[Here lies Salvino Armato D’Armati of Florence, the inventor of spectacles. May God pardon his sins. The year 1317.]
Condell and Heminge
In the church-yard of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, are interred two of the personal friends and stage associates of Shakespeare, Henry Condell and John Heminge, to whom the world owes a debt for the loving trouble they took in collecting the works of the great bard and publishing them in book form. With a modesty somewhat uncommon in that age, they refused to be regarded as editors, but, in their own words, they “but collected (the plays) only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend alive, as was our Shakespeare, by the offer of his plays to your most noble patronage.” On the front of the granite monument of these two Elizabethan actors is a tablet with the following inscription:
“To the memory of John Heminge and Henry Condell, fellow actors and personal friends of Shakespeare. They lived many years in this parish and are buried here. To their disinterested affection the world owes all that it calls Shakespeare. They alone collected his dramatic writings regardless of pecuniary loss, and without the hope of any profit, gave them to the world. They thus merited the gratitude of mankind.”
On the left tablet is the following:
“The fame of Shakespeare rests on his incomparable dramas. There is no evidence that he ever intended to publish them, and his premature death in 1616 made this the interest of no one else. Heminge and Condell had been co-partners with him at the Globe Theatre, Southwark, and from the accumulated plays there of thirty-five years with great labor selected them. No men then living were so competent, having acted with him in them for many years, and well knowing his manuscripts. They were published in 1623 in folio, thus giving away their private rights therein. What they did was priceless, for the whole of his manuscripts, with almost all those of the dramas of the period, have perished.”
Shakespeare’s Doctor
Under this heading the Allgemeine Wiener Medizinische Zeitung says that a gravestone in the church-yard of Fredericksburg bears an inscription which is thus translated:
“Here lies Edward Heldon, a medical and surgical practitioner, the friend and companion of William Shakespeare, of Avon. He died after a short illness in the year of our Lord 1618, in the seventieth year of his age.”
In St. Stephen’s church-yard, Launceston, Cornwall, is an epitaph whose quaintness reminds us of the appeal in the inscription on the gravestone of Shakespeare, in the Stratford Church, though without its blessing and menace: