Graver Words were Never Written

Whether it’s the ghost that haunts your high school auditorium, or the guy who steals kidneys from unsuspecting grifters them leaves them to wake up in bathtubs full of ice in the morning, ours is a culture saturated with these entertaining little bits of Gothicism. Human beings have been inventing stories for as far back as we can trace via writing. The urban legend, in my opinion, is a sub-genre of myth or fable which uses fear as a primary function to deter people from situations which are already uncannily creepy. Being alone in an unfamiliar house at night is creepy; hence the serial killer who preys upon babysitters after the kids have gone to sleep. Going home with a strange person has a fear factor to it; hence the Charlie-the-unicorn kidney myth. Dark hallways with mirrored reflections have their own eeriness; hence Bloody Mary the killer who appears after you look in a mirror and say her name three times.

If I can make a broad sweeping generalization (and I will because it’s my blog and I’ll generalize if I want to), the Brits tend to be extremely superstitious.

If you have the good fortune to make the pilgrimage to Stratford-upon-Avon and worship at the altar of the Bard (and I hope you do someday), you will likely take a meander down the river and into Holy Trinity Church. Shakespeare’s final resting place is a simple affair. He lies front and center, nestled between his wife Anne Hathaway-then-Shakespeare and his grandson-in-law Thomas Nash.

The one extraordinary thing about Shakespeare’s grave is its epitaph.

Shot of the Epitaph on the grave as seen from the High Altar (right-side up)

Carved within the stone on an orientation that is upside down to tourists (it would be right-side-up if read from the high altar) are several lines which Shakespeare himself wrote: “Good friend, for Jesus sake forebear to dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, and cursed be he that moves my bones.”

The so-called “Shakespeare Curse” (no, we’re not talking about what happens to you if you say “Macbeth” in a theatre… that’s another post waiting to happen) has certainly kept historians and scholars at bay. First and foremost, it leaves the question of motive. Why would Shakespeare “curse” his own grave? There are several potential (and valid) explanations to this. Early modern burial practices were such that the most prime real estate in the church (that closest to the altar and thereby closest to God) were the most expensive graves. Shakespeare, front and center, pretty much underneath the altar, paid a pretty penny for his plot. The chaplains (and grave diggers) were individuals who knew how to make a dime and so would bury a buyer and leave him for fifty to a hundred years. When no more relatives were around to protest, they would exhume the grave, move the body, and re-sell the plot. Shakespeare could very well have known about this practice and implemented the curse to keep away superstitious graveyard money-grubbers.

Alternatively, there is what I like to call the “second-best-bed explanation”. In his will, Will famously left his wife Anne only one thing: the “second best bed”. As you can imagine, scholars have been chewing on this one for several hundred years. Because of this line in the will (and the fact that Shakespeare spent most of his married years in London while his wife was in Stratford, and the fact that Anne was very likely with child when the two were married, and the fact that she was much older than young William and her family was much more well off than his probable marrying prospects), scholars have painted a rocky

Shakespeare

picture of William Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway. Early Modern burial practices dictated that when a widow herself passed on, her husband’s grave would be exhumed and she would be ceremoniously dumped on top of him in as dignified a fashion as possible. The second-best-bedders claim that Shakespeare was so unhappy at home that he simply did not want Anne cramping his style in the afterlife. He thereby cursed his grave to keep well-meaning nuptially-inclined grave diggers from re-uniting him with his not-so-dearly beloved.

In yet a third camp, we find the skeptics who say that there was no Shakespeare; he was a cleverly-crafted construction of culture and, thereby, the curse is a sham created to keep anyone from exhuming the grave to find the nothing beneath. No body, no Shakespeare. Of course, the believers of this theory have completely ignored the fact that Shakespeare is buried ON the river Avon and thereby any un-decayed remains may well have been washed away by underground springs over the past four hundred years.

Once you get past the why, the how seems almost inconsequential. The idea that Shakespeare actually had supernatural forces at his disposal is egregious and worthy of fiction, but (like the rest of the things that we have imagined about Shakespeare’s life) fitting of the Man the Myth the Legend.

In any case, this curse has done what dear Will intended. The grave has remained untouched since it was dug upon his death in 1616. Recently, South African anthropologist Francis Thackeray, director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, has been stirring the pot to dig the old man up. Such a dig could reveal how the bard died, if he was (in fact) related to his daughter, and a number of other things about his life. These facts, however, are not Thackeray’s primary concern.

Apparently Thackeray headed a 2001 studywhich found residue of marijuana on certain pipe fragments unearthed from Shakespeare’s garden.

Bust of Shakespeare which hangs over the grave (incidentally this was carved by someone who knew Shakespeare in life and thereby is one of the best likenesses we have today)

To determine whether Cheech and Chong could really play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Thackeray wishes to check the Bard’s teeth, hair, and nails (if any are left).

While the entire project sounds completely ridiculous (come on, centuries of history have kept the guy underground, you really think your 4:20 theory is going to make the church break it?), I can’t help but be the most amused at Thackeray’s efforts to avoid the Shakespeare curse. Thackeray claims that Shakespeare only curses those who MOVE his bones and, due to SCIENCE, we no longer need to. In addition, Shakespeare never mentioned teeth in his epigraph, so the removal of a molar shouldn’t trigger any supernatural visitations.

Essentially, what this all boils down to is justifying one’s research to a dead guy. I suppose, in that extreme, this is yet another example of bardolotry. Oh no, don’t dig up the grave, Shakespeare might be looking down from on high waiting to smite you with a bolt of well-written prose! I’m not horribly opposed to digging up Will and I do think that there are things we could learn from a well-run grave robbing, but part of me still holds onto the magical Shakespeare tradition. There is something to be said for an ancient plot of land left undisturbed for so long. In addition, there is something to be said for the continued respect of a four-hundred-years-dead-man’s wishes. He obviously, for whatever reason, did not want to be exhumed. He’s given us so much… we could at least respect his dieing appeal.

My only request is that if you DO dig up the grave, and he DOES appear to you in a dream or in a dark hallway, could you ask him to put a rest to this whole Edward De Vere authorship question? It’s really getting old.

P.S.: Once again, all photos are shots that I took at one point or another. They are mine, copyright me, don’t steal ’em.