Focus on this artwork and discuss the Critical  evaluations.
The poor modelling and the clumsy relationship between the head and the body have led many critics to see the print as a poor representation of the poet. J. Dover Wilson called it a "pudding faced effigy".  Sidney Lee wrote that "The face is long and the forehead high; the one ear which is visible is shapeless; the top of the head is bald, but the hair falls in abundance over the ears." Samuel Schoenbaum was equally dismissive:In the Shakespeare engraving a huge head, placed against a starched ruff, surmounts an absurdly small tunic with oversized shoulder-wings ... Light comes from several directions simultaneously: it falls on the bulbous protuberance of forehead – that "horrible hydrocephalous development", as it has been called – creates an odd crescent under the right eye and (in the second state) illuminates the edge of the hair on the right side.
Northrop Frye said that the portrait makes Shakespeare "look like an idiot." Cooper notes that "the art of printmaking in England was underdeveloped and there were relatively few skilled engravers. Yet even by the less exacting standards observed in England, the Droeshout engraving is poorly proportioned." Benjamin Roland Lewis observes that "virtually all of Droeshout's work shows the same artistic defects. He was an engraver after the conventional manner, and not a creative artist."Not all critics have been so harsh. The 19th-century writer James Boaden wrote that "to me the portrait exhibits an aspect of calm benevolence and tender thought, great comprehension and a kind of mixt feeling, as when melancholy yields to the suggestions of fancy". He added that his friend John Philip Kemble thought this "despised work" was more characteristic of Shakespeare than any other known portrait. More recently, Park Honan has written that "if the portrait lacks the 'sparkle' of a witty poet, it suggests the inwardness of a writer of great intelligence, an independent man who is not insensitive to the pain of others."
Northrop Frye J. Dover Wilson James Boaden Sidney Lee Samuel Schoenbaum John Philip Kemble Park Honan