Like everything else associated with Shakespeare, the monument has had its vicissitudes. The effigy, originally painted to resemble life, showed the poet to have had auburn hair and light hazel eyes. In 1748 a well-meaning Mr. John Ward repaired the monument and retouched the effigy with colour, and in 1793 Malone persuaded the vicar to have it painted white; an outrage satirised by the lines written in the church visitors’-book in 1810—
“Stranger, to whom this Monument is shewn,
Invoke the Poet’s curse upon Malone
Whose meddling zeal his barbarous taste betrays,
And smears his tombstone as he marr’d his plays.”
It was not until 1861 that the white paint was scraped off and the original colour restored, by the light of what traces remained.
Opinions have greatly varied as to the merits of the portrait, and many observers have been disappointed with it. Dr. Ingleby, for one, was distressed by its “painful stare, with goggle eyes and gaping mouth.” But the measure of this disappointment is exactly in proportion to the perhaps exaggerated expectations held. We must bear in mind that the sculptor worked from a death-mask, and that the expression was thus a conventional restoration.
Mark Twain, who, like the egregious Ignatius Donnelly, did not believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, founded a good deal of his disbelief on the unvexed serenity of this monumental bust. It troubled him greatly that it should be there, so serene and emotionless. “The bust, too, there in the Stratford church. The precious bust, the priceless bust, the calm bust with the dandy moustache and the putty face, unseamed of care—that face which has looked passionlessly down upon the awed pilgrim for a hundred and fifty years, and will still down look upon the awed pilgrim three hundred more, with the deep, deep, deep, subtle, subtle, subtle expression of a bladder.” What, then, did he expect? A tragic mask, a laughing face of comedy? But Mark Twain hardly counts as a Shakespeare critic.
It is forgotten by most people that the painting and scraping have wrought some changes, not for the better, in the expression of the face, tending towards making it what Halliwell-Phillipps too extravagantly calls a “miserable travesty of an intellectual human being.” However lifeless the expression, we see the features are those of a man of affairs. They are good and in no way abnormal. The brow is broad and lofty; the jaw and chin, while not massive, perhaps more than a thought heavier than usual. This was a man, one thinks, who would have succeeded in whatever walk of life he chose, and that is exactly the impression derived from the known facts and the traditions of Shakespeare’s life.
There have been numerous arguments in recent times in favour of digging that dust which the poet’s curse has thus far kept inviolate, but the courage has been lacking to it; whether in view of the curse or in fear of public opinion seems to be uncertain.
The late J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps wrote, about 1885: “It is not many years since a phalanx of trouble-tombs, lanterns and spades in hand, assembled in the chancel at dead of night, intent on disobeying the solemn injunction that the bones of Shakespeare were not to be disturbed. But the supplicatory lines prevailed. There were some amongst the number who, at the last moment, refused to incur the warning condemnation and so the design was happily abandoned.”
Nor would it appear that the graves of his family have been disturbed. They lie in a row, with his own, before the altar, a position they occupy by right of Shakespeare having purchased the rectorial tithes, and thus becoming that curious anomaly, a “lay rector.” It matters little or nothing where one’s bones are laid, but the doing this, and thus acquiring the right of sepulture in the most honoured place in the church, seems to imply that Shakespeare expected to found a family, and to see that his name was honoured to future generations in his native town.
We are not to suppose that the clergy of that time welcomed Shakespeare’s burial in this honoured place, but they could not help themselves. He had acquired the right, and although he had lived well into a time when puritanism had banished plays and players from Stratford, and although as a playwright he must have been regarded by many as a lost soul—unless, indeed, he became a converted man in his last year or so—his rights had to be observed.