The portrait has been in private hands for several centuries but the owners, the Cobbe family, didn't know the man in the painting may be Shakespeare.

The only confirmed painting of the Bard in his lifetime is known as the Cobbe portrait, and it hangs in the Hatchlands Park country house in Surrey. It was made around 1612. What do you think?

Wells said that he believes the portrait is a genuine, unique likeness of the bard. "Though it is circumstantial, [the evidence] is, in my view, overwhelming," he said.

For more than 250 years, the Cobbe portrait was a nameless head hanging obscurely in an Anglo-Irish country house outside of Dublin. Alec Cobbe glanced at it a thousand times as a boy and never ...

The person in the Chandos portrait strongly resembles the Shakespeare portrayed in the First Folio engraving. But Edmondson said this does not discredit his assertion that the Cobbe portrait forms the ...

Incredibly, the portrait has been in private hands for several hundred years but the owners -- the Cobbe family -- had no idea the man in the painting was responsible for so many enduring ...

The portrait has been in the Cobbe family for generations. The family is distantly related to Shakespeare's only known literary patron, Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton.