Great Regulars: Especially when it comes to artists,

we should think of Elizabethan portraits not as passport photos but as album art or book-jacket portraits.

And if we accept that these paintings were exercises in image-making--in 17th-century spin doctoring--then why not embrace the Cobbe painting? Even if Shakespeare didn't actually sit for it, this is probably how he, like any other literary figure of the time, preferred to imagine himself: aloof, sexy, mysterious. And, more to the point, this is how most of us would prefer to imagine him too.

from Charles McGrath: The New York Times: Is That Really You, Sweet Prince?

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