Shakespeare's Skull May Be Missing

[Rosella]

Wasn't the church where Shakepeare was buried damaged by Puritans in Cromwell's time? It was probably them! Someone was supposed to have aimed a rock at Shakespeare's monument and smashed the nose of his bust, up in the niche. When they repaired it later, as best they could, it was about an inch shorter than it had been.

[Rosella]

I don't think he would have minded that fate so much.

Wasn't he supposed to have regularly played the Ghost in Hamlet, or was it Macbeth?

[jason_c]

Archaeologists who scanned William Shakespeare's grave in Stratford-upon-Avon say his skull appears to be missing.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...324-story.html

I find stories such as this as annoying im afraid. The story is nothing more than clickbait. The grave is almost certainly empty. It was reported as being empty in the 18th century when work was being done to the church. This is not to countenance a conspiracy theory. The area is slap bang next to a frequently flooding river. The earth in and around that church is in constant movement. Such a flooded area also decays everything buried within it.

Wasn't he supposed to have regularly played the Ghost in Hamlet, or was it Macbeth?

Hamlet. He is also thought to have played kingly roles and the character of Adam in As You Like It.

[Mayerling]

Using ultra sound they found that the skeleton (except the head) is in the grave. There was a rumor that a Doctor had removed the head around 1795 (a Dr. Campbell) and that it was done because Horace Walpole offered 300 pounds for the head (in the 18th Century there was a collecting mania about all kinds of weird things - this was the same period that Dr. David Hunter created the famous "Hunterian Collection" which included the skeleton of the tallest man in England in the 1770s, which was acquired by "resurrectionists"). If that curse was active (about moving Shakespeare's bones) Walpole's death in 1797 might be proof.

Jeff

[jason_c]

Using ultra sound they found that the skeleton (except the head) is in the grave. There was a rumor that a Doctor had removed the head around 1795 (a Dr. Campbell) and that it was done because Horace Walpole offered 300 pounds for the head (in the 18th Century there was a collecting mania about all kinds of weird things - this was the same period that Dr. David Hunter created the famous "Hunterian Collection" which included the skeleton of the tallest man in England in the 1770s, which was acquired by "resurrectionists"). If that curse was active (about moving Shakespeare's bones) Walpole's death in 1797 might be proof.

Jeff

I have now read two links on this story. Neither link mentions discovering evidence of Shakespeare's skeleton. Without having seen the documentary yet we dont know exactly what has been found. What these links are claiming so far is that there has been disturbance of the grave, but we already knew that. The disturbance of Shakespeare's grave has been public knowledge for two centuries. The only surprising news of this "discovery" is the depth of the grave.

One more indication of Shakespeare skeleton having not been discovered by this ultrasound technology is that there is zero mention of his height. Discovering Shakespeare's height would be massive news in the world of Shakespeare and clickbait.

I may turn out to be completely wrong. His skeleton may have been discovered. However, from my limited reading of this news no such claim has yet been made by the research team.

[jason_c]

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-...958572/?no-ist

"The scan, however, can’t identify bone, so it's not 100 percent certain that the skull is missing."

On a JtR site we should call out clickbait when we see it. As ripperologists we have seen this type of thing before. No offence meant to the OP, he is not at fault here.

[Ginger]

I'm betting an otherwise respectable seeming Victorian took it. Probably for a seance.

Srsly. I'd not even raise an eyebrow if that turned out to be the solution.

[GUT]

Slight side note, Oxford's name has been associated with Shakespeare because of some works found by Anne Duncombe, who was actually a relative of Oxford's, and also of Bacon's.

Carry on.

Sorry, brain snap, it was Anne Cornwallis, Anne Duncombe's Aunty that links de Vere (Earl of Oxford) to Shaespeare, one connection anyway, I'm not saying the only one.

It was William Duncombe that bought Fisher's Folly from Oxford, then sold it back when Oxford was back in the money.

[Pcdunn]

I think a young American female surnamed Bacon started the idea that Francis Bacon wrote the Works of Shakespeare, back in the mid-nineteenth century.
Many Americans doubted Will's authorship, including Helen Keller and Mark Twain. Fascinating stuff, the Authorship controversy.

[Mayerling]

I think a young American female surnamed Bacon started the idea that Francis Bacon wrote the Works of Shakespeare, back in the mid-nineteenth century.
Many Americans doubted Will's authorship, including Helen Keller and Mark Twain. Fascinating stuff, the Authorship controversy.

