It is impossible to convey an adequate suggestion of the prodigious and overwhelming sense of peace that falls upon the soul of the pilgrim in Stratford church. All the cares and struggles and trials of mortal life, all its failures, and equally all its achievements, seem there to pass utterly out of remembrance. It is not now an idle reflection that "the paths of glory lead but to the grave." No power of human thought ever rose higher or went further than the thought of Shakespeare. No human being, using the best weapons of intellectual achievement, ever accomplished so much. Yet here he lies—who was once so great! And here also, gathered around him in death, lie his parents, his children, his descendants, and his friends. For him and for them the struggle has long since ended. Let no man fear to tread the dark pathway that Shakespeare has trodden before him. Let no man, standing at this grave, and seeing and feeling that all the vast labours of that celestial genius end here at last in a handful of dust, fret and grieve any more over the puny and evanescent toils of to-day, so soon to be buried in oblivion! In the simple performance of duty and in the life of the affections there may be permanence and solace. The rest is an "insubstantial pageant." It breaks, it changes, it dies, it passes away, it is forgotten; and though a great name be now and then for a little while remembered, what can the remembrance of mankind signify to him who once wore it? Shakespeare, there is reason to believe, set precisely the right value alike upon contemporary renown and the homage of posterity. Though he went forth, as the stormy impulses of his nature drove him, into the great world of London, and there laid the firm hand of conquest upon the spoils of wealth and power, he came back at last to the peaceful home of his childhood; he strove to garner up the comforts and everlasting treasures of love at his hearthstone; he sought an enduring monument in the hearts of friends and companions; and so he won for his stately sepulchre the garland not alone of glory but of affection. Through the high eastern window of the chancel of Holy Trinity church the morning sunshine, broken into many-coloured light, streams in upon the grave of Shakespeare and gilds his bust upon the wall above it. He lies close by the altar, and every circumstance of his place of burial is eloquent of his hold upon the affectionate esteem of his contemporaries. The line of graves beginning at the north wall of the chancel and extending across to the south seems devoted entirely to Shakespeare and his family, with but one exception.† The pavement that covers them is of that blue-gray slate or freestone which in England is sometimes called black marble. In the first grave under the north wall rests Shakespeare's wife. The next is that of the poet himself, bearing the world-famed words of blessing and imprecation. Then comes the grave of Thomas Nashe, husband to Elizabeth. Hall, the poet's granddaughter, who died April 4, 1647. Next is that of Dr. John Hall (obiit November 25, 1635), husband to his daughter Susanna, and close beside him rests Susanna herself, who was buried on July 11, 1649. The gravestones are laid east and west, and all but one present inscriptions. That one is under the south wall, and possibly it covers the dust of Judith—Mrs. Thomas Quiney—the youngest daughter of Shakespeare, who, surviving her three children and thus leaving no descendants, died in 1662. Upon the gravestone of Susanna an inscription has been intruded commemorative of Richard Watts, who is not, however, known to have had any relationship with either Shakespeare or his descendants.
† "The poet knew," says J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, "that as a tithe-owner he would necessarily be buried in the chancel."
Shakespeare's father, who died in 1601, and his mother, Mary Arden, who died in 1608, were buried in or near this church. (The register says, under Burials, "September 9, 1608, Mayry Shaxspere, wydowe.") His infant sisters Joan, Margaret, and Anne, and his brother Richard, who died, aged thirty-nine, in 1613, may also have been laid to rest in this place. Of the death and burial of his brother Gilbert there is no record. His sister Joan, the second—Mrs. Hart—would naturally have been placed with her relatives. His brother Edmund, dying in 1607, aged twenty-seven, is under the pavement of St. Saviour's church in Southwark. The boy Hamnet, dying before his father had risen into local eminence, rests, probably, in an undistinguished grave in the churchyard. (The register records his burial on August 11, 1596.) The family of Shakespeare seems to have been short-lived and it was soon extinguished. He himself died at fifty-two. Judith's children perished young. Susanna bore but one child—Elizabeth—who became successively Mrs. Nashe and Lady Barnard, and she, dying in 1670, was buried at Abingdon, near Oxford. She left no children by either husband, and in her the race of Shakespeare became extinct. That of Anne Hathaway also has nearly disappeared, the last living descendant of the Hathaways being Mrs. Baker, the present occupant of Anne's cottage at Shottery. Thus, one by one, from the pleasant gardened town of Stratford, they went to take up their long abode in that old church, which was ancient even in their infancy, and which, watching through the centuries in its monastic solitude on the shore of Avon, has seen their lands and houses devastated by flood and fire, the places that knew them changed by the tooth of time, and almost all the associations of their lives obliterated by the improving hand of destruction.
