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The article does not make it clear why they think the portrait depicts Shakespeare. I guess you have to watch the tv show for that information?

It talks about comparison to other portraits of Shakespeare, but as far as I know there are no depictions of Shakespeare confirmed to have been made in his lifetime.

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Agreed it's not clear from the article, but I think the reason is the similarity to an engraving called the Droeshout portrait [0]

> It is one of only two works of art definitively identifiable as a depiction of the poet

> ... commentators have used the Droeshout print as a standard by which to judge other portraits alleged to depict Shakespeare.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droeshout_portrait

Yeah that was my thought exactly. It certainly looks like a lot of other so-called depictions of Shakespeare, which are all based on images we know are not images of him but of other people.

The Droeshout engraving and the Stratford monument don't fit that description, and they were accepted by Shakespeare's contemporaries.

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