Who Killed William Shakespeare?
by
Simon Stirling
The Church of St Leonard sits on a hillside, away from the
road. Through the porch and the heavy
oak door, you enter a well-kept space with all the usual oddities of an old
English church.
To the left of the east-facing chancel, a short flight of
concrete steps leads up to a pair of iron gates which open into a side chapel,
filled with memorials to members of the Sheldon family. Carved effigies occupy the space between this
chapel and the chancel.
Every five years, two of the steps leading up to the chapel
are removed. More steps, never seen by
the public, lead downwards into a small crypt.
Old coffins lie side-by-side in this musty space. Sometime in the past, these coffins were
broken into by thieves who wanted to steal the lead linings surrounding the bodies.
There is a hole in the wall, beyond which lies an ossuary
filled with large bones. The ossuary also
contains a bucket-like urn which once held the viscera of Ralph Sheldon. He died in 1613.
But the skull which rests in the urn is not Ralph Sheldon’s.
The skull is not complete.
The lower jaw and cheek bones are missing, and there are no teeth. Deep scratches are scored into the right
forehead. The eye sockets are broken,
with a sharp burr of bone jutting out at the edge of the left eyebrow.
A new vicar arrived at the Church of St Leonard in
1883. His name was Rev Charles Jones
Langston. In October 1879, he had
published an astonishing story in the “Argosy” magazine. It was entitled, “How Shakespeare’s Skull was
Stolen”.
Langston’s tale of grave-robbing was filled with incidental
detail. It appeared just as an
international debate on whether or not to open up the grave of William
Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, was hotting up. When the Shakespeare expert C.M. Ingleby
wrote his “Shakespeare’s Bones: A Proposal to Disinter Them” in 1883, he
mentioned Langston’s extraordinary tale.
Rev Langston responded by publishing the second half of his story under
the title, “How Shakespeare’s Skull was Stolen and Found”.
His new account described how the skull had been hidden away
in the ossuary beneath the Sheldon chapel in the Church of St Leonard by the
very thieves who had broken into the crypt and smashed up the coffins to get at
the valuable lead inside them.
Langston claimed to have discovered the church almost by
accident. He was shown into the crypt by
the churchwarden. There, by the light of
a lantern, surrounded by the mouldering remains of generations of the Sheldon
family, he had reached into the bone-house, pulled out the funerary urn, and
found the missing skull of William Shakespeare.
