The "Unrecorded Portrait" of Edward Alleyn

Abstract

ARLOWE EVIDENTLY THOUGHT, CONVENTIONALLY ENOUGH, that Tamburlaine wielded his sword with his right hand and arm, conforming to the symbol of human and divine power that is a commonplace of graphic and literary expression in the Renaissance with traditional roots in medieval, classical, and biblical habits of thought. Shakespeare's delicate and tender prince, inheritor of Norway and Denmark, similarly would have worn his sword on his left hip, to be drawn by reaching across the front of the body. Thus, if the portrait of Tamburlaine which appears in Richard Knolles's The Generall Historie of the Turkes2 is, as has been claimed, a picture of Edward Alleyn in his habit as he lived-or as he lived as Tamburlaine on the stage-it is surely very odd that his sword is worn on his right, obliging him to draw and wield it with his left hand (see Fig. 1). None of the Tamburlaine legends suggest he was a southpaw, nor does anything known about Alleyn elsewhere give any hint of this possibly interesting detail. (Do left-handed actors point, beckon, and gesture with the left hand favored over the right? The Dulwich portrait of Alleyn, a rather more trustworthy witness to his appearance, seems to indicate that his favored expressive hand was his right.) Left-handed swordsmanship was evidently common enough for Saviolo to devote a chapter of his treatise to it,3 but the whole issue in Alleyn's case is probably a canard. There is a simpler explanation for the curious position of the sword in the Knolles picture. If an engraver were to copy a conventional portrait of a warrior directly onto a copper plate without making any adjustment to what he saw or without thinking carefully about the result, the print from the engraving so made would reverse the original entirely: the head would face the opposite direction, and the sword, absurdly, would be worn on the right. If this is what Lawrence Johnson, the engraver for Knolles's book, did, then the question becomes not how well he remembered Alleyn or whether the actor sat for him, and so on, but what graphic source he used. For the other portraits in the book, he certainly copied many pictures very closely, and he usually reversed them in doing so. His source for Tamburlaine may have been a picture of Alleyn, although I find this unlikely. This paper will explore the places in which he had certainly been looking to compose the series of illustrations for Knolles and in doing so will offer what I take to be a more plausible interpretation of the Tamburlaine plate. The claim that a portrait of Alleyn would be tucked away in a large learned folio on Turkish history published in 1603 is on the face of it a strange one. The claim was