ABSTRACT
One of today’s best known images of William Shakespeare is the bust in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford. There Shakespeare sits, chubby and stolid, memorably described by Dover Wilson as resembling “a self-satisfi ed pork butcher”.4 A sketch of the bust made in 1634, however, by the reliably accurate engraver William Dugdale for his later Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated (1656) records a lean-faced man, with long, drooping whiskers. He holds neither quill nor book. The effi gy that we know today has been transformed beyond recognition from the original. It has even been argued recently that the bust does not depict William Shakespeare at all. More probably it represents the poet’s father, who had held, unlike his son, several civic offi ces in Stratford, and was restored to the borough council by
the time of his death in 1601. John Shakespeare had also been a substantial dealer in wool, which may explain why the original bust placed both hands upon a woolsack.5 Repeatedly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘renovations’ and ‘beautifi cations’ then altered the image until the original, as Dugdale’s sketch reminds us, was altogether effaced by the self-impositions of subsequent periods. It will be the argument of this book that something not dissimilar has happened in literary criticism’s portraits of Shakespeare’s politics. Due to the distortive self-projections of subsequent cultural history, and a perhaps insuffi cient concern to recover the originary circumstances of representation, we have lost the political face of William Shakespeare. In the light, I suggest, of modern historical scholarship, much of Shakespeare’s original political profi le may be recovered-and to rather startling effect.
