The Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-on-Avon (_continued_)—The
Shakespeare grave and monument.
WE now pass beneath the arches of the central tower, under the organ and
past the transepts, into the chancel. The chief interest is, quite
frankly, the Shakespeare monument and the graves of his family; although
even were it not for them, the building itself and the curious carvings
of the miserere seats would attract many a visitor.
It is with feelings of something at last accomplished, some necessary
pilgrimage made, that the cultured traveller stands before the monument
on the north wall and looks upon it and on the row of ledger-stones on
the floor. But the sentiments of Baconian mono-maniacs are not at all
reverent and respectful. They come also, but with hostile criticism. I
think they would like to tear down that monument, and I am quite sure
they would desire nothing better than permission to open that grave and
howk up whatever they found there. For to them Shakespeare is “the
illiterate clown of Stratford”; a very disreputable person; an impostor
who could neither write nor act, and yet assumed the authorship of works
by the greatest genius of the age, Francis Bacon. Twenty-four years ago
in his Great Cryptogram, Ignatius Donnelly exposed the fraud and unmasked
Shakespeare. Some one at that time referred in conversation with one of
Mr. Donnelly’s ingenious countrymen to “Shakespeare’s Bust.” “Yes, he
is,” rejoined that free and enlightened citizen: “he is bust and you
won’t mend him again.”
He referred to the alleged cryptogram said to be by Bacon, and purporting
to be discovered in the First Folio edition of the play, _Henry the
Fourth_. It is amusing reading, this deciphered cipher, and if we were
to believe it and Bacon to be its author, we should have no need to
revise the old estimate of Bacon, “The wisest, wittiest, meanest of
mankind.” We should, however, find it necessary to emphasise “meanest,”
because he is made to reveal himself as one who wrote treasonable plays,
and, being afraid to admit their authorship, bribed Shakespeare in a
heavy sum to take the risk and retire out of danger to Stratford-on-Avon.
It is not a convincing tale; but it is printed with much elaboration; and
Bacon is made to show an astonishingly intimate knowledge of
Shakespeare’s family and affairs. He uses very ungentlemanly, not to say
unphilosophical, language, and leaves Shakespeare without a shred of
character. He shows how suddenly this misbegotten rogue, this whoreson
knave, this gorbellied rascal with the wagging paunch and the many
loathsome diseases which have made him old before his time leaves London,
where he is in the midst of his fame as a dramatist, and retires to live
upon his ill-gotten wealth as a country gentleman in his native town of
Stratford-on-Avon. He was never an actor, and only succeeded in one
part, that of Falstaff, for which he was peculiarly suited because of his
great greasy stomach, at which, and not at the excellence of his acting,
people came to laugh. Thus says Bacon; always according to Mr. Ignatius
Donnelly, in the bi-literal cipher he persuaded himself he found. Here
we see Bacon the philosopher, in very angry, unphilosophic mood, as
abusive as any fish-fag or Sally Slapcabbage.
[Picture: Shakespeare’s Monument]
And then this cuckoo, this strutting jay, who sets up to be a gentleman
with a brand-new coat of arms presently dies, untimely, at fifty-two
years of age, just like your Shakespeares! He must have had some good
reason of his own for it; probably the better to do Bacon out of his due
fame with posterity. But Bacon was not to be outwitted. He heard early
in 1616 that Shakespeare was in failing health, and sent down on that
three days’ journey from London to Stratford-on-Avon two of Shakespeare’s
friends, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson, who were in the secret of the
authorship. They were instructed to see that if Shakespeare really
insisted upon dying, the secret should not be divulged at the time. And
Shakespeare, like the ungrateful wretch he was, did die. The diary of
the Rev. John Ward, vicar of Stratford-on-Avon, contains an entry in
1662, referring reminiscently to Shakespeare’s last days—
“Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merrie meeting, and it
seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour there
contracted.”
Donnelly suggests that Drayton and Jonson in Bacon’s interest duly saw
Shakespeare buried, and so deeply that it would be for ever unlikely he
should be exhumed, and Bacon’s secret revealed. He founds this upon a
letter discovered in 1884 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, written in
1694 by one William Hall, of Queen’s College, to a friend, Edward
Thwaites; in which, in the course of describing a visit to
Stratford-on-Avon, he states that Shakespeare was buried “full seventeen
feet deep—deep enough to secure him!” This recalls at once the reply of
one of Mr. Donnelly’s irreverent countrymen before the tomb of Nelson in
St. Paul’s Cathedral. The verger had pointed out that the Admiral’s body
was enclosed in a leaden coffin and a wooden outer covering, and then
placed in a marble sarcophagus weighing 90 tons. “I guess you’ve got
him!” exclaimed the contemplative stranger; “if ever he gets out of that,
cable me, at my expense!” No doubt Ben Jonson and Drayton guessed they
had got Shakespeare safe enough, but to make doubly sure (says Donnelly)
they invented and had engraved the famous verse which appears on the
gravestone, involving blessings upon the man who “spares these stones”
and curses upon he who moves the poet’s bones. The world has always
thought Shakespeare himself was the author of these lines. The reason
for them is found in the horror felt by Shakespeare—and reflected in
_Hamlet_—at the disturbance of the remains of the dead. In his time it
was the custom to rifle the older graves, in order to provide room for
fresh burials, and then to throw the bones from them into the vaulted
charnel-house beneath the chancel. This revolting irreverence, which, as
a long-established custom at that time, seemed a natural enough thing to
the average person, was horrific to one of Shakespeare’s exceptional
sensibilities; and he adopted not only this deep burial but also the
curse upon the sacrilegious hand that should dare disturb his rest.
