Holy Trinity and the grave curse

A man who has spent his working life writing the words other men will speak knows, better than most, what words can do when they outlive the mouth that made them. He knows that the line which lands at the back of the pit will land in the back of a memory fifty years on. He knows the difference between a sentence that flatters a patron and a sentence that has work to do. And on rare occasions, when the matter is small and personal and absolutely his own, he uses the trade on his own behalf.

THE HOUSE AT NEW PLACE

William Shakespeare, gentleman of Stratford-upon-Avon, lay in the upper bedroom of New Place on the morning of the twenty-third of April, sixteen hundred and sixteen. He was fifty-two. He had been three years retired from the King's Men, the company that had played for Elizabeth and now played for James, and he had come home to the second-largest house in the borough, to the orchard, to the half-share of the parish tithes that gave him standing among the aldermen and the right of burial inside Holy Trinity church. The fever had been on him eleven days. His son-in-law, the physician John Hall, was mixing a tonic at the side-table that would not help. Anne was in the kitchen below. A blackbird sang in the apple tree, and the spring sun lay on the foot of the bed.

THE STATE OF AFFAIRS

The will was settled. Francis Collins of Warwick had drawn it in March, and he had signed each of the three sheets. Susanna was to have the property, Judith the gold, Anne the second-best bed. Heminges and Condell and Burbage were to have twenty-six shillings and eightpence each for mourning rings. The plays were not mentioned; the plays would look after themselves, or they would not, and the matter was out of his hands. What was not settled, what had not been written down anywhere, was the slab.

THE CHARNEL-HOUSE

He knew the practice of the parish because he had lived under it all his life. Holy Trinity kept its dead under the chancel and the nave; when the floor filled, the sexton went down with a spade and took up the older bones, and the bones went out across the churchyard to the charnel-house, where they lay in heaps along the walls. The charnel-house was a low stone shed against the north side of the church. He had seen it as a boy. He had seen, more than once, a skull lifted out and turned in a sexton's hand, and the sexton not knowing whose. He had written that scene. He had written it for a prince in a Danish graveyard and given the prince the skull of a jester he had known as a child, and the prince had said, Alas, poor Yorick, and the audience at the Globe had laughed and then gone quiet, because every man in the pit had been in a country churchyard and seen the same thing. The half-share of the tithes gave him the right to lie in the chancel. The right did not say how long. In fifty years the chancel would fill, and the sexton of sixteen sixty-six would come with his spade, and the bones of the gentleman who had written for the King's Men would go out to the shed with the rest.

THE HINGE

He had, by the fever's grace, the clear-headed hour it gives a man before the next slope down. He took the slate Hall had set against the bolster, and a quill, and ink, and he thought about it the way he had thought about every other line he had ever set down for hire. What stops a sexton from lifting a slab? The cost of replacing it, the grumble of the parishioners, and the fear of God. The first cost would be paid; the second grumble would die with the men who knew him; only the third would last, and only if the third was made plain enough to reach a man with a spade at six o'clock on a winter morning in a hundred years' time. Plain words, then. No Latin, though he had Latin enough. No name, because a name on a slab tells a sexton which bones are which, and a name on the slab would call the sexton to him first. No date. Iambic tetrameter, because the country ear holds tetrameter, and a final couplet, because the final couplet is the form a curse takes in English, the form the country had used since the Anglo-Saxons cut their stones. A blessing for the man who left him alone, a curse for the man who did not. The threat must land at the level of the man with the spade. He turned the slate. He wrote: Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare, To digg the dvst encloased heare. Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones, And cvrst be he yt moves my bones. He read the four lines back. The spelling was plain enough for a Stratford grave-digger of sixteen sixty. The reading was not for a scholar at the Bodleian. The metre held. The threat held. He had written it for the man with the spade.

THE INSTRUCTION

He called John Hall up from the kitchen. He gave him the slate. He told him to carry it to Thomas Greene at the parish on the Friday, and to say that the slab over the grave was to bear these lines and no name and no date. Hall took the slate down the stairs. The blackbird was still in the apple tree. Shakespeare lay back on the bolsters and used the rest of the clear-headed hour, by Hall's later report, on the small business of the household; nothing more is recorded of the writing of that day. He died in the night.

THE CHANCEL

On the morning of the twenty-fifth of April the body was carried the short distance from New Place down Church Street to Holy Trinity, in through the north porch under the avenue of limes, and laid under the chancel floor by the altar rail, on the north side, the side the tithe-holders had. The slab was cut with the four lines as he had asked, and with no name, and with no date. The bust came later, in sixteen twenty-three, the year the Folio was printed in London by Heminges and Condell. Gerard Johnson the younger, a sculptor of Southwark whose father had cut the tomb of the Earl of Southampton, set the half-length figure of the gentleman of Stratford into the north wall of the chancel above the slab, with a quill in the right hand and a sheet of paper under the left, looking out over the line of stones. It is the only contemporary likeness that exists. It has watched the chancel from above the line since.

THE STONE THAT WAS NOT LIFTED

The sextons of Stratford have come and gone for four hundred and nine years and the slab has not been lifted. The chancel filled, as he had known it would, and the older parish dead went out to the charnel-house against the north wall, and in seventeen ninety-nine the charnel-house itself was pulled down and the bones inside it scattered, but the bones under the four lines stayed where they were. Antiquaries from the eighteenth century onward asked to open the grave, to see what was inside, to settle the questions the plays had raised; and the parish, every time, refused. In two thousand and sixteen a ground-penetrating radar survey commissioned for a Channel 4 documentary found that the head end of the grave had been disturbed at some date, possibly by the eighteen-hundreds attempt at relic theft a magazine of the period reported. The curse had held for the body. The head, perhaps, had been moved by someone who could read, and was prepared to risk the line. The rest had not.

THE LAST LINE

A man who has spent his working life writing the words other men will speak knows that words outlive the mouth. He had written for queens and for clowns, for the pit and for the gallery, for one season's run and for the printer's quarto, and at the end, in the upper bedroom at New Place with eleven days of fever on him, he had written for himself. Four lines, plain, in the spelling a country sexton could read, with no name on the stone above them. The stone is in the chancel at Holy Trinity, on the north side, by the altar rail. It is worn smooth in the centre where four centuries of visitors have stood reading. The lines are still legible. The slab has not been lifted.