A colourful courtier? The Cobbe portrait. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Another scholar of high standing has challenged claims that the “Cobbe portrait”, soon to go on display at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, really depicts Shakespeare.

Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Professor Katherine Duncan-Jones, of Somerville College, Oxford, pours scorn on Professor Stanley Wells’s recent backing of the Cobbe. Her article adds fuel to arguments advanced in the Guardian by Dr Tarnya Cooper, curator of 16th-century collections at the National Portrait Gallery, that the Cobbe is likely to be a picture of colourful courtier Sir Thomas Overbury.

Duncan-Jones points out the portrait’s resemblance to a work well attested as a portrait of Overbury, which is “shrouded in the air-conditioned bowels of the Bodleian”.