Shakespeare’s Multiple Metamorphoses: Authenticity Agonistes

The recently discovered Sanders portrait, allegedly an authentic and contemporary representation of Shakespeare, has again stirred up our pervasive anxieties about who Shakespeare is and what sort of man stands behind these highly influential plays and poems. The Sanders portrait feeds an appetite within our culture for a stable and sure foundation upon which we can ground our use of and interest in Shakespeare’s works. To be effective, this foundation must appear as necessary rather than contingent. It must appear as a fact of nature, not an artifact of culture. This double recognition—one, that we have a desire for a foundation, and two, that the foundations we desire may in fact be contingent upon our desire for them—contributes to our current ontological panic. Not being sure of the verities, we become ever more desirous of them.

This paper explores some of the manifestations of this anxiety in contemporary representations of Shakespeare, focusing primarily on Shakespearean cinematic adaptations. We conclude that it’s pointless to look for a definitive Shakespeare. No matter how deeply we dig, we will never get to get to a final uncontested center of things. The whole project of uncovering the “real” Shakespeare, whether it’s the “real” man (Shakespeare, Bacon, the Earl of Oxford etc.), the “real” biography (Honan, Rowse, Schoenbaum, etc.), the “real” texts, (prompt books, good quartos, bad quartos, etc.), is interminable, and thus like all things interminable is both endlessly tantalizing and inevitably disappointing.