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What? Genealogy??
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090410.
wshakespeare0411/BNStory/Entertainment/home
Here's something to possibly twist your codpieces and flip your crispines, gentlemen and ladies. …
A 76-year-old retired Bell Communications engineer from Ottawa has discovered that he is related to William Shakespeare. Yes, the Shakespeare of Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet fame, the bestower of “obscene,” “fancy-free,” “arch-villain,” “play fast and loose” and “all's well that ends well,” among many thousands of other words and expressions that enliven the English language.
The discovery is significant because Lloyd Sullivan already is famous, in a sorta/kinda way, as the inheritor and custodian of a portrait that The Globe and Mail, in a front-page story in May, 2001, unveiled as very possibly the only authentic portrait of the Bard painted during his 52 years on the planet. Gasps were heard around the world: A colonial from Upper Canada with a portrait of the world's greatest playwright wrapped in cardboard and brown paper and stored in a cupboard in his home?!?
... Just last month the mighty Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, scored international headlines when it unveiled what it claims is the only authentic portrait of Shakespeare completed during his lifetime (1564-1616). Known as the Cobbe portrait, it has been dated to around 1610 – the same date attributed to the Chandos portrait that Tarnya Cooper, curator of 16th-century portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in London, declared three years ago to be the only “probable” authentic lifetime image of Shakespeare.
Also last month, Canadian documentarian Anne Henderson launched, at Montreal's Festival international du film sur l'art, Battle of Wills, a sympathetic portrayal of Sullivan's now-$1-million, near-20-year quest to affirm the authenticity of the portrait of which he has been custodian since 1972.
What fascinates Henderson, she said in an interview, is “how much political spin underlies the stories of these portraits. People have … not really analyzed the agendas behind institutions like the National Portrait Gallery and the Birthplace Trust. At the same time, those very institutions hold Sullivan to a higher standard. He's sort of required to have the 100-per-cent-bullet-proof document, whereas they don't.”
... in 1594 Dorothy Saunders, a relative of Sullivan, married one John Throckmorton – one instance of a number of marriages involving these families over the decades. Throckmortons also married Ardens, and it was one of those aristocratic Ardens, Mary, who in 1557 became the wife of a John Shakespeare, and seven years later gave birth to a boy christened William. In 1592 another Sullivan relative, Phillipi Sanders, married one Anna Heminges. She was the cousin of none other than John Heminges, born just two years after Shakespeare in Droitwich, near Stratford-upon-Avon. John Heminges later became an actor in Shakespeare's company, and in 1623 co-edited and published the famous First Folio of the Bard's plays.
Hinks has limned many other linkages. One of the most intriguing concerns another Sullivan relative, Mathew Sanders, the third child of a Stephen Saunders – back then, spelling was anything but standardized – born in Coughton in 1624. At his death, in 1745 at age 68, Mathew Sanders was found to have a will in which he deeded to a John Sanders (relationship unspecified) “eight pictures.”
Could one of these pictures, Sullivan wonders, have been of a man named Shakspere? Could it be the very painting that has been Sullivan's obsession for decades? Hinks hopes she can find out as she strives to push back even further into the early 17th and late 16th centuries. ...
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Take that, Brits. ;)
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