From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers director.

This podcast is called Now Thy Image Duff Appear.

There's no doubt you've seen images of Shakespeare, maybe in a book, a museum, or an ad on the wall of a bus stop.

So it's safe to say. You imagine that you have a

pretty good idea of what Shakespeare looked like. Oxford University professor Catherine

Duncan Jones has written a book that invites you to question your assumptions and maybe take a new

look. As you'll hear, there really are only a few likenesses of Shakespeare where we're

pretty sure we know that the face in the image is his. She offers her theories on why that

might be and tells us what's known about where these images came from. Catherine is interviewed

by Rebecca Shear.

As far as legitimate portraits of Shakespeare go, portraits that can be

verified as actually being of Shakespeare, how many do we have? In the book, you say it's just

three? Well, being of Shakespeare, of course, is itself problematic. That is, are they taken from

life? Can they be seen as being of Shakespeare? Rarely there were only three images that were

almost certainly created by people who had seen Shakespeare and knew what he looked like,

even if he didn't actually sit necessarily for all three of those images. Well, the first question

that seems important then is, why don't we have

more? I think there are various reasons why we don't have more. One very big reason, I mean,

now live in a very visual age, and we have film and lots of reproductive processes. Shakespeare's

age wasn't so visual in that way, and there are quite a lot of writers of Elizabethan period,

of whom we don't have an image at all.

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