Who Killed William Shakespeare?: The Murderer, the Motive, the Means

by Simon Andrew Stirling

Overview

William Shakespeare lived in violent times; his death passed without comment. By the time he was adopted as the national poet of England the details of his life had been concealed. He had become an invisible man, the humble Warwickshire lad who entertained royalty and then faded into obscurity. But his story has been carefully manipulated. In reality, he was a dissident whose works were highly critical of the regimes of Elizabeth I and James I. Who Killed William Shakespeare? examines the means, motive and the opportunity that led to his murder, and explains why Will Shakespeare had to be 'stopped'. From forensic analysis of his death mask to the hunt for his missing skull, the circumstances of Shakespeare's death are reconstructed and his life reconsidered in the light of fresh discoveries. What emerges is a portrait of a genius who spoke his mind and was silenced by his greatest literary rival.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780752494210
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	08/05/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Simon Andrew Stirling is the author of The King Arthur Conspiracy. He received a Writers' Guild Award in 1995 for his work on the BBC's Between the Lines.

Read an Excerpt

Who Killed William Shakespeare?

The Murderer, The Motive, The Means

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By Simon Andrew Stirling

The History Press

Copyright © 2013 Simon Andrew Stirling
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9421-0

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CHAPTER 1

Being Merry at a Tavern

IT IS by far the most visited parish church in England.

Eight hundred years old, the Collegiate Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity stands on the west bank of the river in the Old Town of Stratford-upon-Avon. Approaching along a paved avenue lined with lime trees, the visitor steps through the vaulted fifteenth-century porch and, passing the font in which William Shakespeare was baptised, enters an echoing space illuminated by brightly coloured windows.

The best windows light the east-facing chancel, with its medieval choir stalls, its ornate tomb of Thomas Balsall (who built the chancel in 1480) and its recumbent effigy of Shakespeare's friend, John Combe. The high altar is a rare example of a pre-Reformation altar still in use in England; buried for many years under the chancel floor, it escaped the rage of the Puritan reformers.

The grave of William Shakespeare lies in front of the altar. On one side is the grave of his widow, Anne; on the other, the graves of Thomas Nash (who married Will's granddaughter), Dr John Hall (who married Will's daughter, Susanna) and Susanna herself. It is the grave of Will Shakespeare which lures so many visitors to Holy Trinity Church. The gravestone is smaller than those on either side and is inscribed with a four-line doggerel verse, laying a curse upon anyone who 'moves my bones'.

The register of Holy Trinity Church records the burial on 25 April 1616 of 'Will Shakspere gent'. Overlooking the grave from the north wall of the chancel, a funerary monument, installed within a few years of Shakespeare's death, reveals that the poet died on 23 April, aged 53. He was buried two days later under a gravestone which does not bear his name.

An Oxford University student toured Holy Trinity Church in 1694. In a letter to a friend he wrote of Shakespeare's grave that 'they have laid him full seventeen-foot deep, deep enough to secure him'. Combined with the curious injunction on his gravestone not to 'dig the dust enclosed here', the extraordinary depth of the grave ensured that Will's remains were unlikely ever to be disturbed.

A NEW vicar arrived in Stratford in 1662. The Rev. John Ward was eager to find out all that he could about the famous poet who lay buried in his church and gave himself a reminder to look in on Shakespeare's daughter, Judith. Whether or not John Ward spoke with Judith – she died that same year – the parson did glean some information from his parishioners.

'I have heard that Mr Shakespeare was a natural wit,' he wrote, '... he frequented the plays all his younger time, but in his elder years lived at Stratford, and supplied the stage with two plays every year, and for that had an allowance so large that he spent at the rate of a thousand a year, as I have heard.' Those were spectacular outgoings; £1,000 was a great deal of money. Rev. John Ward continued his memorandum: 'Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.' This is the only known reference to the circumstances surrounding Shakespeare's death.

Ward's interest in the Bard was far from idle. He concluded his note, 'Remember to peruse Shakespeare's plays and be versed in them, that I may not be ignorant in the matter.' But his memorandum sadly lacks detail; the vicar made no mention of where or when the 'merry meeting' took place. We can, however, hazard some educated guesses.

