2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage

Summary

Leslie Hotson’s latest book is in its way biography. It is not based directly on some new discovery in the archives but upon an elaborate study of a portrait miniature, dated 1588, that has long been known to exist in two versions by Nicholas Hilliard. Hotson contends that the sitter (who was accepted before 1700 as the Earl of Essex) is in reality William Shakespeare. With the arcane knowledge and something of the ingenuity of a Sir Thomas Browne, Hotson amasses the evidence of iconography to sustain his argument that the mysterious linked hands in the portrait signify at once the sitter’s association with Lord Strange’s Men, who may conceivably have worn some such badge, and with some mortal friend to whom the sitter is as a Mercury to an Apollo. Building upon the foundations of his own Mr. W. H. and other books, Hotson identifies the Apollo-like friend as the Young Man amongst Roses (depicted in the miniature that is Hilliard’s acknowledged masterpiece), as the Fair Friend of the Sonnets, as Mr W. H., and as William Hatcliffe, Prince of Purpoole in the Gray’s Inn revels. There are links between Shakespeare and Mercury in the minds of contemporaries who admired him.