The divine pork butcher

Wednesday, 25th April 2007

For some reason, snootiness I expect, I had never been to Stratford-upon-Avon before. On a chilly day at the end of March, with only a scattering of Japanese pilgrims about, the place is a revelation. How upon the Avon it is, the church so close to the river that a gale could blow its great East window into the water. When you stand at the altar rails, there slap in front of you is Shakespeare’s tomb and, ranged alongside, the tombs of his wife, daughter Susanna and son-in-law. And up above you to the left, there is the coloured bust of him, the one that the critic Dover Wilson complained makes him look like a self-satisfied pork butcher; if so, a pork butcher who has just come back from a fortnight in Marbella, because the 18th-century overpainting has gone an ineradicable brown. Despite this, he looks pretty much the same, except fuller in the face, as he does in the Droeshout frontispiece to the First Folio: the same domy brow, thyroid eyes and John-Major upper lip. The opposite page in the Folio has the little doggerel verse by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s long-standing rival and drinking partner, which certifies Droeshout’s version as a fair likeness, just as his family must have okayed the bust which was erected only a couple of years after his death.