Looks a bit like the guy behind you at the 7-11

"Laertes, was your father dear to you?
Or are you like the painting of a sorrow,
A face without a heart?"

                                            Hamlet     (IV, vii)

Shakespeare's usurping King Claudius presents Laertes with a classic gut-check: is there enough fire in his blood to avenge his father, sent to his death at the hands of Hamlet?

Claudius plays on Laertes' ignorance of what's really going on: the king has a murder of his own to hide, and his fleeting pangs of conscience have not been quite burdensome enough to force him to give up the throne.

Shakespeare's metaphorical use of a painting, which can have the look but not the breathing soul (and hence the rage) of a man, is apt for more reasons than one. The comparison not only suits the playwright's immediate purpose well. It makes for entirely credible dialogue: secular paintings had become de rigueur items of courtly display during the European Renaissance, an era when ego was not to be denied.

Set aside the fact that the origins of Shakespeare's Hamlet can be traced at least as far back as the medieval writings of the twelfth-century Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus. Move the story's setting several centuries forward in time, and the words dovetail well with the spirit of Shakespeare's age.

Pictured above and below, at Agecroft Hall, is a 1566 portrait of William Dauntesey attributed to the "Master of the Countess of Warwick." Dauntesey was the son of one of Henry VIII's courtiers. He became the owner of Agecroft Hall when he married Anne Langley, who had inherited the property in 1561. Scratched onto a pane of glass at Agecroft is the name of their grandson William and a date: June 12th, 1645.

The Dauntesey portrait captures more than a hint of pride, perhaps giving way to smug arrogance in a man who evidently gained much of what he owned through the achievements of men who came before him, and through a marriage that brought considerable property with it. In his defense, it should be added that we know much less about William Dauntesey than we would like to know. The same can be said about Shakespeare. 

The portrait includes the Dauntesey family's coat of arms on the left, along with the Latin inscription attesting that William Dauntesey, as the son of Richard Dauntesey, has the right to the depicted coat of arms. Such heraldry was a great source of aristocratic pride, so much so that Shakespeare himself finally secured such an honor for his own family in 1596, on behalf of his father.