A portrait of Isabella de’ Medici was overpainted on to make her more conventionally attractive, after they removed the overpaint they saw how she would have actually looked
Exactly. And maybe it's British actors versus Hollywood actors, but I feel like watching BBC gives you a better idea of someone who is talented versus only good looking.
how could the most popular playwright of all time, to the point of even getting commissions from the royal fucking family, whose theatre is constantly packed, be overweight!?
How can he be the most famous artist if he wasn’t at all times a starving artist? Good art only comes from 130 lbs or less! OBVIOUSLY! That’s just history… 😂
Fr, I believe way back in his time being fat or being big in general was a sign of great wealth, so he might not fit modern beauty standards but I'm sure he did then.
Even today almost nobody fits the beauty standards bc they’re unrealistic lmao there’s nothing wrong with that. I love me a good chubby man/woman with sweet traits, so I don’t have to deal with that bs
to be fair, i feel like he would think it was extremely funny that someone angrily called his portrait "self satisfied pork butcher." he would make a sex joke about butchering someone's self satisfied pork.
He pretty much looks the same in all three. You have to assume that's what he looked like especially since his friends paid for two of them. Unless they all said, fuck it that's good enough.
Yeah, if you look at the ones paid for by people who knew him. I would say it’s a fairly safe assumption that he was balding and had the hair on the sides of his head saved out a bit and cut into a sort of blunt Bob with some curls in the hair, even it the exact length isn’t clear, both are in about the same ball bark and type of hair style. Same goes for the facial hair. Like both depict the same styling of facial hair. And those sort of details are stuff that I would expect to be pretty easy to describe to a artist that haven’t seen the subject, compared to say face shape or like the exact shape of someone’s nose besides like ‘pointy’, ‘botton nose’ etc.
@@tiannaconstantine9606Yeah is it really do hard to believe that after he became a successful writer he got a bit chubby. Especially considering the link between health and weight wasn't really established. And well pen and parchment hardly requires much exercise
I actually love the last one. He's a but chubbs but he also looks like an actual person who spent a huge portion of his life sitting at a desk writing (and then presumably eating a lot once he became successful)
@@nessesaryschoolthing But then, again, Stephen King went through a lot of starvation as a kid being raised by a single mom who worked herself to death, he would turn out gaunt.
I love that he looks like an average person in those depictions. I love the idea that all of those incredible concepts and plots and words came from someone outwardly unremarkable, and that his work is still great hundreds of years on and no one gives that much of a flying fart what he looked like.
IYAM one of the greatest foolish mistakes of literary types and historians in general is that they assume that great artists must have been upscale, rich, and gorgeous. mainly only because they want it to be true, not because it ever actually has been. Shakespeare basically wrote soap operas for base commoners. 300 years later it's all pearls and furs -- and that's a lark.
most of the people who have ever done anything remarkable, throughout history, were people who looked rather unremarkable. if you think that most important people are handsome or beautiful, you've been watching too many movies.
Exactly. None of the famous writers of today look anything as I would call handsome. Stephen King is my favorite writer but even in his youth, if I ran into him in a alley I'd be afraid he try to mug me
This makes me think of a line that Joey said in Friends, when he was teaching a class in soap opera acting:- "Now, to work in soap operas, most of you are going to have to become, much more attractive".
Plus Gerard Johnson, the sculptor of the monument, had his workshop just around the corner from The Globe Theater. It's possible Shakespeare might have commissioned it himself. About half of all funerary monuments were.
@@pokemon202668 He wasn't doing too badly. At the time of his death, he owned two houses in Stratford, including second-largest in town, a fair amount of farm land, held an annuity in the local church's tithes worth about £150k in today's money, and owned a town house in London. He may have divested his shares in The King's Men and his theaters. If his heirs could have inherited copyrights to his works, though, you're correct. King Charles would be hitting them up for a loan.
When I went to Stratford the last one is what they all say he looked like. His wife Anne Hathaway commissioned it and is thought to have said that it was fairly accurate
Always annoys me when historians get in denial about things like the appearance or character of their heroes. In the end, these people were people and like us, are flawed. These days we are healthier than ever so I bet even the most beautiful looking people then were on par with average people now simply due to health.
It makes me skeptical whenever i see an attractive artist of any kind. Of course sometimes i am wrong, and attractive people also make good art....but also they may have unfair advantages, right? But is he a serious poet/playright or a boy band? His poetry is better than Jim Morrison's any day!
i like to call them "non-newtonian" which is an actual thing for some stuff (like fluids), but when using it on people i mean "doesnt look like isaac newton" because he embodies the "historical noble smart guy" look perfectly
I remember an artist commenting on the second one, and apparently that one (which is usually the most common one seen, it’s even used on a lot of book covers) was done by an artist that tended to make all the faces of his portraits the same (so it’s likely to be fairly incorrect in the facial features like nose, eyes/eyelids, etc).
Yeah he looks fine in the bust depiction? It doesn't even look that different than the other one commissioned by his friends he's just a bit heavier which is something that would change over a lifetime.
