state of Droeshout's print. Taking the view that if it were the source, the first state would be closest, he concluded that it was a copy from the print. In 2005 chemical analysis proved the portrait to be a 19th-century fake painted over an authentic 17th-century image. Critical evaluations The poor modelling and the clumsy relationship between the head and the body have led many critics to see the print as a poor representation of the poet. J. Dover Wilson called it a "pudding faced effigy". Sidney Lee wrote that "The face is long and the forehead high; the one ear which is visible is shapeless; the top of the head is bald, but the hair falls in abundance over the ears." Samuel Schoenbaum was equally dismissive: Northrop Frye said that the portrait makes Shakespeare "look like an idiot." Cooper notes that "the art of printmaking in England was underdeveloped and there were relatively few skilled engravers. Yet even by the less exacting standards observed in England, the Droeshout engraving is poorly proportioned." Benjamin Roland Lewis observes that "virtually all of Droeshout's work shows the same artistic defects. He was an engraver after the conventional manner, and not a creative artist." Not all critics have been so harsh. The 19th-century writer James Boaden wrote that "to me the portrait exhibits an aspect of calm benevolence and tender thought, great comprehension and a kind of mixt feeling, as when melancholy yields to the suggestions of fancy". He added that his friend John Philip Kemble thought this "despised work" was more characteristic of Shakespeare than any other known portrait. More recently, Park Honan has written that "if the portrait lacks the 'sparkle' of a witty poet, it suggests the inwardness of a writer of great intelligence, an independent man who is not insensitive to the pain of others." Conspiracy theories Proponents of the Shakespeare authorship question, who assert that someone other than Shakespeare was the real author of the plays attributed to him, have claimed to find hidden signs in the portrait pointing to this supposed secret. Indeed, Dover Wilson suggested that the poor quality of the Droeshout and funeral effigy images are the underlying reason for "the campaign against 'the man from Stratford' and the attempts to dethrone him in favour of Lord Bacon, the Earl of Derby, the Earl of Oxford, or whatever coroneted pretender may be in vogue at