How does Chandos portrait elucidate its Ethnic interpretations?
Because there are a lack of sources regarding Shakespeare's appearance – no written contemporary descriptions of him are known to exist, and conflicting views regarding Shakespeare's ethnicity were written about in the 19th and 20th centuries based on the painting (which themselves were based on phrenology). George Steevens said that the picture gave Shakespeare "the complexion of a Jew, or rather that of a chimney sweeper in the jaundice". According to Ben Macintyre, "Some Victorians recoiled at the idea that the Chandos portrait represented Shakespeare. One critic, J. Hain Friswell, insisted 'one cannot readily imagine our essentially English Shakespeare to have been a dark, heavy man, with a foreign expression'." Friswell agreed with Steevens that the portrait had "a decidedly Jewish physiognomy" adding that it displayed "a somewhat lubricious mouth, red-edged eyes" and "wanton lips, with a coarse expression." According to Ernest Jones, the portrait convinced Sigmund Freud that Shakespeare was French: "He insisted that his countenance could not be that of an Anglo-Saxon but must be French, and he suggested that the name was a corruption of Jacques Pierre."
phrenology Ernest Jones Ben Macintyre George Steevens Sigmund Freud