This reminds me of a friend of mine being offended by a letter that was preserved over time announcing to one of the early churches that Paul the apostle was going to be arriving to town and had a description of what he looked like. The letter described him as short, somewhat stocky, and mostly bald among other things and my friend was just so sure that Paul, being a leader in the early church, had to look handsome like how many Catholics depict their saints in artwork, but in reality people are people and not some mystical hansom and beautiful works of art.
@@yamataichul Not all branches of the catholic church are the same and not all people who are catholic are the same. I personally am protestant bit not all protestant churches are the same either.
@@samuelplyler1511The Catholic Church does have an overall ruling body and leader though, which results in a bit more uniformity than something like Protestantism which just more or less lets you practice Christianity however you want as long as you follow some reasonable interpretation of the bible.
Honestly, I'm guessing they are all correct, and the 3rd one is most accurate, so what he looked like a pork butcher it does not mean his work is lesser :)
When I went to his grave years ago some guy from the back of the group I was in said, quite loudly, "did he just get his wisdom teeth pulled or something?". The whole group started cracking up.
My understanding of Shakespeare's milieu is that "self satisfied pork butcher" is perhaps the most believable. Oh silly elites, thinking all art was from pretty people. ESPECIALLY Shakespeare. Shakespeare was the Lenny Bruce of his day. Imagine 400 years from now historians playing Richard Pryor and calling it "the best stage performer of the 20th century" (and I'm not saying they'd be wrong)
I am fairly sure that the self satisfied pork butcher is the closest. When you consider that he was a fairly successful and prolific writer, he was probably fairly well off. His works were celebrated while he was alive so he would have been paid for them and paid fairly well at that. One of the indicators of wealth at that time was, well, how well fed you were. The pork butcher painting indicates a fairly rotund, well fed, gentleman who didn’t do a lot of strenuous, physical labor. Writing is mentally straining and Mr. Shakespeare was very prolific at that, which indicates that he did a lot of sitting.
I’m a barber and I do have to point out that A-symmetrical hairstyles have went in and out of fashion for centuries so while I do know that the guy who did that engraving was also known for being bad at his job and using himself as the model, he might have gotten the hairstyle correct.
The first portrait, known as the "Chandos" has provenance going back to William Davenant, a 17th Century poet laureate who claimed to be Shakespeare's godson. This was long before the mania for Shakespeare portraits of the mid-18th Century that spawned so many fakes. The Chandos was painted between 1600 and 1610, making the sitter the correct age to be Shakespeare. The collar identifies the sitter as a poet.
They all look like 3 different depictions of the same person by different people so none of them are far fetched. And since it doesn't actually matter what he looked like, we can just take it as read.
"no one wants to believe Shakespeare looked like.."I believe it. I don't know about the UK but the US has a huge problem with yassifying historical figures from all across the world.
Lmao my english teacher showed us a movie about Shakespeare and the actor they used to play him was basically every 37 year old woman's idea of a sexy guy it was very funny
Art thou sure of that? From what I've read, he came from farmers and married into a family with pedigree. By the time Willy was born, his father was entering the political life of Stratford. He skyrocketed, first an Ale Taster then Constable then a Burgess and then Chamberlain. So, when Willy was about 4 years old, his father reached High Bailiff -- a position equivalent to mayor, which effectively put him in charge of all public business and gave him the title of ‘Master’ Shakespeare.
“Farmer” doesn’t necessarily mean you till the land with a plow and harvest crops, it often means, historically, as it still does today, that you own enough land that you can rent it out to someone to work it, or hire people to do so. If you’re a glovemaker who owns land with a farm operating on it, you are also a “farmer”.
People have complained about the "forehead bulge" being "unnatural" and "nobody has a head shaped like that!" in the 2nd portrait you showed...but honestly, there was a guy I'd see occasionally in my homedown with that exact same forehead shape. (Kept seeing him whenever I'd take the bus down to the library, lol.)
When you look at elisabethan portraits there a lot of ppl having a phenomenally high forehead or have really eggshaped heads so it might really have been in fashion. Same with the men's hair longer on the left side - there is a famous portrait of Charles I. (though that was some time after Shakespeare) depicting him from 3 different sides as reference for a sculpter. In this picture the hair on the left side of his head is significantly longer than on the right.
@@Huorfern This is absolutely true. During the (remarkably brief) era of the "cone hat & veil" fad among Western European noblewomen, the big fashion was to have a high hairline on your brow...so women who didn't have one would shave or pluck their hairline. I used to think that was a lie, until I met a family where all the sons AND both daughters had the high forehead that would have been perfect for wearing with a henin (the name of the hat), no plucking needed!
The Wikipedia article "Portraits of Shakespeare" has a list of many portraits that are supposedly of Shakespeare, including the first two mentioned here
Well he probably looks like this but we don’t like that so in the movies we make about him the main actor needs to be 6’5 with a godly jawline and raging 6 pack abs
Weirdly the third depiction is actually bulkier/stronger than most movies Shakespeare to my eye. He looks like he had no six pack but quite the pecs, like he was the guy you'd want on your rugby team or helping you move out rather than the actors portraying him.
He might have been slimmer in he’s youth, because he didn’t come from a rich family, but in those days being fat was good because it showed you could afford to stuff yourself, therefore he probably pigged out once he made it, to show he’s wealth. That’s why I believe that he did in fact look like the last one.
I used to have a sporty little Saab automobile. It had a problem with the front end vibrating back and forth at speed. It was a Shake-steer-ian Sonett.
@@jasonescott i see what ya did there, Jason. You know, your Greek namesake was a Fair Youth. anyways, I hold dear Shakespeare’s King Lear, and now I need a beer
Shakespeare could very well have ended up looking like a self-satisfied pork butcher after gaining all his successes and wealth. Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the greatest musical geniuses of the High Baroque era, looked for all the world like a gym teacher who put on a lot of weight after a knee injury.
I'm sorry, I don't understand the problem with the last representation: a marvelous writer can't be fat as well? Is being fat such a proof of idiocy and clumsiness? Does your intelligence disappear when you hit 169 lbs?
I actually wrote a paper on that some time ago! It is a topic that is frowned upon by most scholars but I found it to be quite interesting, although in the end it of course doesn't really matter who exactly wrote his works, because their greatness remains. :) There are three main theories about who it might have been and through the research for my paper I found strong arguments against all of those and additionally several arguments for Shakespeare the Stratford-Man actually being Shakespeare the actor AND Shakespeare the writer (there are people who claim those were all different people). And after everything I read and researched for months I think that there is an extremely high probability that Shakespeare DID write his works (only leaving the slim margin for error that is always there with historical things). About the recycled stories that you mentioned: that was common practice at that time and it was nothing that only Shakespeare did. It was completely normal to take old myths and stories and transform them into something new. If you think about it a lot of that is done even today. A funny example for that is the movie "10 things I hate about you" being loosely based on Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew". Or just think about Romeo and Juliet or even Greek Mythology and the influence of all those stories on modern literature... :)
@Lucia B. Totally true about recycled stories, I don't know much about that TV series but books like The late Mattia Pascal and The sorrows of young Werther is the first that comes to mind. Yet I have doubts about Shakespeare being one person, literacy in England in 1500s was only roughly 11% of population, and most likely they were nobles or clergy. I couldn't find any record about him being either of them. An aristocrat/priest writer under a pseudonym? Or maybe multiple people? French origins? Or maybe as you've suggested it could have been two different people. It does happen to have an identical name to a stranger. All interesting topics and yet for me the doubt remains. Also if I'm not mistaken canovaccio made its debut in the 600s ... aside from church records are there any alternative ways to check upon facts?
There's actually no evidence whatsoever that Shakespeare got an education further than grammar school, even if he did go to grammar school at all! The Stratford-upon-Avon Grammar school wasn't keeping records at the time Shakespeare could have gone, and even then it is likely that he would have dropped out to go and work. There are also historical documents about the third of the pictures of Shakespeare, showing it being a man with wool rather than a man with a quill and parchment. It could very well be that later on it was changed to be a writer to build the idea that Shakespeare was from Stratford upon Avon. Not just that but there is no evidence that Shakespeare's "grave" could ever have been a grave, given that it is much too small to hold a human corpse at any point in British history, and that there is no corpse in it at all. The inscription on the monument points one toward Westminster Abbey for the burial site. On top of this, the level of detail that there is for Italian plays of Shakespeare such as Romeo and Juliet or Merchant of Venice is much too deep and accurate for one to hear offhandedly from a traveler. Therefore it is likely that whoever DID write the plays did visit Italy on one or multiple occasions. Once again, this does not point towards Shakespeare, as he lived all his life in Warwickshire and apparently traveled between there and London many times. Never to Italy! Look into it. Very unlikely that Shakespeare the Stratford-man was the same as VVilliam Shake-Speare that wrote the plays. Most likely it would be Marlowe, Bacon or De Vere that did write them.
I like how the last one was paid for by his FAMILY and historians are like "Jeez he's ugly, can't be right!" Oh right cuz genius means good looking... 😂
I am now 100% convinced that Shakespeare definitely looked like a self-satisfied pork butcher, and Shakespeare would probably find it funny.
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Refusing to accept that a long-dead important historical figure wasn't conventionally attractive is a very specific sort of petty
Very English major vibes coming from that one
That’s what I’m thinking like bro what
A portrait of Isabella de’ Medici was overpainted on to make her more conventionally attractive, after they removed the overpaint they saw how she would have actually looked
@@therealgrimreaper68 I believe that's called makeup
@@SubtotalStar850-uh8pg no, it was actually overpainted. Even the facial structure and proportions were different.
"Self satisfied pork butcher?!" said Shakespeare to himself. "I must work that into my next play."
Thoughts like this make me hope there's an afterlife, so we can enjoy the next great writing lol
@@aazhie totally 😂.
