Focus on this artwork and discuss the Authenticity.
There is no independent evidence that the original portrait traced by Curzon depicted Hathaway. Samuel A. Tannenbaum's editorial in the Shakespeare Association Bulletin, discussing the Colgate acquisition in 1942, suspected that the "whole business (portrait, notation, and verses) is  probably a comparatively modern fake" on the grounds of oddities in the text and handwriting, notably the fact that the ink inscription seemed to have been covering an earlier version in pencil and that parts of it seemed "meaningless or absurd". However, the bulletin reserved judgement.Later scholars have not supported the forgery theory. Assistant Professor of English George M. Friend, funded by the Colgate Research Council, conducted an investigation documented in 1972.  After seeing the drawing in 1969, Agnes Mongan, a curator at Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum and an authority on drawings, stated that there was “no doubt about the drawing being eighteenth century” based on a January 1970 report written by Marjorie B. Cohn, Fogg’s Conservator of Works on Paper, which reads as follows:
 I looked at the Shakespeare folio drawing of Anne Hathaway.  The drawing looks to me entirely appropriate for the 1708 date; I don’t see any reason to think the initials and date were added later.  The drawing has the sort of flatness and regularity of line I usually associate with a copy, so the tale of it being a copy of an earlier picture is reasonable enough.  The ink of the inscription and the bulk of the drawing seem identical.
Finally, Friend draws the following conclusion: “Since the entire tradition of worshipping everything connected with Shakespeare was only a development of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is improbable that Sir Nathaniel or his source for the drawing were products of infatuation or that they intended to deceive.  One hopes that what was at work was a genuine curiosity and an amateur’s disinterested wish to preserve a human image.”However, the fact that the lines accompanying it are a pastiche of Jonson's lines on Shakespeare led the Shakespeare scholar Samuel Schoenbaum to conclude that the drawing was probably a playful attempt to create a parallel image to that of the poet himself, though since it was almost certainly a copy of an authentic Elizabethan portrait, the "exciting" possibly that the original actually depicted Hathaway could not be ruled out. Schoenbaum states:Did Curzon copy a portrait - long since vanished - of a young, soberly attractive woman of times past, and playfully offer it as an imago vero of Shakespeare's wife? That is more plausible (given the facetious tone of the verses) than a theory of deliberate imposition in the manner of the later fabricators; more plausible too than the infinitely exciting hypothesis that Curzon had somehow stumbled upon an authentic portrait of Anne Hathaway.
Schoenbaum also notes that Curzon seemingly did not know the name of Shakespeare's wife (as she is simply called "Shakespear's Consort"). The drawing was made a year before Nicholas Rowe published the first biography of Shakespeare in which her family name was given.
Park Honan also takes the view that the drawing "is less likely to be an authentic portrait than a playful sketch of Anne Shakespeare in her Elizabethan cap and ruff."
pencil Marjorie B. Cohn Nicholas Rowe Samuel A. Tannenbaum Fogg Art Museum Samuel Schoenbaum Agnes Mongan Park Honan