SUMMER 1996  SHAKESPEARE BULLETIN – 25

The Shakespeare Epitaphs

By Roberta Ballantine

Editors’ Note: While Shakespeare Bulletin is not intended to be a forum on the authorship issue or an arena for anagrams, we thought the following article sufficiently curious and provocative to warrant its publication.

Engraved on the flat stone covering William Shakespeare’s burial place in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, is this familiar jingle, thought to have been written by Shakespeare himself¹:

GOOD FREND FOR JESVS SAKE FORBEARE,

TO DIGG TH                  E DVST ENCLOASED HEARE!

BLESE BE Ys MAN Yt SPARES TH                  ES STONES,

AND CVRST BE HE Yt MOVES MY BONES

When the letters of these verses are carefully rearranged, keeping connected letters together and abbreviation intact, a ferocious message appears—an anagram which has never been made public:

BENEA TH                   Yt CLOSE FIND MARLOVES VERSE,

NEAR SHAKESPEARES DVSTY BONES,

O Yt BRAGGART JESE OF GODD BE CVRSD!

HE YtS ENTOMBED OF TH                  ESE STONES.

M

              Anagrams are often derided as meaningless games, for a popular notion holds that any sequence of letters containing a possible variety of words can be rearranged to form all sorts of different messages.  Not so!  Sometimes the letters of a randomly chosen word sequence can be shifted to create a number of different words, but unless that sequence is the outward form of a truly created anagram, letter-shifting, even if some related phrases are achieved, always results in a longer or shorter residue of meaningless letters or, at best, irrelevant words.

              A real anagram is a respectable and sometimes very useful cipher.  When meaningful communication emerges, which uses the material given out front, including abbreviations, single letters, and connected letters, and especially when the communication makes assurance double-sure by using meter and rhyme, in most cases it can be judged a correct decipherment.  But it is true that certain anagrams, after their words are correctly formed, may be slightly rearranged, altering the message.  In this secret poem on the floor of the chancel, the words MARLOVES and SHAKSPEARES can be exchanged.  The transfer doesn’t make sense—the grave is Shakespeare’s—but the fault may have moved the poet to make a second epitaph, one more tightly crafted, free of ambiguity.

              On the north wall of the chancel in the same Holy Trinity Church, carved into the facing –stone below the bust of Shakespeare, there’s a message in verse that has puzzled its readers for centuries.²   It contains an obvious spelling error (SIEH should be SITH), and, after its eloquent opening lines, the poem deteriorates into a tangled contrivance which, though it makes labored sense, leaves the reader feeling uncomfortable.  Scholars patiently explicate the convoluted phrases and attribute both SIEH and the poem’s odd punctuation to a poorly-schooled stonemason.

              But the handle of a cipher sticks out here: DIDE could be DIDO with substitution of a single letter.  Trial and error letter-shifting slowly solves the puzzle, and a touching poem appears—six meaningful lines, Shakespearean in tone, rhyming ababcc.  As he’s done in the cipher on the chancel floor, in this longer poem the author manages to help the decipherer by connecting some of the letters that take their places next to each other in the secret verses: many TH                  ’s, two ME ’s, and an NT  .  The word NA ME  goes across intact, as do THIS and HIS.  The abbreviations [s over Y] Y and [t over Y] Y were in common use when this composition was made—they stand for THIS and THAT—and WRITT and WITT, minus their extra T’s, keep their positions in the final couplet.

              Here’s the public version first, then the secret one:

STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST TH                  OV BY SO FAST?

READ IF TH                 OV CANST, WHOM ENVIOVS DEA TH                  HA TH                  PLAST,

WI TH                 IN TH                 IS MONVME NT        SHAKSPEARE: WI TH                  WHOME,

QVICK NATVRE DIDE: WHOSE NAME DO TH                  DECK Ys TOMBE,

FAR MORE TH                 EN COST; SIEH ALL, Yt HE HA TH                  WRITT,

LEAVES LIVING ART, BVT PAGE, TO SERVE HIS WITT.

