The Shakespeare code: why the Bard portrait ‘discovery’ is provable guff

The story of how William Shakespeare’s face was revealed through symbols in a 1597 gardening manual is a concoction worthy of Dan Brown

Has the only authentic portrait of Shakespeare been recognised, hidden in plain sight, in a 16th-century garden book? That’s the story that has swept the media this week, with huge excitement about the cracking of the “Shakepeare code”.

It might be wise to pause at that hyperbolic image of cracking a code. “How one man cracked the Tudor code”, the cover of Country Life magazine, which broke the story, announces. Inside, scholar called Mark Griffiths does indeed reveal how he identified an image of Shakespeare in the illustrated title page of John Gerard’s 1597 book The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes through a feat of code cracking that evokes, deliberately, Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code.

Historians knew the dangers of getting carried away, and laid out careful rules [to avoid] wild speculation

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