It is the kind of argument William Shakespeare himself would have enjoyed. On one side is a claim that a famous portrait of the Bard has gone missing and been replaced by a fake. On the other side, the claim is dismissed as nonsense.
The row is over a painting of Shakespeare known as the Flower portrait. Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel from the University of Mainz, Germany, examined the portrait in 1996 and pronounced it an authentic representation of Shakespeare, painted in 1609. In 2006, the National Portrait Gallery in London exhibited what it believes to be the same portrait, but what…