I know what shakespear looks like. 💀🦴🦴
💀💀💀
BHAHAHAHA STAPPPP 💀💀💀
A man of infinite jest 💀
"Self satisfied pork butcher"
Anyone seem The Scottish Play recently? 😁
Well he was a writer, not a top model
Exactly. And maybe it's British actors versus Hollywood actors, but I feel like watching BBC gives you a better idea of someone who is talented versus only good looking.
@@aazhie Zamn! I didn't know my homeboy Shakedick got it like that!! 🤪
You don't think he smizes?
@@aazhieHenry Cavill?
You've never seen him but yet believe he existed?
Look, if I had written the bangers that Shakespeare wrote, I would look extremely self-satisfied. I think it's accurate.
Imagine being a scholar, looking at a statue and going “nah, he has no rizz”?!??!
😂
Because of the criticism alone, I choose to believe that the real Shakespeare is the self-satisfied pork butcher
Yeah.
"Shakespeare can't be CHUBBY! How could a chubby guy write good?!"
~some Shakespeare scholar
Of course not. Tuberculosis makes you a good artist, so all good artists must look like they have tuberculosis.
@@TheFansOfFiction John Green doesn’t hate tuberculosis. John Green hates ART!
how could the most popular playwright of all time, to the point of even getting commissions from the royal fucking family, whose theatre is constantly packed, be overweight!?
How can he be the most famous artist if he wasn’t at all times a starving artist? Good art only comes from 130 lbs or less! OBVIOUSLY! That’s just history… 😂
Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss and George RR Martin come from the top of my head.
self-satisfied pork butcher. how many lifetimes could one go without hearing this 😂
Truly. More judgy than funny.
@@jakemarie828welp that’s humans don’t know how to break it to ya 🤷♀️
It's the "self-satisfied" that lifts the
"pork butcher" to the iconic upper echelons of human existence !!!
@@Amanda-ee8oh people can say what they will and I'm allowed to dislike it lol what's it to you
You say "self satisfied pork butcher".
I call hin Dionisus
It's a pity that just because he doesn't fit into our 21st century's beauty standards, people are like "Naaah can't be him."
Fr, I believe way back in his time being fat or being big in general was a sign of great wealth, so he might not fit modern beauty standards but I'm sure he did then.
Can you imagine Shakespeare as a buff ass tiktok boy?! JAJAJAJA
Even today almost nobody fits the beauty standards bc they’re unrealistic lmao there’s nothing wrong with that. I love me a good chubby man/woman with sweet traits, so I don’t have to deal with that bs
Yeah I think he looks fine, what is the problem 😂
@@kiporaan Chubby women are the best
Funnily enough Shakespeare would have probably loved that description
to be fair, i feel like he would think it was extremely funny that someone angrily called his portrait "self satisfied pork butcher." he would make a sex joke about butchering someone's self satisfied pork.
X,D
He could definitely put somebody in their place!
He absolutely would!
A true comedy of his taste
No, actually, he wouldn't, you presumptuous pervert.
He pretty much looks the same in all three. You have to assume that's what he looked like especially since his friends paid for two of them. Unless they all said, fuck it that's good enough.
Yeah, if you look at the ones paid for by people who knew him.
I would say it’s a fairly safe assumption that he was balding and had the hair on the sides of his head saved out a bit and cut into a sort of blunt Bob with some curls in the hair, even it the exact length isn’t clear, both are in about the same ball bark and type of hair style.
Same goes for the facial hair. Like both depict the same styling of facial hair.
And those sort of details are stuff that I would expect to be pretty easy to describe to a artist that haven’t seen the subject, compared to say face shape or like the exact shape of someone’s nose besides like ‘pointy’, ‘botton nose’ etc.
Yeah people are just hopeful for a more attractive picture cuz so many have fallen in love with his mind. Shallow af
@@tiannaconstantine9606Yeah is it really do hard to believe that after he became a successful writer he got a bit chubby.
Especially considering the link between health and weight wasn't really established.
And well pen and parchment hardly requires much exercise
@@jakemarie828 i suppose that’s a part of it but there are general problems w it as well. but mostly yeah they look basically the same
Or they all said, "... Looks better. Much easier to remember him by. Thanks."
I feel like he had one of those big laughs, y'know the kind that fills the room? Makes it all warm? He's that kind of guy.
He looks like a natural human being.
I actually love the last one. He's a but chubbs but he also looks like an actual person who spent a huge portion of his life sitting at a desk writing (and then presumably eating a lot once he became successful)
It's the most correct one
He wrote for a living he was always wealthy lol
yeah it's like, have you seen GRRM? you don't exactly get a lot of cardio typing
@@raspberrycrowns9494Unless you're Steven King. He writes so fast it keeps him skinny, lol
@@nessesaryschoolthing
But then, again, Stephen King went through a lot of starvation as a kid being raised by a single mom who worked herself to death, he would turn out gaunt.
