Shakespeare's funerary monument
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.
The monument, by Gerard Johnson, is mounted on the north wall of the chancel. It features a bust of the poet, who holds a quill pen in one hand and a piece of paper in another. His arms are resting on a cushion, a common motif in funerary monuments of the time. Above him is 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.
It is not known exactly when the monument was erected, 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.
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[edit] Inscriptions
Beneath the bust is engraved a Latin epitaph and a poem in English. The Latin 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.
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The English poem reads:
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In modern orthography:
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[edit] History
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'".[1] The print was copied by later engravers.[2] 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.[3]
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.[4] John Ward's company agreed to perform it. Records do not say which play it was, but B.C.A. Windle, writing in 1899, states that it was Othello.[5]
Greene wrote that "the figure of the Bard" was removed to be "cleansed of dust &c". He noted that the bust and cushion was 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”.[6] Greene also had a plaster cast of the head made at this time.[7]
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.[5]
In 1973 intruders removed the bust 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 bust suffered only "very slight damage".[8]
[edit] Interpretations
In the 1850s, it was argued by the scientist Richard Owen that Johnson probably used a death mask discovered in Germany by Ludwig Becker in 1849, known as the Kesselstadt Death-Mask, to make the bust. The mask had been claimed to be of Shakespeare because of a similarity to an alleged Shakespeare portrait Becker had bought two years earlier.[9] This was depicted by the painter Henry Wallis in his imaginary scene portraying Ben Jonson showing the death mask to the sculptor.[10] However, measurements of the mask and the monument bust did not correspond, most notably the bony structure of the forehead, and the idea was discredited.[11]
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."[12] Sir Nikolaus Pevsner pointed out that the iconographical type represented by the bust is that of a scholar or divine; his description of the effigy is "a self-satisfied schoolmaster".[13]
Schoenbaum, however, says the monument is a typical example of Jacobean Renaissance style,[14] and Spielmann says the "stiff simplicity" of the bust was more suitable for a sepulchral sculpture in a church than a more life-like depiction.[15]
[edit] Gallery
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Sketch made by William Dugdale in 1634 later used by Wenzel Hollar for his engraving in Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656).
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The first published illustration of the monument, in Antiquities of Warwickshire, 1656, engraved by Hollar.
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Gerard Van der Gucht's engraving for Nicholas Rowe's Works of Mr. William Shakespear (1709), mostly copied from Hollar.
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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.
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The context of the memorial, above the graves of Shakespeare and his wife.
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[edit] References and notes
- ^ Spielmann, M. H. The Title Page of the First Folio of Shakespeare's Plays (1924), 21.
- ^ Price, Diana. "Reconsidering Shakespeare's Monument". Review of English Studies 48 (May 1997), 175.
- ^ Price, 177
- ^ Allardyce Nicoll, Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare Survey 19, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p.145.
- ^ a b B. C. A. Windle, Shakespeare Country, 1899, p. 35
- ^ Levi Fox (ed) The Correspondence of the Reverend Joseph Greene, HMSO, 1965.
- ^ Price, 172
- ^ S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, Oxford University Press US, 1987, p.313
- ^ Lee, Sidney. Shakespeare's Life and Work (1904), 160
- ^ Jane Martineau, Shakespeare in Art, Merrell, 2003, p. 214
- ^ Spielmann, 12-13.
- ^ Cultural Shakespeare: Essays in the Shakespeare Myth by Graham Holderness, Univ of Hertfordshire Press, 2001, page 152.
- ^ Pevsner, Nikolaus; and Alexandra Wedgwood (1966). Warwickshire. London: Penguin Books. p. 413. ISBN 0-300-09679-8.
- ^ Schoenbaum, S. William Shakespeare: Records and Images (1981), 158.
- ^ Spielmann, 12.
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