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"This is what Shakespeare looked like, drawn from life and in the prime of life," he said.
Details of his discovery are revealed in this week's issue of Country Life.
Mark Hedges, the magazine's editor, hailed it as "the literary discovery of the century".
Speaking at London's Rose Playhouse, he said the Shakespeare portrait was the "only known verifiable portrait of the world's greatest writer in his lifetime".
He added that the engraving showed the Bard aged 33 and "in his prime".
"He's written Midsummer Night's Dream and he's shortly to write Hamlet. He has a film star's good looks."

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But Professor Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, said he was "deeply unconvinced" by the theory.
"I haven't seen the detailed arguments but Country Life is certainly not the first publication to make this sort of claim," he said.
"One has seen so many claims on Shakespeare based on somebody claiming to crack a code. And nobody else has apparently been able to decipher this for 400 years.
"And there's no evidence that anybody thought that this was Shakespeare at the time."

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It is not the first time such claims have been made about a Shakespeare portrait.
In 2009, a painting known as the Cobbe portrait was put on show by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon.
The trust said it was convinced the artwork - thought to date back to 1610 - was an authentic portrait, but some critics said the picture was not of Shakespeare.

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Griffiths made his discovery when he was researching the biography of pioneering botanist John Gerard (1545-1612), author of The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. The 1,484 page book, published in 1598, is described as the largest single-volume work on plants that has been published in English. Griffiths said on Tuesday that he was aware of only 10 surviving copies of the first edition that contained the title page with an engraving by William Rogers.

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Questions 11-15 (one mark per question)

Complete sentences 11-15 with a word, phrase or number from the text.

Select the word, number or phase on the list below.

11. The botany book is ____________ years old.

12. The engraving showed Shakespeare in his ________, that is to say in his best stage.

13. The director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham was not deeply ________________.

14. There are two finger-hands of ______________.

15. John Gerard died when he was __________ years old.