Traditionally, Shakespeare is said to have been born, as he died, on 23 April. As we shall see, the coincidence of him having died on his birthday, and in the town where he was born, is not without significance. As for a possible venue for the 'merry meeting', we need look no further than a few yards from Shakespeare's home.

New Place stood to the north of Holy Trinity Church, on the corner of Chapel Street. A short distance away, heading along Chapel Street and the High Street, was a half-timbered house known as Atwood's. For five years, a wine merchant named Thomas Quiney had owned the lease on Atwood's for the purpose of running a tavern.

The Shakespeares and the Quineys had been close for years. Adrian Quiney had served with Will's father, John Shakespeare, on the Stratford Corporation. Adrian's son, Richard Quiney, addressed a letter to his 'Loving good Friend and countryman' Will Shakespeare in 1598. It was Richard's son, Thomas, who now ran the tavern on Stratford High Street. On 10 February 1616, a few weeks before Shakespeare died, Thomas Quiney married Will's daughter, Judith, who was still alive forty-five years later when Rev. John Ward came to town.

The tavern run by Will's newly acquired son-in-law was a three-minute stroll from New Place, and so it was perhaps at Atwood's that Shakespeare had his fateful 'merry meeting' with Drayton and Jonson.

OF THE three poets present, only one had a reputation for heavy drinking. This was Ben Jonson, the youngest of the trio.

William Drummond, a Scottish poet who had the pleasure of Jonson's company during the winter of 1618–19, left a character sketch in which he remarked of the 46-year-old Ben: 'He is a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others, given rather to lose a friend than a jest, jealous of every word and action of those about him (especially after drink, which is one of the elements in which he liveth).' Drummond added that Jonson was 'a dissembler of ill parts which reign in him' and 'a bragger of some good' that he lacked.

Ben's fondness for the bottle, particularly the sweet wine known as Canary, had probably contributed to his burgeoning girth. He weighed in at some 278lb (126kg) and boasted a 'mountain belly' to match his 'rocky face'. That face had once been lean and hollow-cheeked but was now fleshy and pockmarked. His beard and moustache were wispy, a shade or two lighter than his thick dark hair. The portrait of Jonson painted in about 1617, and now in the National Portrait Gallery in London, gives him a broad nose with a pronounced ridge at the top where his eyebrows meet. The playwright Thomas Dekker described him as a 'staring Leviathan' with a 'terrible mouth'.

Michael Drayton had no such reputation for drinking. The eldest of the three poets at the 'merry meeting', he was admired for his probity. The churchman Francis Meres, whose Palladis Tamia of 1598 compared his contemporary poets with the poets of the classical world, held him in the highest regard:

As Aulus Persius Flaccus is reported among all writers to be of an honest life and upright conversation: so Michael Drayton ... among scholars, soldiers, Poets, and all sorts of people, is held for a man of virtuous disposition, honest conversation, and well governed carriage, which is almost miraculous among good wits in these declining and corrupt times ...

His portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, painted in 1599 when he was about 36 years old, presents a thin and scholarly looking man of clean skin and neat appearance, the oval of his face accentuated by a trim gingery beard, his brown hair crowned with a wreath of laurels. A later portrait from 1628 shows that Drayton's jowls had begun to sag and his beard had shrunk to a tuft of greying hairs. His face had lost none of its pallor, while the clear eyes of 1599 had become careworn and distrustful.

Warwickshire folklore recalls the adolescent Shakespeare as an enthusiastic and accomplished drinker. This reputation did not follow him down to London. His theatre company endeavoured to prove that they were 'Men of grave and sober Behaviour'.

Writing later in the seventeenth century, John Aubrey – who noted that Ben Jonson tended to fall into bed drunk – remarked that Will Shakespeare was a 'handsome, well-shap't man, very good company', who was 'the more to be admired quia he was not a company keeper' and 'wouldn't be debauched'. When invited to make merry, he would excuse himself, saying 'he was in pain'.

