“Curst be he that moves my bones” reads part of the inscription above Shakespeare’s grave at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. But apparently, someone did, according to the New York Times. New evidence supports old rumors that Shakespeare’s skull was stolen from his grave by a local doctor back in 1794!
It all started in 2010, when Kevin Colls and his team were working on an excavation project near Shakespeare’s family home in Stratford. The former vicar at Holy Trinity Church approached Colls to see if he could examine the grave site, to find out if there was any truth to the rumors.
Colls and a team of researchers at the University of Birmingham dug into archives, which gave contradictory clues such as Shakespeare being buried in an off-site family crypt, and that he was buried 17 feet below the church.
In 2013, Colls and his new team from the Center of Archaeology at Staffordshire University, suggested radar imaging. The church initially resisted the idea, but eventually gave them permission to study the site. In 2014, the radar research began. Colls explained how the equipment sees what is underground:
“…passes radio waves through the ground […] Different materials or buried objects make those waves reflect back up to the surface at different rates [which] effectively produces a visual map.”
What the team found was very significant. The bottom half of Shakespeare’s grave showed the typical signs of graves left undisturbed over time. It had the same kind of air pockets which sinking graves produce, similar to the other graves on the site.
The head end, however, was completely different, indicating that the grave had been disturbed.
Again, the team dove into the archives, going through old folkloric evidence, in hopes of finding any accounts of what may have happened to Shakespeare’s skull.
This is when they found the report of a 1794 grave robbery by a doctor named Frank Chambers. A magazine with limited circulation had printed the story in the late 19th century.
The story had largely been dismissed as bogus, but when the team examined it closer, kernels of truth emerged. They checked the names of Chambers’s gravedigger accomplices, and the inns they visited before and after the deed, and finally the depth to which they were said to have excavated; and, lo and behold, all the details checked out! Colls stated:
“If the grave-robbing account is a made-up story, […] then it’s unbelievably accurate in all its details.”
As for why a doctor would rob a well-known grave, Colls thought the answer may lie with a bet. Horace Walpole (1717-97) was a politician and writer, whom:
“supposedly put a 300-pound bet that he would pay out this money if someone would bring to him the skull of Shakespeare.”
However morbid a bet, placed by a prosperous writer on the skull of another famous writer, may sound to modern day ears, there is an explanation to this too. The late 18th century saw the dawn of phrenology, a pseudoscience which measured intelligence by the size and shape of people’s skulls.
“There were a lot of thefts of famous people’s graves in an attempt to see why that person was a genius […] I imagine that Shakespeare would have been a very worthy target.”
British Channel 4 aired the documentary “Secret History: Shakespeare’s Tomb” this weekend, based on Coll’s research, and British media has created a buzz around Shakespeare’s skull. But do we know for a fact that it is stolen?
Colls himself has chosen a more caucious approach to Shakespeare’s skull, with the simple statement
“We’re reasonably confident that there’s a good chance that William’s skull is no longer there.”
While the mystery of Shakespeare’s skull remains open, the New York Times’ article ended on a chilling note. One of the rules of quantum mechanics, and maybe also journalism, is that you can’t observe something without also disturbing it.
For Shakespeare’s remains to be detected, electrons in the atoms of his bones would have to absorb energy and momentum from the radar waves and then kick it back out. So to see Shakespeare is to give him a quantum tickle.
“Curst be he that moves my bones” says the inscription. Safely embedded in the ground, the bones might not have moved much or at all, but they knew someone was watching.
So let’s turn the gaze from Shakespeare’s skull to his beloved work instead, as this year celebrates 400 years since he passed. There will be plenty of tributes and festivities to watch all over the world.
Featured image by David Jones on Wikipedia. Permission to use under Creative Commons.