I love that he looks like an average person in those depictions. I love the idea that all of those incredible concepts and plots and words came from someone outwardly unremarkable, and that his work is still great hundreds of years on and no one gives that much of a flying fart what he looked like.
IYAM one of the greatest foolish mistakes of literary types and historians in general is that they assume that great artists must have been upscale, rich, and gorgeous. mainly only because they want it to be true, not because it ever actually has been.
Shakespeare basically wrote soap operas for base commoners. 300 years later it's all pearls and furs -- and that's a lark.
most of the people who have ever done anything remarkable, throughout history, were people who looked rather unremarkable. if you think that most important people are handsome or beautiful, you've been watching too many movies.
I mean, Steven Spielberg doesn't look special either
Exactly. None of the famous writers of today look anything as I would call handsome. Stephen King is my favorite writer but even in his youth, if I ran into him in a alley I'd be afraid he try to mug me
This makes me think of a line that Joey said in Friends, when he was teaching a class in soap opera acting:-
"Now, to work in soap operas, most of you are going to have to become, much more attractive".
We really out here judging ancient people by their appearance
Shakespeare is NOT ancient! WTF!?
Nothing makes historians more enraged than the idea that Shakespeare might've actually been kind of a normal guy.
I doubt his family cheaped out on his memorial, so the last one is probably accurate.
Plus Gerard Johnson, the sculptor of the monument, had his workshop just around the corner from The Globe Theater. It's possible Shakespeare might have commissioned it himself. About half of all funerary monuments were.
He wasn’t that wealthy in life though. The vast majority of his fame came about post death
@@pokemon202668 He wasn't doing too badly. At the time of his death, he owned two houses in Stratford, including second-largest in town, a fair amount of farm land, held an annuity in the local church's tithes worth about £150k in today's money, and owned a town house in London. He may have divested his shares in The King's Men and his theaters.
If his heirs could have inherited copyrights to his works, though, you're correct. King Charles would be hitting them up for a loan.
@@Jeffhowardmeade
So he was higher middle class
@@pokemon202668
If his family had the money for a memorial then they have the money for it to be accurate..
When I went to Stratford the last one is what they all say he looked like. His wife Anne Hathaway commissioned it and is thought to have said that it was fairly accurate
The context was that the 2nd best bed was there marriage bed the best was for guests so he left her the bed they used
@@ryanrosenblum2552 cool fact, I didn’t know that
They really thought a writer who spent his whole life obsessed with making poetry and plays would look like Tom cruise 😂
Well, he WAS an actor. I can't imagine him having a great career if he was hideous.
@@Jeffhowardmeade Speak for yourself. Lots of folks have great acting careers despite not being conventionally attractive.
@@Jeffhowardmeade You clearly haven't seen Adam Sandler then
@@SunshinePIRRATA What? You don't like Jewish dudes?
@@Jeffhowardmeade Nah, I don't like Adam Sandler, I hate the oversized shorts
Shakespere can't be fat, no great writers can be fat. Kubrick, Hitchcock, Scorsese and Lucas are famously slim.
And George R. R. Martin - he's the slimmest of them all.
i actually like that third one he looks great, people are just mean
He looks like an Englishman in his 50’s, which he was when he died.
It really feels like they don't like it just because he looks a bit chubby. Other than that he looks the same as the other two.
He seems friendly I like it
@@AbiSaysThings I can hear him mouth breathing in the 3rd one
I mean he was pretty well off due to his success and at the time he lived those with wealth were often fat because they could afford to be
Always annoys me when historians get in denial about things like the appearance or character of their heroes. In the end, these people were people and like us, are flawed. These days we are healthier than ever so I bet even the most beautiful looking people then were on par with average people now simply due to health.
"Thought you'd be taller" is definitely not a throwaway remark
It makes me skeptical whenever i see an attractive artist of any kind. Of course sometimes i am wrong, and attractive people also make good art....but also they may have unfair advantages, right? But is he a serious poet/playright or a boy band?
His poetry is better than Jim Morrison's any day!
i like to call them "non-newtonian" which is an actual thing for some stuff (like fluids), but when using it on people i mean "doesnt look like isaac newton" because he embodies the "historical noble smart guy" look perfectly
it seems very easy for historians to force history into either the norms of today, or on the other end, a caricature of primitivity
So, the scholars were like "theres no way he was ugly this MUST be an inaccurate portrayal"
No but why is the “self satisfied pork butcher” description spot on 😭
From what I understand, for the 3rd one, his mother was alive at the time, and she said it looked like him.
She died in 1609, seven years before Shakespeare.
According to a quick Google, Shakespeare was 52 years old when he died. People age!
I remember an artist commenting on the second one, and apparently that one (which is usually the most common one seen, it’s even used on a lot of book covers) was done by an artist that tended to make all the faces of his portraits the same (so it’s likely to be fairly incorrect in the facial features like nose, eyes/eyelids, etc).
They all look fine to me, they all look close enough to each other so it doesn't really mater in the long run.
Agree. To me it looks like the same person at different stages of life.
