Shakespeare's funerary monument

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Shakespeare's funerary monument, Holy Trinity Church, Stratford.

The Shakespeare funerary monument is a memorial to William Shakespeare located inside Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, UK, the same church in which Shakespeare was baptised.[1]

The monument, by Gerard Johnson, is mounted on the north wall of the chancel. It features a demi-figure of the poet, which holds a quill pen in one hand and holds down a piece of paper resting on a cushion with the other. The style was most commonly used for divines, academics, and those professions with pretensions of learning.[2] The monument is topped with strapwork rising to a heraldic shield containing the Shakespeare family's coat of arms, on either side of which stands two allegorical figures: one, representing Labour, holds a spade, the other, representing Rest, holds a torch and a skull.

The date the monument was erected is not known exactly, but it must have been before 1623; in that year, the First Folio of Shakespeare's works was published, prefaced by a poem by Leonard Digges that mentions "thy Stratford moniment" [sic]. The monument was restored in 1748-9 and has been repainted several times.

Contents

Inscriptions [edit]

The memorial plaque on Shakespeare's monument.

Beneath the figure is engraved an epitaph in Latin and a poem in English. The epitaph reads:

IVDICIO PYLIUM, GENIO SOCRATEM, ARTE MARONEM,
TERRA TEGIT, POPULUS MAERET, OLYMPUS HABET

The first line translates as "A Pylian in judgement, a Socrates in genius, a Maro in art," comparing Shakespeare to Nestor the wise King of Pylus, to the Greek philosopher Socrates, and to the Roman poet Virgil (whose last name, or cognomen was Maro). The second reads "The earth buries him, the people mourn him, Olympus possesses him," referring to Mount Olympus, the home of the Greek gods.

The English poem reads:

STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST THOV BY SO FAST?
READ IF THOV CANST, WHOM ENVIOVS DEATH HATH PLAST
WITH IN THIS MONVMENT SHAKSPEARE: WITH WHOME,
QVICK NATVRE DIDE: WHOSE NAME, DOTH DECK YS TOMBE,
FAR MORE, THEN COST: SIEH ALL, YT HE HATH WRITT,
LEAVES LIVING ART, BVT PAGE, TO SERVE HIS WITT.

In modern orthography:

Stay, passenger, why goest thou by so fast?
Read, if thou canst, whom envious Death hath placed
Within this monument: Shakespeare, with whom
Quick nature died, whose name doth deck this tomb
Far more than cost, sith [i.e. since] all that he hath writ
Leaves living art, but page, to serve his wit.

History [edit]

Painting of monument by limner John Hall made before its 1748-9 restoration.

The monument was reproduced and discussed in William Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, published in 1656, in which the engraved illustration was copied, probably by Wenceslaus Hollar, from a rough drawing made by Dugdale. In Dugdale's depiction, the poet is not shown holding a quill or paper, and the cushion appears to be tipped up against his body. The art critic Marion Spielmann satirised the illustration, describing it as giving the impression that Shakespeare was pressing the cushion to his groin, "which, for no reason, except perhaps abdominal pains, is hugged against what dancing-masters euphemistically term the 'lower chest'".[3] The print was copied by later engravers.[4] In 1725, Alexander Pope's edition of Shakespeare's works included the first fairly accurate engraving of the monument, made by George Vertue in 1723. A drawing of the monument in situ by Vertue also survives.[5]

The monument was restored in 1748-9. Parson Joseph Greene, master of Stratford grammar school, organised the first known performance of a Shakespeare play in Stratford to fund the restoration.[6] John Ward's company agreed to perform Othello in the Town Hall on 9 September 1746, with all receipts going to help pay for the restoration.[7]

Greene wrote that "the figure of the Bard" was removed to be "cleansed of dust &c". He noted that the figure and cushion were carved from a single piece of limestone. He added that "care was taken, as nearly as could be, not to add to or diminish what the work consisted of, and appear’d to have been when first erected: And really, except changing the substance of the Architraves from alabaster to Marble; nothing has been chang’d, nothing alter’d, except supplying with original material, (sav’d for that purpose,) whatsoever was by accident broken off; reviving the Old Colouring, and renewing the Gilding that was lost”.[8] John Hall, the limner from Bristol hired to do the restoration, painted a picture of the monument on pasteboard before beginning.[9] Greene also had a plaster cast of the head made at this time.[10]

Shakespeare's pen has been repeatedly stolen and replaced since, and the paint has been renewed. In 1793 Edmund Malone, the noted Shakespeare scholar, persuaded the vicar to paint the monument white, in keeping with the Neoclassical taste of the time. The paint was removed in 1861 and the monument was repainted in the colours recovered from underneath the white layer.[11]

In 1973 intruders removed the figure from its niche, chipping it out. Local police took the view that they were looking for valuable Shakespeare manuscripts, which were rumoured to be hidden within the monument. According to Sam Schoenbaum, who examined it after the incident, the figure suffered only "very slight damage".[12]

Interpretations [edit]

A fanciful 1857 painting by Henry Wallis depicting Johnson carving the monument, while Ben Jonson shows him Shakespeare's death mask.

In the 1850s, the scientist Richard Owen argued that a death mask discovered in Germany by Ludwig Becker in 1849, known as the Kesselstadt Death Mask, was probably used by Johnson to model the face of the effigy. The mask had been claimed to be of Shakespeare because of a similarity to an alleged Shakespeare portrait Becker had bought two years earlier.[13] This was depicted by the painter Henry Wallis in his imaginary scene portraying Ben Jonson showing the death mask to the sculptor.[14] However, measurements of the mask and the monument figure did not correspond, most notably the bony structure of the forehead, and the idea was discredited.[15]

Critics have generally been unkind about the appearance of the sculpture. Thomas Gainsborough wrote that "Shakespeare's bust is a silly smiling thing". J. Dover Wilson, a critic and biographer of Shakespeare, once remarked that the Bard's effigy makes him look like a "self-satisfied pork butcher."[16] Sir Nikolaus Pevsner pointed out that the iconographical type represented by the figure is that of a scholar or divine; his description of the effigy is "a self-satisfied schoolmaster".[17]

Schoenbaum, however, says the monument is a typical example of Jacobean Renaissance style,[18] and Spielmann says the "stiff simplicity" of the figure was more suitable for a sepulchral sculpture in a church than a more life-like depiction.[19]

Gallery [edit]

  • Sketch made by William Dugdale in 1634 later used by Wenceslaus Hollar for his engraving in Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656).

  • The first published illustration of the monument, in Antiquities of Warwickshire, 1656, engraved by Hollar.

  • Gerard Van der Gucht's engraving for Nicholas Rowe's Works of Mr. William Shakespear (1709), made from a plate copied from Hollar, as the reversed shadowing indicates.

  • George Vertue's 1725 illustration for Pope's edition of Shakespeare's works, derived from his own drawing of the monument and the Chandos portrait.

  • Sketch made by George Vertue in 1737.

  • The immediate context of the monument

  • The wider context of the memorial, above the graves of Shakespeare and his wife.

References and notes [edit]

  1. ^ http://churchmonumentssociety.org/Monument%20of%20the%20Month%20Archive/2010_03.html
  2. ^ Kemp, Brian. English Church Monuments (1980), London: B. T. Batsford Ltd, p. 77.
  3. ^ Spielmann, M. H. The Title Page of the First Folio of Shakespeare's Plays (1924), 21.
  4. ^ Price, Diana. "Reconsidering Shakespeare's Monument". Review of English Studies 48 (May 1997), 175.
  5. ^ Price, 177
  6. ^ Nicoll, Allardyce, and Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare Survey 19, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p.145.
  7. ^ Fox, Levi,ed. The Correspondence of the Reverend Joseph Greene, HMSO, 1965, p. 164.
  8. ^ Fox 171.
  9. ^ Spielmann 24; Fox 15, 145-6.
  10. ^ Price 172
  11. ^ B. C. A. Windle, Shakespeare Country, 1899, p. 35
  12. ^ S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, Oxford University Press US, 1987, p.313
  13. ^ Lee, Sidney. Shakespeare's Life and Work (1904), 160
  14. ^ Jane Martineau, Shakespeare in Art, Merrell, 2003, p. 214
  15. ^ Spielmann, 12–13.
  16. ^ Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth by Graham Holderness, Univ of Hertfordshire Press, 2001, page 152.
  17. ^ Pevsner, Nikolaus; and Alexandra Wedgwood (1966). Warwickshire. London: Penguin Books. p. 413. ISBN 0-300-09679-8. 
  18. ^ Schoenbaum, S. William Shakespeare: Records and Images (1981), 158.
  19. ^ Spielmann, 12.
Portraits and sculptures of William Shakespeare
Portraits
Sculptures
Disputed portraits

Coordinates: 52°11′12″N 1°42′27″W / 52.18667°N 1.70750°W / 52.18667; -1.70750

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