Portrait of Anne Hathaway

Shakespear's Consort
Drawing of Anne Hathaway in Curzon Family Third Folio
Artist	Nathaniel Curzon (based on unknown original)
Year	1708
Type	pencil
Location	Colgate University Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives, Hamilton, New York

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 "", meaning "drawn by".

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:

As interesting is Curzon’s first attempt at penciling an explanatory note on the first blank recto, presumably made prior to the existing description above. Apparently, he started too far down the page and his script was too large for the remaining area since he ran out of space before finishing it. He erased it and started anew on the second flyleaf as reproduced above. However, a faint impression remains and George M. Friend, writing in 1972, examined the Folio first-hand and made out the following, which interestingly recounts that the image was “faintly traced.”

The "Philip Chetwinde" mentioned was the publisher of the Third Folio. As Curzon notes, the 1664 version of his edition contained seven extra plays, listed on an added title page, not included in earlier editions. The verses referred to are found on the third flyleaf beneath Ben Jonson's verse referencing Martin Droeshout's famous portrait engraving of Shakespeare on the facing page. Inscribed in ink by Sir Nathaniel, followed by his initials and the year 1708, they are: