SHAKESPEARE'S BONES ***
Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
SHAKESPEARE'S BONES
THE PROPOSAL TO DISINTER THEM, CONSIDERED IN RELATION TO THEIR POSSIBLE BEARING ON HIS PORTRAITURE: ILLUSTRATED BY INSTANCES OF VISITS OF THE LIVING TO THE DEAD.
By C. M. Ingleby, LL.D., V.P.R.S.L., Honorary Member of the German Shakespeare Society, and a Life-Trustee of Shakespeare's Birthplace, Museum, and New Place, at Stratford-upon-Avon.
"Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs." Richard II, a. iii, s. 2.
This Essay is respectfully inscribed to The Major and Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon, and the Vicar of the Church of the Holy Trinity there, by their friend and colleague, THE AUTHOR.
SHAKESPEARE'S BONES.
The sentiment which affects survivors in the disposition of their dead, and which is, in one regard, a superstition, is, in another, a creditable outcome of our common humanity: namely, the desire to honour the memory of departed worth, and to guard the "hallowed reliques" by the erection of a shrine, both as a visible mark of respect for the dead, and as a place of resort for those pilgrims who may come to pay him tribute. It is this sentiment which dots our graveyards with memorial tablets and more ambitious sculptures, and which still preserves so many of our closed churchyards from desecration, and our {1a} ancient tombs from the molestation of careless, curious, or mercenary persons.
But there is another sentiment, not inconsistent with this, which prompts us, on suitable occasions, to disinter the remains of great men, and remove them to a more fitting and more honourable resting- place. The Hotel des Invalides at Paris, and the Basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura at Rome, {1b} are indebted to this sentiment for the possession of relics which make those edifices the natural resort of pilgrims as of sight-seers. It were a work of superfluity to adduce further illustration of the position that the mere exhumation and reinterment of a great man's remains, is commonly held to be, in special cases, a justifiable proceeding, not a violation of that honourable sentiment of humanity, which protects and consecrates the depositaries of the dead. On a late occasion it was not the belief that such a proceeding is a violation of our more sacred instincts which hindered the removal to Pennsylvania of the remains of William Penn; but simply the belief that they had already a more suitable resting-place in his native land. {2}
There is still another sentiment, honourable in itself and not inconsistent with those which I have specified, though still more conditional upon the sufficiency of the reasons conducing to the act: namely, the desire, by exhumation, to set at rest a reasonable or important issue respecting the person of the deceased while he was yet a living man. Accordingly it is held justifiable to exhume a body recently buried, in order to discover the cause of death, or to settle a question of disputed identity: nor is it usually held unjustifiable to exhume a body long since deceased, in order to find such evidences as time may not have wholly destroyed, of his personal appearance, including the size and shape of his head, and the special characteristics of his living face.
It is too late for the most reverential and scrupulous to object to this as an invasion of the sanctity of the grave, or a violation of the rights of the dead or of the feelings of his family. When a man has been long in the grave, there are probably no family feelings to be wounded by such an act: and, as for his rights, if he can be said to have any, we may surely reckon among them the right of not being supposed to possess such objectionable personal defects as may have been imputed to him by the malice of critics or by the incapacity of sculptor or painter, and which his remains may be sufficiently unchanged to rebut: in a word we owe him something more than refraining from disturbing his remains until they are undistinguishable from the earth in which they lie, a debt which no supposed inviolable sanctity of the grave ought to prevent us from paying.
