Shakespeare’s Death and Monument Shakespeare’s Death and Monument Author Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Funeral Practices Inheritance Law Published file. Updated metadata proofed added one figure and citation. updated author respStmt. Created File Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
The wall-mounted monument of carved marble shows the upper-half of a balding man with a goatee holding a quill pen in his right hand and a piece of paper or parchment under his left hand. This image shows Shakespeare’s monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. Photo taken by Michael Best. Used with permission.
Shakespeare’s Final Days

Several years after returning to his hometown in about 1612 for semi-retirement, William Shakespeare apparently became ill, and he drafted his last will and testament in the spring of 1616. Scholars speculate that he may have been declining from a chronic illness. By March 25, he had re-drafted and altered his will, possibly signifying his impending death. Some scholars have suggested that the shaky signatures on the will indicate that he was already very unwell at that time. Shakespeare died a few weeks later, on April 23. His death was likely attended by his son-in-law and executor of his will, the physician John Hall.

Shakespeare’s Burial and Cause of Death

Shakespeare’s burial is recorded in the Stratford Parish Register as occurring on 25 April, 1616, a normal interval between death and burial at the time. The burial was entered in the parish register in a list of deaths that month as Will Shakspere gent..

His tomb, which lies beneath the floor of the church, is inside the chancel rail adjacent to the monument. As befitting a prominent citizen of the town, it is covered by an inscribed stone, featuring this now-famous curse in poetry that does not sound much like Shakespeare’s: Good friend for Jesus sake forbear
 To dig the dust enclosed here!
 Blest be the man that spares these stones,
 And curst be he that moves my bones.

The monument erected in his memory on the wall of the church sometime before 1623 is mentioned in a commendatory poem in the First Folio, listing his age as 53. Several scholars have analyzed the monument as it appears now in comparison to the sketch of it from Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire, speculating on the significance of the alterations in the items Shakespeare holds in his hands. he currently hold a pen and quill resting on a cushion, but initial sketchs in Dugdale show a wool sack, leading some people to wonder if the monument was originally for his father, John, who dealt in wool as a commodity.

Like the other citizens of Stratford who died that year, the cause of death is not listed. His brother-in-law had died the week before, so it is possible that an outbreak of typhoid or other minor epidemic affected the town at that time.

Partying with the Poets?

A story surfaced in the mid-17th century that Shakespeare died from fever after drinking with two other poets, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. John Ward, a physician and vicar in Stratford-upon-Avon, kept a notebook in 1662 with comments about Shakespeare, his family, and his reputation as a playwright. Ward notes that Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted. (Potter 407. Written so long after the actual time of Shakespeare’s death, the story cannot be substantiated. Scholar Paul Edmondson accepts Ward’s account as plausible and thinks may indicate that the men were celebrating Jonson’s new status as unofficial poet laureate of the nation, or perhaps the publication of his The Workes of Benjamin Jonson in the large format of a folio, a bold statement by Jonson that his literary works were worthy of respect (and sale). This may have paved the way for Shakespeare’s colleagues to publish his collected plays in a folio format in 1623.

What’s in the Tomb?

Despite the rhyming curse over Shakespeare’s gravesite and the long-held belief in its sanctity, the tomb seems to have been opened sometime in the past 400 years. In 2016, scientists were given permission by the Church of England to explore the tomb with ground penetrating radar, although not to open it. The scans determined that the body under the inscription lies undisturbed about one meter below the stone, but that the area where the skull should be may have been disturbed. It is inconclusive whether the skull is in the tomb, or as rumor has long held, was removed from the grave in the late 18th century.

Other Tributes to Shakespeare

The monument to Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey’s Poets Corner was erected in 1741, after having been approved in 1726. Some idea to place Shakespeare near other famous British poets must have occurred not long after his death if we believe Ben Jonson’s words from To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author, William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us, published in the prefatory pages of the First Folio in 1623: Soul of the age! The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage! My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A little further, to make thee a room: Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive still while thy book doth live And we have wits to read and praise to give.

Key Print Sources Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. W.W. Norton, 2004. Greer, Germaine. Shakespeare’s Wife. Bloomsbury Press, 2007. Potter, Lois. The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. McMullan, Gordon and Zoe Wilcox, eds. Shakespeare in Ten Acts. The British Library, 2016.
Key Online Sources Bearman, Robert. Parish Register Entry Recording William Shakespeare’s Burial. Shakespeare Documented. Folger Shakespeare Library, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/node/124.. Best, Michael. Shakespeare’s Death. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. https://https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/retirement/death.html.. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026. Brown, Mark. Shakespeare’s Skull Probably Stolen by Grave Robbers, Study Finds. The Guardian. 23 Mar. 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/mar/23/shakespeare-stolen-skull-grave-robbing-tale-true. Weinberg, Abbie and Elizabeth DeBold. The Other First Folio. Folger Shakespeare Library. 11 Oct. 2016. hhttps://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/the-other-first-folio/. William Shakespeare. Westminster Abbey. https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/commemorations/william-shakespeare.
Image Sources Best, Michael. Picture of Shakespeare’s monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. N.D.