Shakespeare Unfound(ed)?
There has been much fuss in London this week about a “new portrait” of Shakespeare, allegedly painted in his lifetime and showing a bright, young, expensively dressed courtier, a hero much easier on the eye than the traditional bald old man of a million schoolbooks. Top scholars have enthusiastically backed its authenticity and the media have made much of the picture-opportunity. Sadly, in the latest TLS, this bubble suffers a bit of a bursting. The figure in the “Cobbe portrait” is, indeed, far too young and richly outfitted to be a mere playwright: a theatrical man who cared for his life kept his costumes for the stage in Jacobean England. Comparison with a picture hidden in the cellars of Oxford's Bodleian Library suggests that Cobbe's man was instead an eminent personage, not much remembered now but scandalous gossip-fodder in his day: Sir Thomas Overbury, murdered mysteriously in the Tower of London, and central to the sexual and political intrigues at court in Shakespeare's last years.
Maurice Bowra, the great Oxford gossip
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Not far from Overbury's Oxford resting place is Wadham College, where Maurice Bowra, model for the social-climbing tutor in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, presided for three decades. Bowra saw civilization as a bubble with himself at Wadham at its heart. Sharing his spiritual space were the Greek poets Sappho and Pindar, and his civilized contemporaries: Isaiah Berlin, Kenneth Clark, and Hugh Gaitskell. Left outside were TS Eliot, WH Auden, and all scientists. The former master of nearby Balliol, Anthony Kenny, whose intellectual life has extended considerably further than Bowra's from the confines of college life, reviews a new biography by Leslie Mitchell which vividly recaptures “both the attractive and repellent features of an extraordinary academic icon.”
John Rawls: On My Religion
Later this year, Harvard University Press is to publish A Brief Inquiry Into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, a forgotten senior thesis written by the then 21-year-old John Rawls in 1942. It was previously known that the greatest political philosopher of his age had once considered studying for the priesthood. But there had been little to show how religious belief had helped to shape his own bible of liberalism, ATheory of Justice. Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel hail the appearance of a work in which Rawls emphasizes “the importance in the lives of the faithful of religious convictions,” describes them as “non-negotiable” and “binding absolutely” and requires any theory of justice to take them seriously.
Peter Stothard is Editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He was Editor of The Times of London from 1992-2002. He writes on ancient and modern literature and is the author of Thirty Days, a Downing Street diary of his time with British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, during the Iraq War.
