August 18th 2007

Some form of tribute to William Shakespeare existed in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, by 1623, for Leonard Digges referred to it in his poem for the First Folio, a volume containing "thy Workes", by which "thy name" will "out-live / Thy Tombe": "when that stone is rent, / And time dissolves thy Stratford Moniment, / Here we alive shall view thee still".

The tribute included, or consisted of, a plaque praising Shakespeare in a Latin couplet and six lines of English verse, which were copied by John Weever in 1631. The earliest visual representation of the monument is a sketch made in 1634 by Sir William Dugdale, preparatory to the engraving included in The Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated (1656).

Controversies arise concerning those features of Dugdale's representation which do not square with the monument as we know it. The subject looks elderly, with a gaunt face and a drooping moustache; the columns enclosing the monument are crowned with leopards' heads; and he is shown arms akimbo, resting his hands on a woolsack. As Richard Kennedy has argued, the woolsack suggests that the original monument was erected to John Shakespeare (1530-1601), father of the poet, who had been "a considerable dealer in wool". Shakespeare senior also held various civic offices between 1557 and 1571 (Alderman, Mayor, JP), before falling on hard times. Following his son's acquisition of a coat of arms in 1596, he regained his place on the borough council. Kennedy also showed that the leopards' heads were far from "irrelevant"', as E. K. Chambers judged, since they are found in Stratford's coat of arms, another detail making this monument more suitable for the father than for the son.

Dugdale recorded that the monument had been sculpted by "one Gerard Johnson", the Anglicized name of Gheerart Janssen, who settled in London in 1557 and became England's leading tomb-maker. His stoneyard was in Southwark, near the Rose Theatre, where he died in 1611. In 1594, Janssen was chosen by Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, father of Shakespeare's patron, to construct a memorial tomb to his parents.

Sidney Lee claimed that the Stratford monument was sculpted by Janssen's far less prominent son, Garret. However, if we accept that Dugdale was referring to Gheerart Janssen, Shakespeare may have helped arrange the commission of a monument to his father. It is also possible that some admirer(s), near or distant (the plaque mistakes Shakespeare's age at death), celebrated the poet by adding a memorial to an existing family monument, near his grave under the chancel floor, rather than commissioning a new one.

This possibility arouses fierce dispute between the "anti-Stratfordians", who believe that Dugdale sketched a monument commemorating "a sack-holding commodity trader" unrelated to Shakespeare, and the "anti-anti-Stratfordians", such as Jonathan Bate and Stanley Wells, who indignantly reject their theories. (These pages have included a lively exchange in recent weeks, following Katherine Duncan-Jones's review of the exhibition "Searching for Shakespeare", March 17; see Letters, June 16, 23, 30.) Without in any way supporting the authorship deniers, I think that the upholders of orthodoxy are mistaken.

Dugdale's credentials as an accurate recorder of antiquities have never been faulted in any major issue. The 1730 revised edition of the Antiquities was supervised by Dr William Thomas, rector of a church not far from Stratford, who could have corrected any errors, but didn't. In this controversy both sides have neglected evidence which, I believe, establishes that two different monuments have existed on the north side of the chancel of Holy Trinity Church.

The first witness is that great assembler of information, John Aubrey. As Kate Bennett showed (Notes and Queries, 2000), Aubrey visited Stratford some time between 1640 and 1670, recording that Shakespeare's "figure is thus, viz a Tawny satten doublet I thinke pinked (the ornamental cuts in cloth revealing an underlying surface, clearly visible in Dugdale's engraving) and over that a blacke gowne like an Under-graduates at Oxford, scilicet the sleeves of the gowne doe not cover the armes, but hang loose behind". "I do beleeve", Aubrey adds, "that about the later end of Queen Elizabeth time 'twas the fashion for grave people, to weare such Gownes." John Shakespeare, who died in his seventies after nearly twenty years of service to the town council, would be more likely to figure among the "grave people" of Stratford than his son.

The Stratford church suffered from damp, the chancel undergoing repairs in 1691. By 1746 the "monument and bust of that incomparable poet" had "through length of years and other accidents become much impaired and decayed", and money was raised to restore it. In 1749 a Mr John Hall, Limner, was hired to "repair and beautify" it, so "that the monument shall become as like as possible to what it was when first erected". Mid-eighteenth- century standards of restoration were doubtless different from our own, and it is impossible to know how much "repairing and beautifying" Hall carried out. The anti-anti-Stratfordians dismiss such questions, but whoever compares Dugdale's representation with the current monument will notice many differences. The coats of arms at the top are now far more ornate, and the leopards' heads have been replaced with Corinthian capitals. In Dugdale the arch over the subject's head is indented, and begins at ear-level: in the current state it is continuous, and begins at shoulder level. In Dugdale the allegorical figures, one with an hour-glass, the other with a spade, sit at the extreme ends of the cornice, their legs dangling down, while today they sit within the framework. They have also been to a fashionable hairdresser. Chambers grudgingly conceded that "the present Rest and Labour, with the Georgian chevelure, may date from 1748". As for Shakespeare's costume, in Dugdale his doublet has the modest total of fourteen buttons, while the modern version gives it twenty-nine.