At home, he might have let his guard down. An anecdote preserved in the second volume of Aubrey's Brief Lives finds Will in a Warwickshire saloon:

One time as he was at the tavern in Stratford on Avon, one Combe, an old rich usurer, was to be buried, [Shakespeare] makes this extempore epitaph:

Ten in the hundred the Devil allows,
But Combe will have twelve, he swears and vows:
If anyone asks who lies in this tomb,
'Hoh!' quoth the Devil, "Tis my John o'Combe.'

John Combe of Old Stratford died in 1614, a couple of years before Shakespeare; his effigy lies close to Will's funerary monument in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church. John Combe left Shakespeare £5 in his will. Will in turn bequeathed his sword to John's nephew and heir, Thomas Combe, a Catholic.

A somewhat kindlier version of Will's 'extempore epitaph' for John Combe was recorded by Nicholas Burgh, a Poor Knight of Windsor, in a document dating from 1650. Burgh's manuscript also recalled an occasion when Shakespeare and Jonson had been drinking together:

Mr. Ben Jonson and Mr. William Shakespeare being merry at a tavern, Master Jonson having begun this for an epitaph: 'Here lies Ben Jonson, / That was once one', he gives it to Master Shakespeare to make up, who presently writes: 'Who while he lived was a slow thing, / And now, being dead, is a nothing'.

A similar anecdote was discovered among the papers of Thomas Plume, Archdeacon of Rochester and vicar of Greenwich, who died in 1704. In Plume's account, Will 'took the pen' from Jonson and wrote:

Here lies Benjamin –
With short hair upon his chin –
Who while he lived was a slow thing,
And now he's dead is no thing.

The playful epitaphs for John Combe (who was dead) and Ben Jonson (who wasn't) were not up to Will's usual standard. They can be compared with a jingle that Shakespeare reputedly wrote to accompany a pair of gloves. The gloves were made by Will's father for the Stratford schoolmaster, Alexander Aspinall, who gave them to his bride, Ann Shaw, who lived near the Henley Street home of the Shakespeare family. The wedding present came with a note: 'The gift is small, / The will is all: / Alexander Aspinall.'

The word 'will' was a slang term – as 'willy' is today – for the penis. Elsewhere, Shakespeare made use of the term 'glove' as a familiar metaphor for the female genitals, and so the wedding gift became, as the ditty suggested, a token of something more meaningful: the easing of the groom's enlarged 'will' into his bride's little 'glove' when the marriage was consummated.

Something of the same bawdy nature can be glimpsed in Will's jokey epitaph for Ben Jonson. Nicholas Burgh and Thomas Plume recorded slightly different versions of this epitaph, but the tenor of both was the same – Ben, while he lived, was a 'slow thing' and, once dead, would be 'nothing'.

Then, as now, a 'thing' could be a penis. Shakespeare is known to have used 'thing' and 'no thing' to designate the male member and its female counterpart. This sheds an unsavoury light on his off-the-cuff epitaph for Jonson. Ben himself had started it off with 'Here lies Ben Jonson, / That was once one'. Shakespeare then took the pen and wrote that Ben was a 'slow thing' – a dullard, a flaccid penis – who died and became 'no thing', a rotting pudendum.

Before long, Jonson was recounting his own version of the impromptu epitaph. He told the Scottish poet William Drummond (who noted how quick Ben was to take offence, especially when he had been drinking) that his 'Epitaph, by a companion written, is:

Here lies Benjamin Jonson dead,
And hath no more wit than a goose in his head,
That as he was wont, so doth he still
Live by his wit, and evermore will.'

('Ane other', wrote Drummond in 1619: 'Here lyes honest Ben / That had not a beard on his chen.')

Jonson's account of his epitaph 'by a companion written' was clearly a sanitised version of the ones later recorded by Burgh and Plume. Gone are the dubious references to slow things and no things. Instead, Ben contrives to live eternally by his wit, even though he has less wit in his head than a 'goose'.

Coming within three years of Will Shakespeare's death, Ben's own account of his epitaph suggests that other versions were already doing the rounds. These alternative versions, later written down by Nicholas Burgh and Thomas Plume, made it clear that Shakespeare was the companion who had made up the original.

