Shakespeare's funerary monument

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Shakespeare funerary monument in Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-upon-Avon was broken into in 1973. Intruders lifted the carved figure from its niche and tried to chip away at the inscription below it. Local police believed the thieves were hunting for Shakespeare manuscripts, rumoured to be hidden inside the monument itself. Sam Schoenbaum, who examined the effigy afterward, said it had suffered only "very slight damage". That break-in is one moment in a long and strange history for this monument. It stands on the north wall of the chancel, in the same church where Shakespeare was baptised and buried two days after his death. Carved in pale blue limestone, it shows a demi-figure of the poet gripping a real quill pen in one hand. A sheet of paper rests on a cushion in the other. Who carved that face, whether it truly shows how Shakespeare looked, and why so many critics found it faintly absurd are questions this documentary follows.

• 2. A Face In Stone

  ›

  Ornamental slashes decorate the doublet on the effigy, which was probably painted scarlet when the monument was new. Underneath, the loose gown was black, the eyes were hazel, and the hair and beard were auburn. Restorers have retouched these colours many times since. This demi-figure is one of only two representations definitely accepted as accurately portraying William Shakespeare's physical appearance.

  Strapwork rises above the poet's head to a heraldic shield bearing Shakespeare's own coat of arms. On one side sits an allegorical figure representing Labour, holding a spade. On the other sits Rest, holding an inverted torch and a skull. Figures like these were common from the early to the mid 17th century, most often used to memorialize scholars, divines, and other learned professions.

  Two columns of black polished marble support the entablature and coat of arms above the bust. The two putti and the skull are carved from sandstone, and the columns' capitals and bases are gilded sandstone. The effigy itself, together with its cushion, was cut from a single piece of bluish Cotswold limestone. Black touchstone forms the inlaid panels set into the surrounding stonework.

  Exactly when this assembly of marble, sandstone, and limestone first went up on the chancel wall, no surviving record says outright.

• 3. Dating An Undated Monument

  ›

  No record states precisely when the monument was erected, though it must have gone up before 1623. That year, the First Folio of Shakespeare's collected plays was published, prefaced by a poem from Leonard Digges referring to "thy Stratford moniment".

  John Weever transcribed the monument's Latin inscription and the nearby grave epitaph in an undated manuscript of his own. H. R. Woudhuysen's analysis of that manuscript suggests Weever made his visit to Stratford not much later than 1617-18.

  Weever's transcription preserved words that a visitor can still read beneath the effigy today, words that have puzzled scholars for centuries since.

• 4. Words For The Passerby

  ›

  Beneath the effigy, an epitaph in Latin runs alongside a poem in English. The Latin's first line translates as "A Pylian in judgement, a Socrates in genius, a Maro in art", comparing Shakespeare to Nestor, the wise king of Pylos, to the philosopher Socrates, and to the poet Virgil, whose cognomen was Maro. Its second line reads "The earth covers him, the people mourn him, Olympus possesses him", invoking Mount Olympus, home of the gods.

  Stanley Wells is one of the few biographers to comment directly on the English poem. He says it somewhat cryptically calls on the passer-by to pay tribute to Shakespeare's greatness as a writer, though he admits the poem's closing lines are hard to parse. Wells suggests they may mean that Shakespeare's own writing outranks the sculptor's craft, reducing it to mere service, or that all art after Shakespeare serves his genius the same way. He also notes that the poem never names Shakespeare directly, and that the monument is not, strictly speaking, a tomb at all, which suggests it may once have been designed as part of a free-standing tomb.

  Smaller lettering beneath the poem gives the date of Shakespeare's death in abbreviated Latin. It states that he died in 1616, in his 53rd year, on the 23rd of April, the only exact calendar date carved anywhere on the monument.

• 5. First Impressions On Paper

  ›

  Sir William Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, published in 1656, was the first book to illustrate and discuss the monument in print. Dugdale wrote that Stratford "gave birth and sepulture to our late famous Poet Will. Shakespere, whose Monument I have inserted in my discourse of the Church." The engraving, almost certainly the work of Wenceslaus Hollar, was based on a rough sketch Dugdale made himself, probably in 1649, likely paid for by Shakespeare's granddaughter and last living descendant, Elizabeth Barnard.

