The Shakespeare code: why the Bard portrait ‘discovery’ is provable guff

The story of how William Shakespeare’s face was revealed through symbols in a 1597 gardening manual is a concoction worthy of Dan Brown
Has the only authentic portrait of Shakespeare been recognised, hidden in plain sight, in a 16th-century garden book? That’s the story that has swept the media this week, with huge excitement about the cracking of the “Shakepeare code”.It might be wise to pause at that hyperbolic image of cracking a code. “How one man cracked the Tudor code”, the cov