We are left with the impression that some sort of epitaph game was played by Shakespeare and Jonson while they were 'being merry at a tavern'. Shakespeare was said to have composed an extempore epitaph for his friend, John Combe, in a Stratford tavern in 1614. The occasion of the Jonson epitaph was quite possibly the 'merry meeting' of 1616, at which the poets 'drank too hard' and Will caught the 'fever' that killed him. Ben was soon promoting his own, more self-flattering version of the epitaph, thereby implying that the alternative account was already in circulation. This would suggest that a third party was there to witness the moment when Shakespeare insulted Jonson with his 'no thing' jibe.

That person was probably Michael Drayton, the third poet at the 'merry meeting'.

LIKE SHAKESPEARE, Drayton was a native of the Woodland, the spiritual and geographical heart of England. Born in the village of Harthill, on the north-eastern boundary of the Forest of Arden, he was about a year older than Shakespeare.

In his childhood Michael Drayton entered into service with the Goodere family of Polesworth. His first patron was Sir Henry Goodere. An important local figure, Goodere served as High Sheriff of Warwickshire in 1570, but was committed to the Tower of London the following year over his dealings with Mary, Queen of Scots. He recovered his fortunes, however, and was later knighted, becoming a trusted Gentleman of the Privy Chamber.

Drayton remained in service with the Gooderes of Polesworth Hall until the death of Sir Henry in 1595, when he was 'bequeathed' to the dazzling Lucy Harington, whose parents were based at Coombe Abbey, near Coventry. Lucy married Edward Russell, Third Earl of Bedford, at about the same time as she inherited the poet Drayton. As Lucy, Countess of Bedford, she became the 'universal patroness of poets', but her relations with Drayton soon soured. He complained in a bitter verse that she had abandoned him in favour of 'deceitful Cerberon', a 'beastly clown too vile of to be spoken'. It is probable that this beastly 'Cerberon' was Ben Jonson, who dedicated his satirical play Cynthia's Revels to the Countess of Bedford in 1600.

By 1602, Drayton had a new patron, Sir Walter Aston, whose mother was the daughter of Sir Thomas Lucy, the lord of the manor of Charlecote, near Stratford. Sir Thomas Lucy was a magistrate, a Member of Parliament and a fanatical persecutor of Catholics: among those who suffered at his hands was a glove maker of Stratford called John Shakespeare and his eldest son, William.

Unlike Will Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Drayton never married. The love of his life was Anne Goodere, the daughter of his first patron. She became his 'Idea' – his Muse – and he dedicated his pastorals and a collection of sonnets to her in the early 1590s. Around the time of her father's death in 1595, Anne married Sir Henry Rainsford of Clifford Chambers, a manor just 2 miles south of Stratford-upon-Avon. The lovelorn Drayton took to spending his summers at the half-timbered Manor House, with its clear view of the wooden spire of Holy Trinity Church. He would remain the devoted poet-shepherd, 'Rowland of the Rock', forever inseparable from his 'Idea' and her marital home of 'dear Clifford'.

It was during one of his extended stays at Clifford that Drayton was cured of a recurring fever by Dr John Hall of Stratford. Hall's notes reveal that Drayton was given an emetic with syrup of violets, which 'worked very well both upwards and downwards'. In 1607, Dr John Hall married Shakespeare's daughter, Susanna. He also treated Drayton's beloved 'Idea', Lady Anne Rainsford.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title,
Dedication,
Author's Note,
Preamble: 'The Apotheosis of Shakespeare',
Part One: Means,
1. Being Merry at a Tavern,
2. A Sculptor's Workshop,
3. Marred by a Jagged Hole,
4. As He Hath Hit His Face,
5. We Wondered, Shakespeare,
Part Two: Motive,
6. Now am I in Arden,
7. Herne the Hunter,
8. Hall the Priest,
9. The Primrose Way,
10. The More Fool I,
11. Remember Me,
12. Chaos is Come Again,
13. The Way to Dusty Death,
14. Striding the Blast,
15. There is a World Elsewhere,
Part Three: Opportunity,
16. Our Revels Now Are Ended,
17. All is True,
18. Double Falsehood,
19. Blest be the Man,
20. Look How the Father's Face,
Selected Bibliography,
Plates,
Copyright,