Maybe any bronze funerary figure would have transmogrified into a cursed object in the home of the Headless Horseman.
Shakespeare’s Grave
CURRENT LOCATION:
HOLY TRINITY CHURCH, STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, ENGLAND
SIGNIFICANCE:
BURIAL SITE OF THE BARD OF AVON
AGE:
∼400 YEARS
William Shakespeare knew how to sling a curse. Some form of that word appears 197 times in his forty or so plays, if I’m using Open Source Shakespeare correctly. But we don’t need to scour the collected dramatic works of the man whose pen evolved the English language beyond grunts and sniffs to know how good the playwright was with a curse. We just have to go check out his grave.
William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the English town of Stratford-upon-Avon, northwest of London, to a glove-maker father and a farmer mother. He married Anne Hathaway at the age of eighteen and had three children with her. He moved to London and found success as an actor, playwright, and partner in a theater company. When he was forty-nine, he returned to his hometown, where he died three years later. Meanwhile, he completely transformed the English language and fully stocked our common pool of metaphors.
Besides a handful of biographical facts and his life’s work of plays and poetry, little is known about Shakespeare. Even the circumstances and cause of his death in 1616 are lost to history. But we do know that his grave is cursed. It says so right there on the stone slab.
But before we get to his grave, let’s talk about another curse Shakespeare is known for — Macbeth. His play about a Scottish general’s murderous rise to the Scottish throne is one of his most popular. However, actors who perform it balk at saying the title of the play inside a theater for fear of bringing bad luck to themselves and the production. As a result, they often refer to Macbeth as “the Scottish play” or “the Bard’s play.” The exception to the curse is if the actor says the word while rehearsing for or performing the play.
The story goes that a coven of witches was angered that Shakespeare included witches and incantations in the play and so they placed a curse on it. According to the Royal Shakespeare Company website, if the name of the Play-That-Must-Not-Be-Named does slip through an actor’s lips, the way to defeat the curse is to leave the theater, spin around thrice, spit, curse, and then knock on the door of the theater to regain entrance.
But that’s just a curse for actors to worry about. Shakespeare’s other curse could impact anyone who visits his grave. Because even though he’s been called the Immortal Bard, Shakespeare went to dirt like the rest of us. And that dirt can be found under a church in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Holy Trinity Church is both the site of Shakespeare’s baptism as a child and his burial at the end of his life. Historians also like to assign both his birthday and death day as April 23, giving a nice symmetry to his life. The church building dates to the thirteenth century. It’s located on the banks of the River Avon on an atmospheric piece of land punctured by ancient gravestones. But Shakespeare isn’t buried in the graveyard. He’s inside the church, interred with his wife and eldest daughter, Susanna, in the floor of the chancel (where the altar is located). A nearby monument depicts the Bard from the waist up with quill and parchment in hand and is topped by a pair of cherubs and a ghastly skull. The grave is a simple slab of stone in the floor. His name isn’t even engraved on it. Where another stone might feature the familiar “Here lies” refrain are the lines of a curse that can barely be made out in the old rock, but which are transcribed on a helpful plaque atop the grave:
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.
The story goes that Shakespeare himself composed this funerary verse, and for reasons that weren’t poetic, but practical. At the time of his death, bodies were often exhumed for medical research, to make room for newly dead bodies, or even so their treasures could be grave-robbed. In Shakespeare’s case, there was also the risk of fans wanting to take souvenirs. Writing the verse was Shakespeare’s way of guaranteeing he could spend eternity with a “Do Not Disturb” sign dangling from his door handle.
And the people of England take the curse seriously. In 2008, the burial site and other stone surfaces in the church needed to be restored, having begun to crumble with age and use. The team overseeing the project had to assure the people of England that they wouldn’t disturb the bones of Shakespeare and that they were taking all precautions to minimize disruption to the grave.
But, the thing is, Shakespeare’s bones might have already been disturbed centuries ago. It has long been rumored that his skull is no longer rotting with the rest of him — that at some point it went missing from the grave. Of course, this seems like an obvious rumor to spread about the author of that indelible scene in Hamlet in which the Danish prince talks to the skull of his friend, “poor Yorick.”
In 2016, a team of researchers used ground-penetrating radar — the type that wouldn’t disturb Shakespeare’s bones or activate the curse — to see if they could find either evidence of the skull or the lack thereof. What they found were possible signs of a past disturbance of the area of the grave where the skull would be. Interesting, but inconclusive.
So until somebody ignores the curse completely and roots around Shakespeare’s remains for definitive answers, the question of his skull will remain a mystery. Unless, that is, there’s another option.
A professor named Francis Thackeray, from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, has an idea. In a 2015 interview with the Telegraph, he posited a way to reach Shakespeare’s skull while avoiding the curse. He said: “We could possibly get around that by at least exposing the bones and doing high-resolution non-destructive laser surface scanning for forensic analyses, without moving a single bone. Besides, Shakespeare said nothing about teeth in that epitaph.”
Hopefully, Shakespeare’s curse is forgiving when it comes to technicalities.
You are holding in your hands, right now, a cursed object. That’s thanks to the curse printed on this page, the one that prescribes the penalty for its theft as hanging and eye gouging by ravens.
It might seem like an aggressive tone to set for the book, but this curse furthers an ancient tradition that can be traced back at least as far as the seventh century BCE, when King Assurbanipal of Assyria had clay tablets in his collection inscribed with threats of divine retribution against anybody who stole or inscribed their own name on them.