Shakespeare: A Life (40 page)

Shakespeare's Birthplace at Stratford. Richard Greene's watercolour,
made around 1762, is one of the first pictures of John Shakespeare's
double house on Henley Street. The so-called 'Woolshop' was to the
right, and the 'Birthplace' to the left.

(Below) The earliest known drawing of Mary Arden's house at Wilmcote, in John Jordan's sketch of about 1795.

Top to bottom:
(1) From an engraving of a copy of Richard Greene's
South-east Prospect of Stratfordupon-Avon,
1746. (2) A sketch of the High or Market Cross, next to which the
glovers sold their wares. (3) Stratford's Middle Row, shortly before
it was pulled down. From the south, one rode up beside Middle Row,s
houses, before turning into Henley Street.

Elizabethan gloves, of a kind familiar to the glover John Shakespeare.

(
Below)
Between the words 'the marke' and 'of Marye Shacksper', Mary
Shakespeare wrote her marke on a deede that conveys interest in a
Snitterfield estate to Robert Webbe in 1579. Her neat design, made in
one continuous movement, shows some familiarity with a quill pen.

Macbeth and Banquo meet three 'weird sisters or feiries', in Raphael Holinshed's
Chronicles,
published in 1577 when Shakespeare was at school. (
Opposite)
Sir Humphrey Gilbert's
A Discourse of a Discovery
appeared in 1576, with a surprisingly accurate world-map despite its
view of a northwest passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Shakespeare's Consort
.
This drawing by Sir Nathaniel Curzon is dated 1708. It is less likely
to be an authentic portrait than a playful sketch of Anne Shakespeare
in her Elizabethan cap and ruff. With verses signed 'NC 1708', it is
inserted in a copy of the Third Folio (second issue, 1664), now at
Colgate University Library.

(Below) Anne Hathaway's cottage, as viewed by Samuel Ireland in
Picturesque Views on the Upper, or Warwickshire Avon, from its Source at Naseby to its Junction with the Severn at Tewkesbury
( 1795).

The Grafton Portrait. An oil painting, on oak, reputedly owned by the
dukes of Grafton and now in the John Rylands University Library of
Manchester. If the inscription at the top (Æ SUÆ 24 1 • 5 • 8 • 8 • ')
is genuine, the young man was born in the same year as Stratford's
poet. No evidence links the work with Shakespeare, but the facial
proportions are similar to those in Droeshout's engraving.

London Bridge and the city. A copy of a detail in a panoramic view of
London from the south, made by the Amsterdam engraver Claes Janszoon
de Visscher in 1616. In the foreground is St Saviour's church in
Southwark, also called St Mary Overy, the parish church for the Globe.

(Below) The Bear Garden and the Globe, from a copy of another detail in Visscher's view.