Grafton portrait

While Shakespeare scholar Peter Ackroyd and some other experts suggest that it is a portrait of the young William Shakespeare, the John Rylands Library has refrained from identifying the subject.^[7] A nine-month specialist analysis of the oil painting by the National Portrait Gallery concluded that there was no evidence to suggest that it could be a portrait of Shakespeare other than the age of the subject, and the initials 'WS' on the back which they concluded were added in the 19th century.^[8] Curator Tarnya Cooper also suggested that the style of clothing depicted, including a costly silk scarlet jacket, was incompatible with Shakespeare's likely financial situation in 1588.^[8][9] She says that the portrait has "fuelled the kind of Shakespeare in Love theories of the 21st Century, of a beautiful young man with a sensitive and passionate face, of a character with an incredible emotional range".^[10]

Writer Germaine Greer suggests that the subject of the portrait is the same as that of the 1585 portrait at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge which has been proposed to depict Christopher Marlowe.^[9]

• Portraits of Shakespeare