The Droeshout portrait

Droeshout portrait
The Droeshout portrait of William Shakespeare as it appears on the title page of the first folio. This is the final, or second state, of the engraving.
Artist	Martin Droeshout
Year	1623
Type	engraving
Dimensions	34 cm × 22.5 cm (13 in × 8.9 in)

The Droeshout portrait or Droeshout engraving is a portrait of William Shakespeare engraved by Martin Droeshout as the frontispiece for the title page of the First Folio collection of Shakespeare's plays, published in 1623. It is one of only two works of art definitively identifiable as a depiction of the poet; the other is the statue erected as his funeral monument in Shakespeare's home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. Both are posthumous.

While its role as a portrait frontispiece is typical of publications from the era, the exact circumstances surrounding the making of the engraving are unknown. It is uncertain which of two "Martin Droeshouts" created the engraving and it is not known to what extent the features were copied from an existing painting or drawing. Critics have generally been unimpressed by it as a work of art, although the engraving has had a few defenders, and exponents of the Shakespeare authorship question have claimed to find coded messages within it.

The portrait exists in two "states", or distinct versions of the image, printed from the same plate by Droeshout himself. Examples of the first state are very rare, existing in only four copies. These were probably test printings, created so that the engraver could see whether some alterations needed to be made. The overwhelming majority of surviving copies of the First Folio use the second state, which has heavier shadows and other minor differences, notably in the jawline and the moustache.

Later copies of the second state, with minor retouching, were also printed from the plate by Thomas Cotes in 1632, for Robert Allot's Second Folio, a new edition of the collected plays. It was also reused in later folios, although by then the plate was beginning to wear out and was heavily re-engraved. The original plate was still being used into the 1660s, and then disappears. Already in 1640 William Marshall had copied and adapted the design on a new plate for John Benson's edition of Shakespeare's sonnets. All subsequent engraved reprintings of the portrait were made by later engravers copying the original printed image.