"Cursed be he that moves my bones" by Karla Stover

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This weekend, while looking for something to watch on TV as I sat with two dogs on my lap making pine needle baskets, (and no easy task in Puget Sound where there aren't a lot of pine trees), I stumbled on one of the few programs PBS doesn't charge to watch. It was about a group of archaeologists and historians who wanted access to the contents of William Shakespeare's grave.


Unlike the majority of Great Britain's men of letters who lie in Westminster Abbey's Poets Corner, Shakespeare was interred in Stratford-upon-Avon's Holy Trinity Church. I don't remember why they wanted a look-see, but they weren't the first hoping for a peak. After all, the grave is less than 3 feet deep. And in the mid-19th century, Ohio-born school teacher Delia Slater Bacon became convinced that if she was allowed to open the site, she would be able to prove "the works attributed to him had in fact been written by a coterie of writers led by Francis Bacon and including Edmund Spenser and Sir Walter Raleigh and were credited by them to the relatively obscure actor and theatre manager largely for political reasons."

The teacher so disliked Shakespeare and was so vocal about both that dislike and her theory that after receiving some encouragement from Ralph Waldo Emerson she moved to England in 1853, "ostensibly to seek proof. She was uninterested in looking for original source material, however, and for three years lived in poverty while she developed her thesis out of ingenuity and 'hidden meanings' found in the plays."

Three years later, cold and hungry, she abandoned her plan of opening Shakespeare’s grave to look for the documents she believed would support her position. Perhaps she took its creepy epitaph to heart.

"Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare, 

To dig the dust enclosed here. 

Blessed be the man that spares these stones, 

And cursed be he that moves my bones." 

One of her additional theories was "that Francis Bacon had hidden proof of the plays’ authorship in his grave." But by this time her brother begged her to come home," writing to Nathaniel Hawthorne that he believed that Delia had been verging on the edge of insanity for at least six years. Delia, however, refused to leave England.

Delia’s mental state worsened, and as she suffered from constant fevers and poor health, and became suicidal, she was ultimately committed to an asylum, first by the mayor of Stratford-upon-Avon, then by her brother after she returned to the United States in 1858.

As for the results of the PBS special, what the researchers found "is that half of the Bard's grave is undisturbed" but that the head end where his skull would have been contains nothing. It's merely voided space. The popular theory is that grave robbers took it many years ago.;