  Both the sketch and the engraving look strikingly different from the monument as it appears today. The poet is not shown holding a quill or paper at all, and the cushion appears tipped up against his body instead. The art critic Marion Spielmann said the effect made it look as though Shakespeare were pressing the cushion to his groin, "which, for no reason, except perhaps abdominal pains, is hugged against what dancing-masters euphemistically term the 'lower chest'". Later engravers went on copying Hollar's print for decades.

  In 1725, Alexander Pope's edition of Shakespeare's works carried the first engraving of the monument's later, familiar look, made two years earlier by George Vertue. A drawing Vertue made of the monument in situ also survives. Around the same period, John Aubrey wrote an account, probably in the early 1670s though possibly based on older observations, describing Shakespeare in "a Tawny satten doublet I thinke pinked and over that a black gowne like an Under-gratuates at Oxford", with sleeves that hung loose rather than covering the arms.

  Vertue's engraving captured the monument only a couple of decades before workmen would take the whole figure down for a very different kind of attention.

• 6. Restoration And Repainting

  ›

  The monument underwent its first major restoration in 1748-49, organised by Parson Joseph Greene, master of the Stratford grammar school. To help pay for the work, Greene arranged the first recorded performance of a Shakespeare play in Stratford. On the 9th of September 1746, John Ward's theatre company performed Othello in the Town Hall, with every penny of the receipts going toward the restoration.

  Writing soon afterward, Greene described how the effigy was taken down to be, in his words, "cleansed of dust &c". He insisted almost nothing had actually changed, except that the architraves, originally alabaster, were now replaced with marble; the old colouring was revived, and the gilding renewed. Before the work began, John Hall, a limner from Bristol hired to carry it out, painted a picture of the monument on pasteboard, and Greene had a plaster cast made of the effigy's head.

  Shakespeare's quill pen has been stolen and replaced more than once since that restoration, and the paint has needed renewing again and again. In 1793, the Shakespeare scholar Edmond Malone persuaded the vicar to paint the entire monument white, matching the Neoclassical taste fashionable at the time. That white paint stayed in place until 1861, when it was stripped away and the monument was repainted using colours recovered from beneath it.

  Stripping away Malone's white paint in 1861 exposed a face whose true origins scholars were only just beginning to argue about.

• 7. Search For A True Face

  ›

  Tradition credits the sculptor Gerard Johnson with carving the monument, but the historian Lena Cowen Orlin challenges that attribution. Orlin argues the effigy was more likely modelled from life by Gerard's brother, Nicholas Johnson. She goes further, proposing that Shakespeare himself may have commissioned the monument during his own lifetime, directly from Nicholas Johnson.

  In the 1850s, the scientist Richard Owen advanced a very different theory about the face. He argued that a death mask found in Germany, discovered by Ludwig Becker in 1849 and known as the Kesselstadt Death Mask, had probably been used by Gerard Johnson as his model. Becker had claimed the mask was Shakespeare's because it resembled an alleged Shakespeare portrait he had bought two years earlier. The painter Henry Wallis even depicted an imagined scene of Ben Jonson showing the death mask to the sculptor.

  Measurements eventually undid Owen's theory. The bony structure of the forehead on the mask and on the monument figure did not correspond, and the idea was largely discredited. Even so, the biographer Park Honan argues that the monument's face does look as though it was modelled on some kind of mask. Honan wrote that "His eyes stare, the face is heavy and the nose is small and sharp", adding that shrinkage of the muscles and nostrils may explain why "the upper lip is elongated".

  Whatever model the sculptor actually worked from, it did nothing to stop later critics from mocking the results.

• 8. Unkind Critics

  ›

  Thomas Gainsborough judged the effigy a "silly smiling thing". J. Dover Wilson, a critic and biographer of Shakespeare, once said the Bard's effigy makes him look like a "self-satisfied pork butcher". Sir Nikolaus Pevsner placed the monument within a broader type representing a scholar or divine, and described this particular likeness as "a self-satisfied schoolmaster".

  Not every scholar reached for such harsh words. Schoenbaum called the monument a typical example of Jacobean Renaissance style. Spielmann defended it too, arguing that its "stiff simplicity" suited a sepulchral sculpture inside a church better than a more lifelike depiction ever could.

  Before any restorer touched the stone in 1748, Greene had a plaster cast made of the effigy's head, a private record of that face that has outlasted every coat of paint applied since.