Portrait of Anne Hathaway
The only surviving image that may depict Anne Hathaway (1555/56 - 6 August 1623), the wife of William Shakespeare, is a portrait line-drawing made by Sir Nathaniel Curzon in 1708, referred to as "Shakespear's Consort". It was probably traced from a lost Elizabethan original. The drawing is currently located in the Colgate University Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives, Hamilton, NY. The image of the young woman with a 16th-century cap and ruff is contained on the verso of the original title page in the Colgate collection's copy of the Third Folio (1663) of Shakespeare's works. Beneath it is inscribed "Delin N.C. 1708". "Delin" is an abbreviation of the Latin "delineavit", meaning "drawn by". Sir Nathaniel Curzon This edition originally belonged to Sir Nathaniel Curzon, Baronet, (1636-1719), who married Sarah, daughter of William Penn of Buckinghamshire. The work was handed down through the family to Curzon's great grandson, the Honourable Robert Curzon (1774-1863). His name is hand-printed in black ink on the top left of the initial flyleaf, "R. Curzon. 1850", and he wrote as marginalia on the second flyleaf: The manuscript verses on the next page refer to a drawing of Anne Hathaway which had been made on the