If Shakespeare's "lease" had not then expired, which seems to me implied, it would have been "dissolved to a stranger" in the person of Dr. Hall.
Some ready money would be required for the carrying out of the will. Three hundred pounds left to Judith, and £73 13s. 4d. in smaller bequests, would certainly run up to £400 by the payment of debts and funeral expenses. The eagerness to leave all land to his own children is another proof of Shakespeare's earnest desire to found a family.
Shakespeare did not immediately die after the signing of his will. Probably the devoted care of his wife and daughters and the skill of his son-in-law soothed his dying moments. But one cannot but have a lurking suspicion of maltreatment through the crude medical notions of the time: of bleeding when there should have been feeding; of vile medicines when Nature should have been supported and not undermined by art. At all events, Dr. John Hall had not the happiness and honour to record the name of his illustrious father-in-law in his book of "Cures."[173] This was the one great failure of his life.
THE CHANCEL, TRINITY CHURCH.
To face p. 83.
The April 23 on which Shakespeare closed his eyes completed his cycle of fifty-two years, according to ordinary reckoning. But strangely enough there is entered on his tombstone "Ætatis 53," and this suggests that he had been born on April 22. No records of his funeral have come down to us, but it must have made a stir in his native place. He was a native of the town, known to all in his youth, and loved by many. Yet, on the other hand, he had offended all the traditions of the borough. He had descended from the safe levels of trade to the vagabond life of a "common player," especially detested in Stratford-on-Avon (see notes); he had made money somehow in the city, and had returned to spend it in his native town, but he had never taken office, and had never been "one of them." And at the end he was to be buried in the Chancel, the select spot for nobles and prelates and "great men." Verily the tongues of the gossips of Stratford would wag on April 25, 1616. The authorship of the doggerel lines on his tomb has been attributed to various people. Probably they were a part of the stock-in-trade of the stone-cutter, that satisfied Shakespeare's widow as expressing a known wish of her "dear departed." Rude as they are, they have fulfilled their end:
"Good Frend, for Jesus' sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased here;
Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones."
Meanwhile Shakespeare's friends had been planning a monument to be placed on the northern wall of the Chancel. The bust is said to have been prepared from a death-mask, and to have been sculptured by one Gerard Johnson, son and successor of the Amsterdam tomb-maker, whose place of business lay between St. Saviour's Church and the Globe Theatre. He may be presumed to have frequently seen Shakespeare in his lifetime. The exact date of its erection is not known, but it would seem to have been some time before 1623, as Leonard Digges refers to it in his poem prefixed to the First Folio, "To the Memorie of the deceased Authour, Maister W. Shakespeare":
"Shakespeare, at length thy pious fellowes give
The World thy Workes—thy Workes, by which outlive
Thy touche thy name must; when that stone is rent,
And Time dissolves thy Stratford monument,
Here we alive shall view thee still."
Crude and inartistic as it is, the bust must have had some likeness in its earlier days to have satisfied critical eyes; but it has passed through so many vicissitudes, and suffered so much restoration, that the likeness may have entirely vanished by this time. Nevertheless, it remains a witness to the affection of the surviving, and a witness, Puritans though they were, that it was on account of the power of his pen that he deserved special remembrance.