I suggest that the carver of the present version worked from the previous monument, copying the slashes in the doublet, if making them less pronounced. However, he failed to understand the construction of the short gown, with the sleeves pinned back behind the shoulders, substituting a jerkin. He also changed the position of Shakespeare's arms to allow them to hold a pen and paper, and transformed the woolsack into some kind of cushion, a wholly unsuitable writing surface -presumably to make the bust "as like as possible to what it was when first erected". The "only-ever-one-monument" diehards question Dugdale's accuracy, claiming that he was more interested in heraldry. But he was a trained and experienced draughtsman, and it would be truly extraordinary if, looking at the same monument as we know it today, he should represent it as different in every respect.

Another striking difference was pointed but by Barbara Whittingham Jones (Quarterly Review, 1964). She observed that the "Janssen monument was wider than its successor, the central section, containing the bust, being square in shape and its outer plinth projected sideways beyond the square pillars enclosing the inscription". Moreover, "all photographs of John Hall's monument reveal four nails or knobs in the chancel wall exactly where one would expect the broader Dugdale to have been secured to the wall". These knobs must have held the solid backing frame of the original monument. As Whittingham-Jones asked, "If not the last remains of Gheerart Janssen's bust, what are they?".

One other visual record exists, but it is difficult to evaluate. Not having visited Stratford, George Vertue produced a frontispiece for Pope's 1723 edition of Shakespeare in which he superimposed the Chandos portrait on the bust, showing Shakespeare in the act of writing. In 1737, Vertue sketched the monument from life: the columns no longer have leopards' heads, but the putti's legs still dangle down, as in Dugdale. The elbows of "Shakespeare" are close to his sides, his right arm stretching right across and holding a pen again. But his doublet has only five buttons, and there is no gown. This curious hybrid, if accurate, may represent some intermediate stage of "restoration".

Rather more trust can be given to my third piece of evidence, the existing plaster casts. Making casts of Shakespeare's bust has been a frequent occupation. Vertue took one in 1737. The Revd Joseph Greene had one made in 1748, before restoration work began, recording that "Heath the Carver & I took (the bust) down from the chancel wall & laid it exactly in a horizontal posture before we made the cast".

Malone took another in 1793. All this activity may have damaged the bust. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust possesses a cast made for the distinguished antiquary John Britton, who recorded that "in Dec. 1814 I incited Mr. George Bullock to make a cast of the monumental bust. He was much alarmed on taking down the Effigy to find it to be in a decayed and dangerous state, and declared it would be risking its destruction to remove it again". Bullock's cast shows us the effigy as we know it today, with twenty-nine buttons in the doublet. However, the fingers of Shakespeare's right hand are parallel to the writing surface, and the quill is held at an impossible angle. Helen Mullaly published (in Apollo, 1988) another cast made by Bullock, this time for Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, in which the fingers of the right hand point downwards, as in the current monument. Nathan Drake had an engraving made from this cast for the frontispiece of Shakespeare and his Times (1817), and vouched for its accuracy, having visited Stratford in 1815. It seems that some changes had been made between the two casts.

By 1835, the bust had again reached such a state of "disfigurement", given "the neglected condition" of the church interior, that "a new Society (was) formed, for the Renovation and Restoration of Shakespeare's Monument and Bust, and of the chancel". Perhaps these renovations altered the shape of Shakespeare's face from the well-proportioned visage shown in the plaster cast to the plump-cheeked rigidity that it now has. The final and most damaging transformations were made in 1861, by Simon Collins, a picture restorer, commissioned to paint the bust according to the colours in the Birthplace portrait. The hair and beard are auburn, the eyes staring in shocked horror, as if contemplating the legends of authenticity that were being foisted on it.

Whether or not scholars accept the argument that Dugdale's sketch shows a monument erected to Shakespeare's father, these well-documented records of recurrent decay and the need for extensive repair work to the monument in 1749, 1814, 1835 and 1861 make it impossible that the present bust is the same as the one that was in place in the 1620s. Leonard Digges was right that Shakespeare's name would "out-live" his tomb, but he could not know how often "Time" would dissolve "thy Stratford Moniment".