An article in today’s New York Times describes an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London:

Will the Real William Shakespeare Please Stand Up?

The first painting donated in 1856 to the new National Portrait Gallery here was of William Shakespeare, already well enshrined as the nation’s literary idol. For the gallery, the oil recorded as NPG 1 seemed like a singularly apt founding work for its collection. And now, as the museum celebrates its 150th anniversary, it is again in the limelight.

But does this so-called Chandos portrait actually depict Shakespeare? Indeed, do any of dozens of other “Shakespeare” paintings and engravings offer a true likeness of the man who was born in Stratford-on-Avon in 1564 and died there in 1616?

These are the central questions addressed in “Searching for Shakespeare,” a fascinating exhibition on view here through May 29. For this inquiry, the National Portrait Gallery has for the first time united the six oils most frequently said to portray Shakespeare. For further comparison, it is also presenting the 1623 engraving of him in the First Folio of his collected plays, as well as a plaster cast of the bust that was placed above his grave in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford sometime between 1620 and 1623.

Read on for the bullet-point version of controversies about the paintings and the difficulty in finding a credible likeness of Shakespeare.

I’m starting in on the Othello criticism now, but it’s difficult to get into. Possibly my reading comprehension skills are not amazing after all. Possibly I didn’t connect as a reader with the play. It’s a very different kind of play; domestic rather than political, the relationships of its characters carry no consequences beyond the characters themselves. Othello’s suicide may put Venice in a difficult spot as far as finding a new general, but no villages are going to get burnt and no innocents are going to die and no property is going to change hands and no loyal subjects are going to feel a change in their daily lives.

Criticisms I’ve read so far also point out that Othello keeps the closest of Shakespeare’s plays to the Aristotelian unities of action, place, and time; that it has one of the smallest casts of Shakespeare’s plays; that Othello is the most romantic hero of the plays; that if Hamlet and Othello switched situations, there wouldn’t be plays; and what I’ve mentioned above, that it is only briefly political. The lines about the Turkish fleet can easily be cut.

For some reason, it also seems that this edition’s writers generalize less and quote more lines and phrases from the play than writers did for Macbeth and Henry IV, indicating a closer engagement with the text. In my own readings, I’m taking the quotes for granted instead of remembering them in the general context of the play. Then again, I’ve read Macbeth several times in a classroom setting and Othello only once on my own, and that probably has a lot to do with it.