There is not the least room for objection to this story; but the
Baconians know better. “_There must have been some reason_,” objects
Donnelly, in italics. There was; the reason already shown. But in
dealing with a fellow like Shakespeare you—if you are a Baconian—have to
go behind the obvious and the palpable and seek the absurd and
improbable. It does not appear what Shakespeare’s widow, his daughters,
his sons-in-law and his executors were doing while Drayton and Ben Jonson
were thus having their own Baconian way with Shakespeare’s body. They,
according to this theory, simply looked on; which we might think an
absurd thing to suppose, except that nothing is too absurd for a
Baconian, as we shall now see.
[Picture: Inscription on Shakespeare’s Grave]
Not only did Drayton and Jonson invent and get these verses engraved,
they also—more amazing still—inserted Bacon’s bi-literal cipher into
them. Now it is to be remarked here that the deeply-engraven lines upon
which so many thousands of pilgrims gaze reverently are not, in their
present form, so old as they appear to be, but were recut, and the
lettering greatly modified, about 1831. Not one person in ten thousand
of those who come to this spot is aware of the fact, and no illustration
of the original lettering exists; but George Steevens, the Shakespearean
scholar, wrote of it, about 1770, as an “uncouth mixture of small and
capital letters.” He transcribed it, and so also in their turn did
Knight and Malone. Some slight discrepancies exist between these
transcriptions, in the exact dispositions of the letters, but the actual
inscription appears to have been as under—
“Good Frend for Iesvs SAKE forbeare
To diGG T-E Dvst Enclo-Ased HE.Re.
Bleste be T-E Man Yt spares T-Es Stones
And cvrst be He Yt moves my bones.”
The hyphens between the words “the” and “thes” represent the old-time
habit of engraving some of the letters conjoined, as seen repeated in the
existing inscription illustrated here, in which the word “bleste” forms a
prominent example. In that word the letters “ste” are in like manner
conjoined, leading very many of the not fully-informed among the copyists
of inscriptions to read it “blese.”
Halliwell-Phillipps, the foremost Shakespearean authority of his age
(whom his arch-enemy, the emphatic F. J. Furnivall delighted, by the way,
to style “Hell-P”) thus refers to the re-cut inscription in his _Outlines
of the Life of Shakespeare_, 1881—
“The honours of repose, which have thus far been conceded to the
poet’s remains, have not been extended to the tombstone. The latter
had by the middle of the last century (_i.e._ about 1750) sunk below
the level of the floor, and about fifty years ago (_c._ 1831) had
become so much decayed as to suggest a vandalic order for its
removal, and in its stead _to place a new slab_, one which marks
certainly the locality of Shakespeare’s grave, and continues the
record of the farewell lines, but indicates nothing more. The
original memorial has wandered from its allotted station no man can
tell whither—a sacrifice to the insane worship of prosaic neatness,
that mischievous demon whose votaries have practically destroyed so
many of the priceless relics of ancient England and her gifted sons.”
The cipher which Donnelly, the resourceful sleuthhound, pretends he has
found in the older inscription, is destroyed by the re-arrangement in the
new. It was not, he says, the sheer illiteracy of the local mason who
cut the original letters that accounts for the eccentric appearance of
capitals where they have no business to be; for the hyphen which so oddly
divides the word “Enclo-Ased”; for the full-stops in “HE.Re.” or for the
curious choice that writes “Iesvs” in small letters and “SAKE” in large
capitals. No; it was the necessities of the cipher which accounted for
this weird “derangement of epitaphs”; and Donnelly proceeds to emulate
the conjurer who produces unexpected things from empty hats, and he
finally arrives at this startling revelation—
“Francis Bacon wrote the Greene, Marlowe, and Shakespeare plays.”
As Mark Twain—another Baconian—says, “Bacon was a born worker.” Yes,
indeed; but he understates it, if we were to believe this revelation. To
have done all this he would need to have been a syndicate.