Despite being the most famous playwright in the English language, very little is known about Shakespeare’s appearance.
The Chandos portrait depicts him with a receding hairline, beard and a pierced ear, but what do we know about his height?
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How tall was William Shakespeare?
Although many paintings of Shakespeare exist, almost all are portraits and none of them depict him standing, so it is tricky to infer how tall he was.
We also don’t have any records, such as a tailor’s book or details of the costumes he wore on stage, to help us.
However, we can use research to gauge how tall he could have been. In 2017, a team from Oxford University used data on skeletal remains to calculate how the average height of Englishmen aged between 21-49 rose or fell over 2,000 years of history.
From 1400 to the early 1650s, they found that mean height increased to 173-174cm (5ft 6in-5ft 7in). With Shakespeare being born in 1564, it seems likely that he would’ve been a similar height.
And as he was no stranger to verbal attacks from his contemporaries (such as Robert Greene’s ‘upstart crow’ jab), it’s safe to say that if his height did make him stand out from the crowd, it probably have been picked up on.
Top image: The 'Chandos Portrait' of William Shakespeare, oil on canvas, attributed to John Taylor, c1610. Credit: History/Universal Images Group via Getty
