Portrait of Anne Hathaway
The only surviving image that may depict Anne Hathaway (1555/56 - 6 August 1623), the wife of William Shakespeare, is a portrait line-drawing made by Sir Nathaniel Curzon in 1708, referred to as "Shakespear's Consort". It was probably traced from a lost Elizabethan original. The drawing is currently located in the Colgate University Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives, Hamilton, NY. The image of the young woman with a 16th-century cap and ruff is contained on the verso of the original title page in the Colgate collection's copy of the Third Folio (1663) of Shakespeare's works. Beneath it is inscribed "Delin N.C. 1708". "Delin" is an abbreviation of the Latin "delineavit", meaning "drawn by". Sir Nathaniel Curzon This edition originally belonged to Sir Nathaniel Curzon, Baronet, (1636-1719), who married Sarah, daughter of William Penn of Buckinghamshire. The work was handed down through the family to Curzon's great grandson, the Honourable Robert Curzon (1774-1863). His name is hand-printed in black ink on the top left of the initial flyleaf, "R. Curzon. 1850", and he wrote as marginalia on the second flyleaf: The manuscript verses on the next page refer to a drawing of Anne Hathaway which had been made on the back of the blank 1st title ----, by my great grandfather Sir Nathaniel Curzon of Keddlestone. This drawing was almost obliterated, and the remains of it are concealed by mounting the page which was loose, in the old family copy of this book = = = The printed verses are most rare, if not unique in this form, I have never met with another specimen, they were intended for the very rare edition of 1663 printed without the seven additional plays for Philip Chetwinde This copy seems to be Chetwinde's edition as it has the title page, as well as the common one, and it has the 7 additional plays added at the end with a separate pagination As interesting is Curzon’s first attempt at penciling an explanatory note on the first blank recto, presumably made prior to the existing description above. Apparently, he started too far down the page and his script was too large for the remaining area since he ran out of space before finishing it. He erased it and started anew on the second flyleaf as reproduced above. However, a faint impression remains and George M. Friend, writing in 1972, examined the Folio first-hand and made out the following, which interestingly recounts that the image was “faintly traced.” The manuscript verses on the first leaf refer to a drawing which was very faintly traced on the title, which together with the first three leaves was loose, and were all mounted to preserve them from further damage. The first title of all is of very faint clarity [?] as is also the leaf of verses and only occurs in the 1st…[undecipherable text] The "Philip Chetwinde" mentioned was the publisher of the Third Folio. As Curzon notes, the 1664 version of his edition contained seven extra plays, listed