve a human image.” However, the fact that the lines accompanying it are a pastiche of Jonson's lines on Shakespeare led the Shakespeare scholar

Samuel Schoenbaum Samuel Schoenbaum (March 6, 1927 - March 27, 1996) was a leading 20th-century American Shakespearean biographer and scholar. Biography Born in New York, Schoenbaum taught at Northwestern University from 1953 to 1975, serving for the last four ye ...

to conclude that the drawing was probably a playful attempt to create a parallel image to that of the poet himself, though since it was almost certainly a copy of an authentic Elizabethan portrait, the "exciting" possibly that the original actually depicted Hathaway could not be ruled out. Schoenbaum states:

Did Curzon copy a portrait - long since vanished - of a young, soberly attractive woman of times past, and playfully offer it as an ''imago vero'' of Shakespeare's wife? That is more plausible (given the facetious tone of the verses) than a theory of deliberate imposition in the manner of the later fabricators; more plausible too than the infinitely exciting hypothesis that Curzon had somehow stumbled upon an authentic portrait of Anne Hathaway.

Schoenbaum also notes that Curzon seemingly did not know the name of Shakespeare's wife (as she is simply called "Shakespear's Consort"). The drawing was made a year before Nicholas Rowe published the first biography of Shakespeare in which her family name was given.

Park Honan Leonard Hobart Park Honan (17 September 1928 – 27 September 2014) was an American academic and author who spent most of his career in the UK. He wrote widely on the lives of authors and poets and published important biographies of such writers as ...

also takes the view that the drawing "is less likely to be an authentic portrait than a playful sketch of Anne Shakespeare in her Elizabethan cap and ruff."Honan, Park, ''Shakespeare: A Life'', Oxford University Press, 27 Apr 2000, p.240-241.

Notes

{{Authority control Hathaway, Anne 1708 in art Colgate University Hathaway, Anne Portraits of women 18th-century drawings

Sir Nathaniel Curzon

Provenance

Authenticity

See also

Notes