An image claimed to be the only contemporary portrait of William Shakespeare has been discovered in a 16th-century book about plants. A code-cracking botanist claims to have identified the image of a man with "film star good looks" as the only contemporary portrait of the Bard. In a five-year quest with echoes of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code , Mark Griffiths is convinced that he has made "the literary discovery of the century".Griffiths was studying The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, a 1484-page volume written in 1598 by John Gerard, a famous botanist and garden designer to Elizabeth I's chief minister, Lord Burghley.The title page features a small image of an unnamed, bearded man with a laurel wreath on his head.Beneath the image is an Elizabethan cipher that Griffiths claims to have cracked - and which he says translates as "William Shakespeare".Symbols included in the portrait, in the form of flowers and vegetables, are said to be coded references to the playwright's identity."At first, I found it hard to believe that anyone so famous, so universally sought, could have hidden in plain sight for so long," Griffiths said.Griffiths was researching a biography of Gerard and quickly identified three of the men in the illustration as the author, Lord Burghley and Flemish botanist Rembert Dodoens, whose work had inspired the volume. ..