@@JJoy-bk8yr Or at least, different artists making their own art of the same person.
This.. this one stung.
I think he looks rather adorable, I don’t understand why people have to be so hard on bigger people.
Yeah this was hurtful. His mind is his most attractive quality.
Yeah he looks fine in the bust depiction? It doesn't even look that different than the other one commissioned by his friends he's just a bit heavier which is something that would change over a lifetime.
@@Teajay21 exactly, I think all 3 depictions look like the same dude and are just him at different ages. I don't find any of them ugly.
It's ok because he's a man!🙄
i think the mustache on the last one looked lopsided. but honestly? that one looks the best out of all of them
This reminds me of a friend of mine being offended by a letter that was preserved over time announcing to one of the early churches that Paul the apostle was going to be arriving to town and had a description of what he looked like. The letter described him as short, somewhat stocky, and mostly bald among other things and my friend was just so sure that Paul, being a leader in the early church, had to look handsome like how many Catholics depict their saints in artwork, but in reality people are people and not some mystical hansom and beautiful works of art.
I'm eastern Orthodox, I genuinely never noticed or occurred to me that Catholics idealize saints😬😂
@@yamataichul Not all branches of the catholic church are the same and not all people who are catholic are the same. I personally am protestant bit not all protestant churches are the same either.
@@samuelplyler1511The Catholic Church does have an overall ruling body and leader though, which results in a bit more uniformity than something like Protestantism which just more or less lets you practice Christianity however you want as long as you follow some reasonable interpretation of the bible.
True but they have, over time, split ideologies a bit over time, mainly in the early to mid 20th century.
I’ve always pictured him like that. I mean, his name is PAUL lmao
"Self-satisfied pork butcher" is very classist
If it was paid for by the family that I'm going to assume the family knew what their son looks like so…
Honestly, I'm guessing they are all correct, and the 3rd one is most accurate, so what he looked like a pork butcher it does not mean his work is lesser :)
When I went to his grave years ago some guy from the back of the group I was in said, quite loudly, "did he just get his wisdom teeth pulled or something?". The whole group started cracking up.
E
My understanding of Shakespeare's milieu is that "self satisfied pork butcher" is perhaps the most believable.
Oh silly elites, thinking all art was from pretty people. ESPECIALLY Shakespeare.
Shakespeare was the Lenny Bruce of his day. Imagine 400 years from now historians playing Richard Pryor and calling it "the best stage performer of the 20th century" (and I'm not saying they'd be wrong)
Those all look like 3 portraits of the same man, which leads me to believe that’s really what he looked like
I think he really did have uneven hair. All three of them have it, having 2 different lengths on either side. XD
it was a fashion of the time
people be mad about the shakespeare face reveal. my greatest playwright can't be that ugly lol.
Right as we all know ugly people can't have any romantic thoughts or positive contributions.
Sorry to tell you this… your favorite writers aren’t going to look like your favorite actors. It’s kind of why we write what they’ll be saying
@@icarusbinns3156 sorry to tell you this, i'm making a joke
@@abiean222 I know.
I’m only half-joking
‘Weird thoughts come from behind weird faces’
He's not even ugly, it's just baldness isn't flattering to anyone.
I am fairly sure that the self satisfied pork butcher is the closest. When you consider that he was a fairly successful and prolific writer, he was probably fairly well off. His works were celebrated while he was alive so he would have been paid for them and paid fairly well at that. One of the indicators of wealth at that time was, well, how well fed you were. The pork butcher painting indicates a fairly rotund, well fed, gentleman who didn’t do a lot of strenuous, physical labor. Writing is mentally straining and Mr. Shakespeare was very prolific at that, which indicates that he did a lot of sitting.
"self satisfied pork-butcher" leave the man alone he's been dead for 400 years 😭
I’m a barber and I do have to point out that A-symmetrical hairstyles have went in and out of fashion for centuries so while I do know that the guy who did that engraving was also known for being bad at his job and using himself as the model, he might have gotten the hairstyle correct.
The first portrait, known as the "Chandos" has provenance going back to William Davenant, a 17th Century poet laureate who claimed to be Shakespeare's godson. This was long before the mania for Shakespeare portraits of the mid-18th Century that spawned so many fakes.
The Chandos was painted between 1600 and 1610, making the sitter the correct age to be Shakespeare. The collar identifies the sitter as a poet.
"Self-satisfied pork butcher" is the hardest line of the year so far.
Imagine body-shaming the dead bard
His hairs were gone due to dramatic thinking.
All 3 look very similar. Best guess is he looked a lot like that.
Tracer retired from overwatch to teach us English history. Subscribed.
He’s still getting praised centuries after his death, I recon he’s got a right to look satisfied with himself
So basically, David Mitchell is the best portrayal of him?
_"Art we the scoundrels?"_
They all look like 3 different depictions of the same person by different people so none of them are far fetched. And since it doesn't actually matter what he looked like, we can just take it as read.
Freak that last critic. LOL. Shakespeare looks like a normal person in his memorial. Did that critic want him to look like a fashion model?
"Self satisfied pork butcher", is a quote worthy of Shakespeare himself.
Didn't Droeshout also _basically_ draw everyone the with the same face 💀💀
"no one wants to believe Shakespeare looked like.."I believe it. I don't know about the UK but the US has a huge problem with yassifying historical figures from all across the world.
Lmao my english teacher showed us a movie about Shakespeare and the actor they used to play him was basically every 37 year old woman's idea of a sexy guy it was very funny
A self satisfied pork butcher is my new favourite description
That is 100% what Shakespeare would look like! He was the son of a glove maker!
Art thou sure of that? From what I've read, he came from farmers and married into a family with pedigree. By the time Willy was born, his father was entering the political life of Stratford. He skyrocketed, first an Ale Taster then Constable then a Burgess and then Chamberlain. So, when Willy was about 4 years old, his father reached High Bailiff -- a position equivalent to mayor, which effectively put him in charge of all public business and gave him the title of ‘Master’ Shakespeare.
@@Tretas.Shakespeare’s father was a still a glovemaker though, that was his profession - and most the titles he got weren’t a full time job.
“Farmer” doesn’t necessarily mean you till the land with a plow and harvest crops, it often means, historically, as it still does today, that you own enough land that you can rent it out to someone to work it, or hire people to do so. If you’re a glovemaker who owns land with a farm operating on it, you are also a “farmer”.
People have complained about the "forehead bulge" being "unnatural" and "nobody has a head shaped like that!" in the 2nd portrait you showed...but honestly, there was a guy I'd see occasionally in my homedown with that exact same forehead shape. (Kept seeing him whenever I'd take the bus down to the library, lol.)
When you look at elisabethan portraits there a lot of ppl having a phenomenally high forehead or have really eggshaped heads so it might really have been in fashion.
Same with the men's hair longer on the left side - there is a famous portrait of Charles I. (though that was some time after Shakespeare) depicting him from 3 different sides as reference for a sculpter. In this picture the hair on the left side of his head is significantly longer than on the right.
@@Huorfern This is absolutely true. During the (remarkably brief) era of the "cone hat & veil" fad among Western European noblewomen, the big fashion was to have a high hairline on your brow...so women who didn't have one would shave or pluck their hairline. I used to think that was a lie, until I met a family where all the sons AND both daughters had the high forehead that would have been perfect for wearing with a henin (the name of the hat), no plucking needed!
“self-satisfied pork butcher” is such a crazy insult
The problem with the second image is its also done by a guy who was kinda infamous for just drawing the same face on a bunch of different heads.
I prefer the pork butcher, he looks like he knows how to enjoy life 😄
Idk Mr Pork Butcher looks very Handsome
I’m betting the last was the most accurate. The family payed Im sure the artist was like well I need to see the corpse to know how to shape his face.
The sculptor's workshop was right around the corner from Shakespeare's theater.
The Wikipedia article "Portraits of Shakespeare" has a list of many portraits that are supposedly of Shakespeare, including the first two mentioned here
Well he probably looks like this but we don’t like that so in the movies we make about him the main actor needs to be 6’5 with a godly jawline and raging 6 pack abs
I blame lord Byron for instilling such ideas
Weirdly the third depiction is actually bulkier/stronger than most movies Shakespeare to my eye. He looks like he had no six pack but quite the pecs, like he was the guy you'd want on your rugby team or helping you move out rather than the actors portraying him.
Shakespeare looked just like the average comedians and I am loving it !!👌
Time to use AI to recreate his most likely appearance based on his DNA code.
Where will you get the DNA
Self-Satisfied Pork Butcher is my new fashion goal.
He might have been slimmer in he’s youth, because he didn’t come from a rich family, but in those days being fat was good because it showed you could afford to stuff yourself, therefore he probably pigged out once he made it, to show he’s wealth. That’s why I believe that he did in fact look like the last one.
I mean... writing isn't a profession traditionally associated with burning a lot of calories.
But it also doesn’t usually pay well … so, “starving writer” is often an apt stereotype until someone gets their “big break”
@@jasonescott Yeah, but wasn't Shakespeare well-famous by the time he died? Might have afforded him some of those extra calories...
@@jasonescott he bought the best house in Stratford; I'd say he was doing well
I think self satisfied pork butcher perfectly fits the vibe of shakespeares work
I trust the death bust. Those tend to be the most accurate. It. Makes total sense, he DOES come from the merchant class of his time.
Poets actually tend to be endomorphs- to have slower metabolism and tendency to snack lol
Hey, I resemble that comment!
Self-satisfied pork butcher is a very apt description.
"Self satisfied pork butcher" is the kind of creative insult Shakespeare would appreciate.
We seem to know a few things for certain just based on all 3 pictures.
He was bald on top, hair on sides, mustache, and goatee.
Gosh it would be great if we could shake-clear the confusion of this situation
You're welcome
you’ve given me a feeling I can’t shake, dear
I used to have a sporty little Saab automobile. It had a problem with the front end vibrating back and forth at speed. It was a Shake-steer-ian Sonett.
