The face of genius?

Is this the face that launched a thousand books? Some experts now believe so, stirring up an ancient and bedeviling controversy: Do we have any image of the living William Shakespeare?

Those who accept the authenticity of the so-called Sanders portrait (pictured above) date it to 1603, when Shakespeare would have been 39, on the verge of writing his great tragic masterpieces. Besides their reading of the art-historical evidence, some experts confess they also like the portrait, and especially the hint of wit in its mischievous smile — “a male minx,” one expert says, “with his knowing eyes and upturned mouth.”

They want it to be real, author Stephanie Nolen says, preferring it to the drab but famous posthumous engraving of the writer in the initial edition of his works, the First Folio of 1623. If the newly acclaimed painting is genuine, it would be the only portrait of the living Shakespeare in existence. But is it, indeed, the real thing?

To answer the question, Miss Nolen, a correspondent for the Toronto Globe & Mail, has spun a gem of a yarn about the Canadian family named Sanders that owns the painting. The Sanders clan has been asking for recognition of the portrait’s authenticity — off and on and without any luck — since about 1909, when an immigrant ancestor is said to have brought it over from England.

Miss Nolen’s involvement was totally accidental. One day in May 2001, her mother told her that her father, out jogging that morning, had met a neighbor who said his family had a genuine portrait of Shakespeare stored away. Miss Nolen didn’t think much of it, but the next day casually mentioned it to her editor. As some editors are wont to do, he went bonkers and demanded she get to the bottom of it.

So, once home, she started doing research. “The life of a newspaper reporter is a repeated exercise in quickly learning enough to write authoritatively about something you previously knew nothing about,” she notes. The fact that she knew little about Shakespeare until that point did not deter her. Nor does it diminish her narrative.

Miss Nolen has a key guide in her learning process, Lloyd Sullivan, a Sanders on his mother’s side, who decided in the mid-1990s that the family had not been dogged enough in finding out the truth about the painting and thereby strengthening or weakening its claims of authenticity.

Much of the book is an account of Mr. Sullivan’s sometimes successful and sometimes unsuccessful encounters with scientists, art historians and literary professors across several continents. Mr. Sullivan is the book’s hero, the Sanders’ Don Quixote.

Experts have been, until recently, quick to brush the Sanders portrait aside as just another fake. One of the main reasons for skepticism from connoisseurs in the arts and museum community about any so-called portrait of Shakespeare is the long history of forgery that began when “Bardolatry” — the tradition of Shakespeare worship — reached its height, in the late 18th century.

Starting then, Europe and America saw a flood of fake portraits as the romantic worship of Shakespeare elevated him above all writers, even above philosophers and other sages. But the experts concluded in all cases the portraits were fakes, made for profit.

A consensus developed that the only genuine portrait was the Folio’s, engraved by an undistinguished artist named Martin Droeshout (there is also a bust in the Stratford-upon-Avon cemetery modeled on it). Droeshout worked from the memory of Shakespeare’s fellow actors, John Hemmings and Henry Condell, who published the First Folio (an unprecedented tribute to a dramatist in an age when plays were not even considered literature).

Unquestionably genuine, the portrait is also dull, without any hint of liveliness of mind or mood. But then Droeshout, not very skilled to begin with, was depicting a dead man from the memory of two elderly friends.

“Shakespeare’s Face” is both history and mystery; it’s just about the best book for the general public on Shakespeare in several decades. Miss Nolen’s history includes accounts of the many known forged portraits of Shakespeare (some of which were on display in 2003 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington) and of “how they were outed.” She also covers associated biographical myths and legends about Shakespeare and, of course, the controversy over the authorship of the plays and the claim that no actor could have written such learned drama.

Miss Nolen’s mystery, which she expertly draws out over the length of the book, is whether the evidence that she and Mr. Sullivan uncover — geneaological, art-historical, paleographic, chemical, physical, forensic and so forth — proves one way or the other that the Sanders painting is genuine, or not.

Can we date the Sanders family back to England and the 17th century? Do their descendants include the Canadians who own the painting today? Were any of their English ancestors painters, as Lloyd Sullivan claims about one John Sanders, the putative portraitist? How would John Sanders have known Shakespeare? How and why did he keep possession of the portrait?

Can experts spot signs of forgery? Is the long left earlobe in the new picture, so similar to that in the Folio portrait, a sign of the picture’s authenticity or expert fakery?

My favorite chapter in the book concerned dendochronology — the science of dating when the wood was cut from the tree that made up the panel on which the portrait was painted. One very nonchalant German expert consulted puts it near 1600.

There is yet a third layer to the book. Between accounts of her own search for evidence and Mr. Sullivan’s, Miss Nolen interpolates essays by scholars — but don’t flee; they are actually written in English and engage the subject in a lively fashion. Contributors include Marjorie Garber of Harvard (author of the “minx” line above), Andrew Gurr of the Globe Research Centre, and Stanley Wells of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Though their matter is scholarly, their manner is accessible. They provide fascinating, often feisty reviews of the cultural landscape of Bardolatry. The alternating rhythm of Miss Nolen’s voice and theirs sustains and keeps fresh the narrative momentum of the book. It is scholarly journalism at its best.

One outside expert, Jonathan Bate of the University of Liverpool, engages a parallel issue that emerged with Bardolatry — the claim that William Shakespeare never wrote “Shakespeare’s” plays. To those of this opinion, the issue of the authenticity of the portrait is a sideshow.

Proponents of the view that Shakespeare was not the author of plays commonly attributed to him formerly nominated Francis Bacon as the real author, then Christopher Marlowe, and lately Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. (Not surprisingly, some of the conspiracists bitterly complained when Miss Nolen wrote her scoop on the portrait’s existence for the Globe & Mail.)

As Mr. Bate shows, no contemporary ever doubted the actor wrote the plays; it was only much later that the “anti-Stratfordians” began to spread their tale of a mysterious conspiracy to conceal the true authorship. “The myth of Stratford as a backwater devoid of all learning was born in the eighteenth century as another incidental consequence of the apotheosis of Shakespeare,” Mr. Bate writes. In truth, it had one of the best grammar schools in England, with a curriculum in the classics that would match Harvard’s today.

But if Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, did anyone named Sanders paint Shakespeare? You have to keep reading to the end to find out Miss Nolen’s answer to the question. She cleverly surveys all the varied evidence before coming to a conclusion. She has composed less a whodunit than a what-is-it, and I’d spoil her suspense by spilling the beans.

Mr. Gurr of the Globe Research Centre says that the truth about the portrait, though interesting in our age of celebrity, makes not one jot of difference to an understanding of the plays. There is, besides, the point made by Shakespeare himself: “There is no art / To read the mind’s construction in the face.” To which, after reading Miss Nolen’s book, I can only say, “Yes, but it’s fun.”

Tom O’Brien is managing editor of Arts Education Policy Review at Heldref Publications.