humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare

On Feb 22, 2:18 pm, Dennis wrote:
.
> Bodies keep well in Stratford soil, Richard Wilson tells us, so that
> if Shakespeare's remains were ever to be exhumed we could test the
> likenesses offered in portraits of the Bard. Shakespeare is of course
> protected by the epitaph on his gravestone, but Ben Jonson, interred
> in a shaft grave in Westminster Abbey, has not been so fortunate:
> James Shapiro reminds us that nineteenth-century digging disturbed
> his corpse and revealed the ignoble fact that
> it was buried upside down. (Anthony Parr)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The general argument is that the mud of the Avon
has done Will in; unless you believe in dust at 17 feet.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
<< *William Hall* , and Oxford graduate, in 1694 stood beside the
grave and after he had read the rude, absurd, and ignorant epitaph,
wrote his Commentary contained in a letter to his friend, Edward
Thwaites, preserved in the Bodleian Library. The letter has brought to
light the significant fact concerning the depth of Shakspere's grave,
"they have laid him full seventeen feet DEEP, DEEP enough to secure
him.">>
- Shakespeare: The Personal Phase_ by *William Hall* Chapman
---------------------------------------------------------------------
PWDBard wrote:

> The story about the tomb being 17 feet down is total crap.
> The watertable would have burst through and food the church
> since the altar area sits right on top of the banks of the Avon.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
WASHINGTON IRVING, 1819 - p.48, Stratford-On-Avon, Sketch Book.
.
<four lines inscribed on it, said to have been written by himself,
and which have in them something extremely AWFUL. A few years since
also, as some laborers were digging to make an adjoining vault, the
earth caved in, so as to leave a vacant space almost like an arch,
through which one might have reached into his grave. No one, however,
presumed to meddle with his remains so awfully guarded by a
malediction; and lest any of the idle or the curious or any collector
of relics should be tempted to commit depredations, the old sexton
kept watch over the place for two days, until the vault was finished
and the aperture closed again. He told me that he had made bold
to look in at the hole, but could see neither coffin nor bones-
-nothing but *DUST* . It was something, I thought,
to have seen the *DUST* of Shakespeare.>>
---------------------------------------------------------------
*DUST* : *POLVERE* (Italian):
---------------------------------------------------------------
Benjamin Franklin: Write injuries in *DUST* , benefits in marble.
.
Horace: We are but *DUST* and shadow.
.
Sir Thomas Browne: Time which antiquates antiquities,
. and hath an Art to make *DUST* of all things.

Thomas Carlyle: The *DUST* of controVERsy
. is merely the falsehood flying off.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer