Shakespeare's Skull Is Missing

William Shakespeare is widely considered the most influential playwright writing in the English language, with his works still being studied and performed centuries after his death. 

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Despite his fame then and now, there are plenty of things which we don't know of his life and eventual death in 1616. A month before he died, for instance, he wrote a will in which he claimed he was "in perfect health & memorie, god be praysed". We do not know the cause of his death, though 50 years after his death a vicar in Stratford wrote that “Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard; for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.”

Though plausible, the cause of death remains unclear, with others suggesting that he may have died of typhus. 

Two days after his death, his body was buried in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, the same church where he had been baptized. On his gravestone, he left one final threatening poem, in the form of a curse.

''Good friend for Jesus sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed hear, Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones," the gravestone reads.

Unfortunately, it appears the curse did not have the intended effect, as 400 years later, archaeologists discovered that his grave appears to be missing his head. It had been thought that Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, may have been buried in a large underground vault, but looking at the graves, the team concluded that they had been buried in shallow graves beneath the church floor. Scanning the burial site at the Stratford-upon-Avon church with ground-penetrating radar, they found signs of a disturbance.

“We came across this very odd, strange thing at the head end. It was very obvious, within all the data we were getting, that there was something different going on at that particular spot. We have concluded it is signs of disturbance, of material being dug out and put back again," archaeologist Kevin Colls from Staffordshire University said in a statement in 2016, when investigations took place, adding that they had found a "very strange brick structure" in the head end of the grave. The investigation was featured in a Channel 4 documentary, Secret History: Shakespeare's Tomb, at the time. 

"We have Shakespeare's burial with an odd disturbance at the head end, and we have a story that suggests that at some point in history someone's come in and taken the skull of Shakespeare," Colls added. "It's very, very convincing to me that his skull isn't at Holy Trinity at all."

There had been claims prior to this study that Shakespeare's skull had been stolen, notably in an 1879 story by Rev Charles Jones Langston titled How Shakespeare’s skull was stolen. In this story, it is claimed that around 100 years before that, the skull had been stolen by graverobbers who broke into the church.

There are also legends that the skull resides in another church in Beoley, Worcestershire. When the team investigated the skull, though, subjecting it to laser scans and forensic analysis, they found that it belonged to an unknown woman in her 70s. In short, the evidence appears to suggest that Shakespeare's skull is missing, and we don't really know where it could be.

"There are so many contradictory myths and legends about the tomb of the Bard," Colls added. "These results will undoubtedly spark discussion, scholarly debate and controversial theories for years to come. Even now, thinking of the findings sends shivers down my spine."