It is a curious story certainly. One of the big boosters of the "Bacon" theory was Ignatius Donelly, a man certainly deserving of a biography if none has been written. Donelly was a Minnesota politician who was a Congressman for awhile, and a supporter of Populism as a political reform movement in the 1880s and 1890s (complete with a favoritism for the bi-metalism theories of "Coin" Harvey and others that were eventually pushed into National politics by the Populist success at the polls in 1892 (electing six U.S. Senators, and winning a large number of states and their electoral votes for the Presidency) and adopted by the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party in 1896 by their candidate William Jennings Bryan). Donelly would actually get the Populist nomination for Vice President in 1900. He wrote several novels expounding his reform ideas, as well as his racial bigotries (he was anti-Semitic, blaming Jewish bankers for supporting the Gold Standard) but in his novel "Caesar's Column" he repented on the last point by expounding support for the idea (or his grasp of the idea) of Zionism, and making a Jewish homeland very prosperous). Donelly would actually espouse three pseudo-learned ideas in his day (and leave a legacy of sorts as a result): He wrote a book about the lost continent, "Atlantis, or the Anti-diluvian World" in which he gathered all the facts (as they were supposedly known) in the 19th Century about the reality of the lost continent in the Atlantic - this book is still in publication (by Dover publishers) and was so thought provoking that William Gladstone the British P.M. had a warship check out some points it raised; Donelly wrote a book concerning "pyramidology", as he tried to link the Egyptian pyramids with the ones in the Mayan and Toltec civilizations in the Yucatan; and finally he wrote "The Great Cryptogram" where he discussed the existence of a secret message in "Love's Labours Lost" (I believe it is that play) where Bacon revealed himself to be the author of the works of William Shakespeare, "presented to the world".

It certainly is an astonishing record of writing, scholarship of a sort, and duty involving public affairs, but I suspect few people (outside specialists) even recall Donelly today. Just why he got so involved was that when sent to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Minnesota Congressman, Donelly discovered that as a Congressman he had access to the great Library of Congress. He took full advantage of this access - hence his huge output.

Jeff

[miss marple]

The Earl of Oxford was an extreamly bad poet, a sort of William Mcgonegall, . plus he was dead before many of the works were written. Bacon was a scientist. Its all about snobbery, certain aristos hated the idea of Will being middle class without an Oxford education.
Thats the trouble with putting the Bard on a pedestal, look at Will's flaws instead[ his ambition, his love of money] some of the plays are badly constructed, his geography is crap, he borrowed stories but he could turn dross to gold with his insight, humanity beautiful poetry and understanding of what works on the stage.
No one else can write like him, his complex metaphors,his invention of language is unique and no writer in the 16th 17th century resembled him and you see the man in the plays, the countryman, his knowledge of nature,his understanding of commerce and greed,passion, low life in london, theatre.
If you read historians of the period you can see how certain real events influened the writing.
I actually feel sorry for people who can't see him and have to put up some pretentous not very bright aristo in his place or be convinced that only a scientist could have poetry in him!

Miss Marple

[Rosella]

I've just been reading an interesting article in the Guardian on the source of the Shakespeare family wealth, John Shakespeare's shady business dealings and money laundering and his attempts to fool the taxman!

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/sep/26/dodgy-dealings-william-shakespeare-father-wool

[GUT]

I think Will wrote Shakespeare, but I am intrigued by the interplay between the most common quoted alternatives.


De Vere, Bacon and Marlowe are all connected to the Cornwallis', coincidence... maybe.

[Damaso Marte]

I think a young American female surnamed Bacon started the idea that Francis Bacon wrote the Works of Shakespeare, back in the mid-nineteenth century.
Many Americans doubted Will's authorship, including Helen Keller and Mark Twain. Fascinating stuff, the Authorship controversy.

My favorite twist is that for a time in the 1990's and 2000's, a substantial portion of the Supreme Court of the United States subscribed to the Oxford theory.

A man named John Paul Stevens joined the US Supreme Court in the late 1970's. He served until 2009 or 2010. He happened to believe that the Earl of Oxford wrote the works of Shakespeare, and during his very long tenure on the court he convinced several of his colleagues that this was true.

[Graham]

On the box last night (UK) was a documentary hosted by historian Dr Helen Castor in which she examined (with a highly critical eye, IMHO) the ultrasound investigation of the Bard's grave. What came out of all this was the fact that US cannot actually detect bones - what it can and did detect were "air pockets" formed by the earth filling settling as a body decomposes, producing voids. There was, or so I understand, no detectable air-pocket where the corpse's head would have been positioned. So there does seem to be good reason to believe that a body was actually buried in this particular grave, and also some reason to think that the skull is missing.

The prog then went on to examine a story published in The Argosy magazine around the year 1880 that the Bard's bonce had been stolen in 1795 by a certain Dr Frank Chambers who, ostensibly, required it for reasons of 'phrenology'. The team certainly found evidence that the grave had been 'repaired' at some point in the past, suggesting that it may well have been opened. There is a legend that after Dr Chambers had done his measurements or whatever he re-buried the skull in a charnel-house under the parish church of Beoley, near to Stratford-on-Avon. The ultra-sound team went there, and opened the charnel-house to find that it contained 4 skeletons complete with skulls and one skull with no accompanying skeleton. Full of hope, they laser-scanned this skull in situ (as they had been forbidden to move it, let alone take it away). A prominent specialist in facial reproduction (can't remember her name, but she was involved in 're-creating' Richard III's face from his skull) subsequently pronounced that the Beoley skull is that of a woman who died in her early 70's.

So the mystery is still yet to be solved (and probably never will be until the church of Holy Trinity in Stratford give permission for the grave to be physically excavated...which they never will, pointing to the well-known curse!)

Graham