Reply #10: You're right, that does look eerily like Dennis Hopper.

[Aristus]

And very much like our accepted beliefs as to how Shakespeare really looked. Unfortunately, there are only two authenticated images of WS that have come down to us, and even those are problematical. So we are left with no clear idea how he may have really looked.

One of the authenticated images is perhaps the most reproduced, Martin Droueshout's engraving of WS for the First Folio:



Ben Jonson thought it a good likeness. But few Shakespeare fans warm to that cold, uninspiring face. And it doesn't really resemble the death mask as publicized in 2006.

The other authenticated portrait is the bust on the wall near his gravesite in Trinity Church, Stratford:



Shakespeare's family approved the likeness, but most Shakespeare admirers dislike the puffy, self-satisfied image of their Bard, like a prosperous bourgeois German burgher.

Many Shakespeare fans love the Chandos Portrait, or "the one with the earring":



Here he is handsome and dashing, with the gold earring lending a piratical touch. But the portrait has never been authenticated.

And although the death mask you mentioned may have made a minor splash in 2006, it hasn't been mentioned much since, nor has the Cobb portrait, which took the world by storm in 2009, when it was announced as a portrait most likely made during Shakespeare's lifetime. (The Chandos was a woodcut, carved 6 years after WS's death, as was the bust over his tomb.)



The world marveled then over a ruddy, bright-eyed, handsome man in very expensive clothes. It was just what we wanted for our successful playwright and acting company manager. But it was never authenticated to the satisfaction of Shakespeare scholars, and the furor has died down.

So I have to treat the 2006 death mask with skepticism for the time being. But I'm glad I had a chance to look at it. B-) :hi: