The portrait of the Moorish Ambassador to Queen Elizabeth I, dated 1600, has been installed in a custom-built display case in the Hall at Mason Croft in Stratford, the University's Shakespeare Institute.
The Ambassador, Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, who led an embassy to London in 1600 to create trade and diplomatic links between Britain and Morocco, is thought to have been the inspiration for Shakespeare's Othello.
For many years the painting has been in store, but now, thanks to a generous grant from the Alumni Fund, it hangs beside another important Shakespearean portrait, of the seventeenth century comic actor Tom Skelton.
Recent dendrochronology tests on the portrait reveal that the panels came from trees that were felled between 1588 and the late 1590s.