What happened
William Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 and two days later was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. The stone slab over the grave bears a four-line verse: “Good friend for Jesus sake forbear, / To dig the dust enclosed here. / Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be he that moves my bones.” Tradition attributes the words to the poet himself. For four centuries nobody dared to open the grave, although in the 19th century a story circulated that souvenir hunters had stolen the skull in the late 18th century. In 2016 archaeologists surveyed the grave with ground-penetrating radar without disturbing the slab. They found that the ground at the head end had been disturbed in the past – which might support the claim that the skull is missing.
Witnesses
Parishioners and clergy of Stratford; the radar survey was carried out in 2016 by a team led by archaeologist Kevin Colls for a television documentary.
Explanations and hypotheses
Such inscriptions were nothing unusual in 17th-century England: bones were regularly cleared from churchyards into charnel houses to make room for new burials, and the curse was meant to prevent that. Whether Shakespeare wrote it himself is unknown. The radar results are not conclusive – without opening the grave it is impossible to check whether the skull is gone, and the parish will not allow an exhumation. So the curse is still doing its job.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
Sources
- Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon – William Shakespeare
- Alfred Corn, Shakespeare's Epitaph (The Hudson Review, 2013)
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