@@jasonescott i see what ya did there, Jason. You know, your Greek namesake was a Fair Youth.
anyways, I hold dear Shakespeare’s King Lear, and now I need a beer
Shakespeare could very well have ended up looking like a self-satisfied pork butcher after gaining all his successes and wealth.
Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the greatest musical geniuses of the High Baroque era, looked for all the world like a gym teacher who put on a lot of weight after a knee injury.
We do know. His name is now Will Hathaway. He’s still married to Anne.
Love the pork butcher portrait though. Feels way more realistic and is the only one with a verified stamp of approval from someone that knew him.
I'm sorry, I don't understand the problem with the last representation: a marvelous writer can't be fat as well? Is being fat such a proof of idiocy and clumsiness? Does your intelligence disappear when you hit 169 lbs?
I've been taught at Uni that Shakespeare might be a myth, it could actually be multiple authors and some of the stories are actually recycled
I actually wrote a paper on that some time ago! It is a topic that is frowned upon by most scholars but I found it to be quite interesting, although in the end it of course doesn't really matter who exactly wrote his works, because their greatness remains. :)
There are three main theories about who it might have been and through the research for my paper I found strong arguments against all of those and additionally several arguments for Shakespeare the Stratford-Man actually being Shakespeare the actor AND Shakespeare the writer (there are people who claim those were all different people).
And after everything I read and researched for months I think that there is an extremely high probability that Shakespeare DID write his works (only leaving the slim margin for error that is always there with historical things).
About the recycled stories that you mentioned: that was common practice at that time and it was nothing that only Shakespeare did. It was completely normal to take old myths and stories and transform them into something new. If you think about it a lot of that is done even today. A funny example for that is the movie "10 things I hate about you" being loosely based on Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew". Or just think about Romeo and Juliet or even Greek Mythology and the influence of all those stories on modern literature...
:)
@Lucia B. Totally true about recycled stories, I don't know much about that TV series but books like The late Mattia Pascal and The sorrows of young Werther is the first that comes to mind. Yet I have doubts about Shakespeare being one person, literacy in England in 1500s was only roughly 11% of population, and most likely they were nobles or clergy. I couldn't find any record about him being either of them. An aristocrat/priest writer under a pseudonym? Or maybe multiple people? French origins? Or maybe as you've suggested it could have been two different people. It does happen to have an identical name to a stranger. All interesting topics and yet for me the doubt remains. Also if I'm not mistaken canovaccio made its debut in the 600s ... aside from church records are there any alternative ways to check upon facts?
There's actually no evidence whatsoever that Shakespeare got an education further than grammar school, even if he did go to grammar school at all! The Stratford-upon-Avon Grammar school wasn't keeping records at the time Shakespeare could have gone, and even then it is likely that he would have dropped out to go and work.
There are also historical documents about the third of the pictures of Shakespeare, showing it being a man with wool rather than a man with a quill and parchment. It could very well be that later on it was changed to be a writer to build the idea that Shakespeare was from Stratford upon Avon.
Not just that but there is no evidence that Shakespeare's "grave" could ever have been a grave, given that it is much too small to hold a human corpse at any point in British history, and that there is no corpse in it at all. The inscription on the monument points one toward Westminster Abbey for the burial site.
On top of this, the level of detail that there is for Italian plays of Shakespeare such as Romeo and Juliet or Merchant of Venice is much too deep and accurate for one to hear offhandedly from a traveler. Therefore it is likely that whoever DID write the plays did visit Italy on one or multiple occasions. Once again, this does not point towards Shakespeare, as he lived all his life in Warwickshire and apparently traveled between there and London many times. Never to Italy!
Look into it. Very unlikely that Shakespeare the Stratford-man was the same as VVilliam Shake-Speare that wrote the plays. Most likely it would be Marlowe, Bacon or De Vere that did write them.
‘Self-satisfied pork butcher’ lmfaooo you can’t make this up
Thanks for the info as always, nerdy British person! Passion for knowledge and understanding has always been my favorite
I like how the last one was paid for by his FAMILY and historians are like "Jeez he's ugly, can't be right!" Oh right cuz genius means good looking... 😂
All Shakespeare wanted was butts on seats. He didn't give a crap. The man was as much business as he was art.
Self-satisfied pork butcher is the most savage roast of all time, that critic is a genius!
I love Shakespeare the bear! He looks so happy!
I like that arguably the most accurate source is disputed just because "ehh we don't want him to have looked like that"
People need to accept that Shakespeare looked like the guy at your local dive bar who can drink a pbr in less than 5 seconds
From another thing I saw today, “he looks *medically* British.”
Self-Satisfied Pork Butcher sounds like A shakespearean insult.
I mean... we don't even really know how many people Shakespeare was. 👀
But there is Shakespeare’s death mask to know exactly what he looks like.
Love these snippets of history, done perfectly, concise and to the point , well done
I love this because it infers that you know what Shakespeare looked like