One of the oldest and most interesting Shakespearean documents in existence is the narrative, by a traveller named Dowdall, of his observations in Warwickshire, and of his visit, on April 10, 1693, to Stratford church. He describes therein the bust and the tombstone of Shakespeare, and he adds these remarkable words: "The clerk that showed me this church is above eighty years old. He says that not one, for fear of the curse above said, dare touch his gravestone, though his wife and daughter did earnestly desire to be laid in the same grave with him." Writers in modern days have been pleased to disparage that inscription and to conjecture that it was the work of a sexton and not of the poet; but no one denies that it has accomplished its purpose in preserving the sanctity of Shakespeare's rest. Its rugged strength, its simple pathos, its fitness, and its sincerity make it felt as unquestionably the utterance of Shakespeare himself, when it is read upon the slab that covers him. There the musing traveller full well conceives how dearly the poet must have loved the beautiful scenes of his birthplace, and with what intense longing he must have desired to sleep undisturbed in the most sacred spot in their bosom. He doubtless had some premonition of his approaching death. Three months before it came he made his will. A little later he saw the marriage of his younger daughter. Within less than a month of his death he executed the will, and thus set his affairs in order. His handwriting in the three signatures to that paper conspicuously exhibits the uncertainty and lassitude of shattered nerves. He was probably quite worn out. Within the space, at the utmost, of twenty-five years, he had written thirty-seven plays, one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, and two or more long poems; had passed through much and painful toil and through bitter sorrow; had made his fortune as author and actor; and had superintended, to excellent advantage, his property in London and his large interests in Stratford and its neighbourhood. The proclamation of health with which the will begins was doubtless a formality of legal custom. The story that he died of drinking too hard at a merry meeting with Drayton and Ben Jonson is idle gossip. If in those last days of fatigue and presentiment he wrote the epitaph that has ever since marked his grave, it would naturally have taken the plainest fashion of speech. Such is its character; and no pilgrim to the poet's shrine could wish to see it changed:—
"Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,
To digg the dvst encloased heare;
Blese be ye man yt spares thes stones
And cvrst be he yt moves my bones."
It was once surmised that the poet's solicitude lest his bones might be disturbed in death grew out of his intention to take with him into the grave a confession that the works which now follow him were written by another hand. Persons have been found who actually believe that a man who was great enough to write Hamlet could be little enough to feel ashamed of it, and, accordingly, that Shakespeare was only hired to play at authorship, as a screen for the actual author. It might not, perhaps, be strange that a desire for singularity, which is one of the worst literary crazes of this capricious age, should prompt to the rejection of the conclusive and overwhelming testimony to Shakespeare's genius that has been left by Shakespeare's contemporaries, and that shines forth in all that is known of his life. It is strange that a doctrine should get itself asserted which is subversive of common reason and contradictory to every known law of the human mind. This conjectural confession of poetic imposture has never been exhumed. The grave is known to have been disturbed, in 1796, when alterations were made in the church,† and there came a time in the present century when, as they were making repairs in the chancel pavement (the chancel was renovated in 1835), a rift was accidently made in the Shakespeare vault. Through this, though not without misgiving, the sexton peeped in upon the poet's remains. He saw nothing but dust.
† It was the opinion—not conclusive but interesting—of the late J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps that at one or other of these "restorations" the original tombstone of Shakespeare was removed and another one, from the yard of a modern stone-mason, put in its place. Dr. Ingleby, in his book on Shakespeare's Bones, 1883, asserts that the original stone was removed. I have compared Shakespeare's tombstone with that of his wife, and with others in the chancel, but I have not found the discrepancy observed by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, and I think there is no reason to believe that the original tombstone has ever been disturbed. The letters upon it were, probably, cut deeper in 1835.
The antique font from which the infant Shakespeare may have received the water of Christian baptism is still preserved in this church. It was thrown aside and replaced by a new one about the middle of the seventeenth century. Many years afterward it was found in the charnel-house. When that was destroyed, in 1800, it was cast into the churchyard. In later times the parish clerk used it as a trough to his pump. It passed then through the hands of several successive owners, till at last, in days that had learned to value the past and the associations connected with its illustrious names, it found its way back again to the sanctuary from which it had suffered such a rude expulsion. It is still a handsome stone, though broken, soiled, and marred.
