The First Folio · Portraiture · Arms and letters
Droeshout’s Two Left Sleeves: A Portrait and a Missing Right Arm
Look below Shakespeare’s familiar face. The doublet, sleeves and broad collar have prompted a long-running argument about how this body was assembled. Beside Lewkenor’s wounded right arm and Dallington’s appeal to the soldier-writer, Corbett asks whether those oddities carry a biographical clue.
The most familiar face in English literature confronts the reader from the title page of the First Folio. The head is large, the expression fixed, the hair unevenly disposed. Beneath it sits a broad white collar, almost a platter, separating the face from a body enclosed in a peculiar doublet. The engraving is signed “Martin Droeshout sculpsit London.”
Look below the face. Compare the shoulders, the embroidered bands and the way each sleeve joins the body. The two sides give the impression of having been assembled from different views of a garment. That is the problem behind the long-standing description of Shakespeare’s “two left sleeves”.
William Corbett’s reading brings this visual puzzle beside a specific life: Lewes Lewkenor, the soldier whose right arm and hand had been crippled in the Low Countries, and whose friends urged him to exchange the wars for the Muses. Could the portrait’s insistent left-sidedness carry a reference to that wounded writer?
Lewes Lewkenor’s right arm and hand had been crippled in the Low Countries. His friends urged him to exchange the wars for the Muses. Could the portrait’s insistent left-sidedness point towards this wounded soldier and writer?
A problem for the tailoring trade
In 1911 The Gentleman’s Tailor published “A Problem for the Trade”. The writer examined the doublet as a piece of clothing and read its construction as a combination of the left front and the left back. What presents itself as one body would therefore be wearing two views of the same side.
“A Problem for the Trade”, The Gentleman’s Tailor, vol. 46 (1911), p. 93; reproduced and discussed by John M. Rollett in “Shakespeare’s Impossible Doublet: Droeshout’s Engraving Anatomized”, Brief Chronicles, vol. II (2010), pp. 9–24.
Rollett returned to the garment in 2010. His illustrated analysis compares four features: the shoulder-wings, the front panels, the position of the sleeve embroidery and the sequence of embroidered bands. He argues that the differences fit a left-front/left-back construction and reads the resulting figure as an intentional challenge to its apparent identity.
The attraction of the argument lies in its starting point. A tailor asks how the garment would be cut and sewn. The question concerns the relationship between a pictured body and the clothing that gives it shape.
The face and the collar
The broad collar intensifies the puzzle. It creates a strong boundary beneath the head, while the contour running around the face lends itself to a reading of the features as a mask. In Corbett’s interpretation, the collar becomes almost a gravedigger’s shovel beneath a detached head: a theatrical image of the familiar face suspended above a different story.
The eye is drawn upward to the face; the doublet asks it to return to the body. The portrait supplies a name and a likeness, then leaves the reader to examine how that likeness has been put together.
A portrait revised during printing
The engraving itself has a history. The Folger Shakespeare Library identifies four states of the plate, the first three represented in copies of the First Folio. Shading was added beneath the head, followed by changes to details of the hair and eyes; a fourth state belongs to the Fourth Folio of 1685.
These impressions let the reader compare the image as a working object. Follow the shadow beneath the head and then return to the shoulders and sleeves.
Folger Shakespeare Library, “Four states of Shakespeare: the Droeshout portrait”, with comparisons of the surviving impressions.
Lewes Lewkenor’s right arm
Lewkenor’s military service left him with a damaged right arm and hand. A petition preserved in Brussels places the injury within the circumstances of his exile, religious allegiance and poverty:
Remonstrance with humility Captain Loys Lewkenor, Englishman, since the banishment from his homeland and the confiscation of his property and whole means, because he followed the Catholic Church, Apostolic and Roman, now has to his whole nation become manifestly notorious … besides several grievous injuries he has received, the lingering illness and the crippling of his right arm and hand.
Brussels petition, 1587; translated extract as transcribed in William Corbett’s The Master of the Ceremonies. The ellipsis marks omitted wording. Archival reference supplied in Corbett’s earlier article: Archives générales du Royaume, Brussels, Papiers d’État et de l’Audience, 1830/3, unfoliated; documents dated 9 and 13 February 1587 and 23 July 1588.
Petition, 1587, translated extract; ellipsis marks an omission. Archives générales du Royaume, Brussels, Papiers d’État et de l’Audience, 1830/3, unfoliated; related documents dated 9 and 13 February 1587 and 23 July 1588.
The right side of Lewes’s body had been injured in war. The left-sided garment in the portrait brings that physical history into Corbett’s authorship investigation. Read in this way, the doublet points towards the surviving arm of a soldier who became a writer.
The petition identifies the right arm and hand. Against that precise injury, the portrait’s two left sleeves acquire a particular interest: a left-sided garment facing the reader, and a soldier whose right arm had been disabled in war.
“O loss of arm”
In 1594 Robert Dallington addressed Lewes in the preliminary verses to The Resolved Gentleman. His poem joins military injury to literary encouragement. The friend who has left the wars still has gifts to offer:
Enforced cause, unfeigned love, prove both constraints in me,
To raise my Muse (O worthless Muse) to sing the worth of thee:
But what I sing is that I see, what I assured ever,
Hopes of your friends are springing still, sweet Lewes do still persevere.
And though nor arms (O loss of arm) nor Muses now are minded,
Despair not friend, men worthy know, that now the time is blinded.
And as this perfect subject shows, the subject of thy mind:
So this pretends, unto thy friends, more resteth yet behind.
Thou leav’st the wars (so wills thy friends), leave not the Muses’ name.
All is not lost, though now liked least, what left is unto fame.
And rest not here, but still run on, we longing are for more.
Great are thy gifts, yet give us still, thou lessenest not thy store.
Robert Dallington, signed “Rob. Dillington”, commendatory verse to Lewes Lewkenor’s The Resolved Gentleman (1594); spelling modernised.
“Arms” moves between warfare and the body; the parenthesis makes the injury personal. “Sweet Lewes” is urged to persevere. His friends know his worth and are waiting for more writing. Dallington presents a man whose military loss has become the occasion for a continuing literary life.
The petition records the injury; the poem remembers the “loss of arm” and urges the soldier to keep writing. Together they bring a particular man into view: Lewes, known to his friends for military service, languages and literary gifts.
“Not on his picture, but his book”
Ben Jonson’s short poem faces the engraving. It begins with the figure and ends by directing the reader away from it:
This figure that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;
Wherein the graver had a strife
With nature, to out-do the life.
Oh, could he but have drawn his wit
As well in brass as he hath hit
His face, the print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass.
But since he cannot, reader, look
Not on his picture, but his book.
Ben Jonson, “To the Reader”, First Folio (1623); text checked against The Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson, edited by Colin Burrow.
The face can be engraved; wit must be encountered in the writing. Jonson makes the reader perform a movement from image to text. In Corbett’s reading, that instruction acquires an additional force beside the anomalous doublet: examine the figure, then seek the writer in the book.
The face can be engraved; wit must be encountered in the writing. Jonson makes the reader perform a movement from image to text. Beside the anomalous doublet, that instruction acquires an additional force: examine the figure, then seek the writer in the book.
Droeshout and the London of the Folio
The portrait belongs to a London craft world of printers, publishers and engravers. The younger Martin Droeshout, baptised in London in 1601, came from a family of Flemish artists that included his father Michael, an engraver. June Schlueter’s archival study examines the family and the attribution of the Folio engraving.
Lewkenor’s career also crossed the worlds of foreign residents, London companies and theatrical hospitality. By the time the Folio appeared in 1623, Sir Lewes had spent twenty years as Master of the Ceremonies. Earlier, in January 1609, the Goldsmiths’ Company had lent him its garden-house for a play “for the solace of himself and his friends”.
The soldier who had published The Resolved Gentleman, The Estate of English Fugitives, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice and The Spanish Mandeville of Miracles was still alive when Droeshout’s portrait entered the world.
June Schlueter, “Martin Droeshout Redivivus: Reassessing the Folio Engraving of Shakespeare”, Shakespeare Survey, vol. 60 (2007), pp. 237–251. For the garden-house performance, see Lewkenor’s biography and the Goldsmiths’ Company minute quoted there.
The body beneath the name
The left-front/left-back reading has an enduring attraction because it makes the garment meaningful. The figure has been constructed; the reader is invited to notice the construction. Beside it stands the record of a writer whose damaged right arm was remembered by his friends.
That is the question this page places before the portrait: could the two left sleeves be an allusion to Lewes Lewkenor, the wounded soldier whose friends called him back to writing? The Brussels petition supplies the injured body; Dallington supplies the literary encouragement; the Folio supplies the image and Jonson’s direction to look into the book.
Could the two left sleeves be an allusion to Lewes Lewkenor? His right arm had been crippled; Dallington remembered the loss and called him back to the Muses. When the Folio appeared in 1623, Sir Lewes was still writing and serving at court. Opposite its extraordinary portrait stood Jonson’s instruction: “Look not on his picture, but his book.”
Sources and further reading
- William Corbett, The Master of the Ceremonies, discussion of Droeshout, Lewkenor’s injury and Dallington’s commendation; also “The Droeshout engraving and Lewes Lewkenor”, 26 November 2015.
- Brussels petition and related documents: Archives générales du Royaume, Papiers d’État et de l’Audience, 1830/3, unfoliated; archival reference supplied by Corbett. Translated extract follows his manuscript.
- Lewkenor’s petition and related documents, 1587–88: Archives générales du Royaume, Brussels, Papiers d’État et de l’Audience, 1830/3, unfoliated.
- Robert Dallington, commendatory verse to The Resolved Gentleman (1594), signed “Rob. Dillington”.
- “A Problem for the Trade”, The Gentleman’s Tailor, vol. 46 (1911), p. 93, as reproduced and discussed in John M. Rollett’s illustrated study, Brief Chronicles, vol. II (2010), pp. 9–24.
- Ben Jonson, “To the Reader” (1623), The Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson.
- Folger Shakespeare Library, “Four states of Shakespeare: the Droeshout portrait”.
- June Schlueter, “Martin Droeshout Redivivus”, Shakespeare Survey, vol. 60 (2007), pp. 237–251.
Read Lewkenor’s biography → · The Resolved Gentleman → · William Shakespeare →