German Professor Claims Shakespeare Died of Cancer
February 24, 2006
Has any author continued to generate such controversy over his works so long after his death? The Shakespeare controversies heated up again when a German academic announced that she has now authenticated four new images of the playwright that she says accurately represent what the Bard looked like. She also announced that Shakespeare died of cancer, as evidenced by a lump on his forehead.
As the National Portrait Gallery planned to reveal that only one of half a dozen claimed portraits of William Shakespeare can now be considered genuine, Prof Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel said she could prove that there were at least four surviving portraits of the playwright.
Startlingly, she said swellings close to Shakespeare's left eye, which she says are clear in several of the contested portraits, are evidence that he had lymph cancer. By dating the portraits, she said, it was likely that he had suffered for around 15 years in increasing pain and died from it.
Little is certain in Shakespeare studies - nothing is known about his death in 1616 and much of his life is a mystery - but if Prof Hammerschmidt-Hummel's claims win backing they will throw the National Portrait Gallery's three-year research project into the authenticity of Shakespeare portraits into serious doubt.
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Prof Hammerschmidt-Hummel, who teaches English literature and culture at Marburg and Mainz University, took the unusual step of using forensic tests used by German detectives to study the morphology of paintings and sculptures that are claimed to be of Shakespeare.
Measuring facial features - nose, eyes, lips, chin etc - and the relationships between them she claims that two paintings, a bust and a contested death mask of the playwright show identical characteristics.
The features are so similar, she claims, that they must be the result of sittings with Shakespeare himself.
The four images with the morphological similarities are, she reveals in a book to be published in Britain in April, the Flower Shakespeare, named after the brewery family that gave the picture to the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1895, the Chandos Shakespeare, presented to the nation by Lord Ellesmere in 1856, the terracotta Davenant Bust, which stands in the Garrick Club in London, and the Darmstadt Death Mask.
So-called because it resides in Darmstadt Castle in Germany, the mask is dismissed by many as a 19th century fake but Prof Hammerschmidt-Hummel says that the features, and most notably the impression of a swelling above the left-eye make it certain that it was taken within days of Shakespeare's death. She said: "The cancerous growths grow bigger as the dates progress.
"Everybody else has missed them but how else would an artist know they were there unless they had seen Shakespeare."
Research for the book has taken 10 years and she says pathologists, doctors, ophthalmologists, dermatologists and imaging engineers have helped her build 3D images to demonstrate the similarities.
Stanley Wells, Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Birmingham University, was not amused and called Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel's conclusions "rubbish." We don't have a clue whether her findings are rubbish or not, but they certainly are interesting.