WAS MARLOVES STAR ENTOMBD, BY TH                 IEVES,

WI TH                 IN TH                 IS CRYPT? THE EPITAPH Yt DECKS TH                 IS CLOSE,

FRAGME NT  TH                 AT: SEE TH                 ROVGH, KNIT VP, TH                 E WOOLSEY WEAVES

OF QUEEN DIDO, KING LEAR: IN BO TH                 , ONE AV TH                 OR SHOWS,

WHOSE ART HIS NAME WI TH                  LOVE HA TH                  WRIT:

TH                 AT FACT MVST SAVE Ys DAMNED, SAVAGE WIT.

H

              The author inverts one M, using it as a W, and takes advantage of a rule mentioned by William Camden in his chapter on anagrams in Remaines Concerning Britain, first published in 1605.  Camden writes: “The precise in this practice strictly observing all parts of the definition [of an anagram] are onely bold with H either in omitting or retaining it, for that it cannot challenge the right of a letter” (168).  The H at the end of the long anagram might be construed as the author’s initial, but the strong Marlovian rhythm that moves the lines suggests the work was crafted by the poet himself, mindful of Camden’s rule.

              And here in this anagram there’s no dangerous equivocal construction to threaten clarity of meaning. TH                  IS and TH                  AT, if exchanged, make only a subtle difference in nearness.  The penultimate line can be read

WHOSE ART HIS NA ME  WITH LOVE HATH WRIT, or,

WHOSE NA ME  HIS ART WITH LOVE HATH WRIT.

The meaning is the same; the poet might have made the words interchangeable to emphasize that crucial line.

              This anagram may be the longest in existence, for even counting Y and Y as only two, the work contains two hundred eighteen letters, and, according to cryptographers William and Elizabeth Friedman, the longest known anagram is a poem in Spanish containing eight lines of verse but only “about 140 letters” (93).  It is also remarkable that every one of the many punctuation marks in the “Stay Passenger” poem is fitted into a suitable place in its anagram.

              But shows of literary panache are not the true wonders of this work.  Its significance, of course, lies in its meaning, along with the nature of its medium.  The author must have believed the only way to preserve his message so it might someday be understood would be to have it carved in stone, in cipher, and installed in a public place.

              His communication is succinct.  Though the poet was a damned savage, he created all his writings with love, and the style of his art must reveal him as author of the whole range of youthful Marlowe, mature Shakespeare work.  For the world to recognize his authorship was so important to him he felt it would save his soul.

              It could happen.  Someday passengers might stay, and read, and the ghost could rest.³

Notes

              ¹Differing scholarly opinions hover over the punctuation of the gravestone epitaph.  B. Roland Lewis, in The Shakespeare Documents (2:529), states that due to chipping of the stone over many years the originally carved marks may have suffered alteration, and he declares there is no exclamation point after the second line, as E. K. Chambers printed it in 1930 (2:181).  Lewis makes it a colon, and others have made it a period.  Nevertheless, the rubbing that Lewis displays as Document 249 (see 530-31) clearly does show a crude but identifiable exclamation point after line two, a reading that certain scholars continue to endorse (e.g. Wadsworth 17).

              Some of the letters incised on this stone have also been cause for debate: the word BLESE, some say, is really BLESE. S. Schoenbaum, in William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (250), prints BLESE but mentions BLESE as “a possible alternative.”  So does G. Blakemore Evans in The Riverside Shakespeare (1834).  In The Shakespeare Documents, Lewis, after a convoluted description of the appearance and position of the word, asserts that there is no stem of a T leaning up against the last E, reaching out an arm to touch the S that precedes it.  “Even though the stone has been chipped at the point in question,” he writes, “magnification of the final E reveals no outer left shank off a capital T (2:529).

              But, once more, the rubbing he provides refutes his statement. It does not show an elegant shank complete with serif; it does show a clear white line—not a “chip” at a “point”—running from the top of the final E back to touch the crown of the S preceding it.

              Lewis mentions joined letters in the inscription.  Excerpt for this trinity of  SJE ,  which he doesn’t recognize, all are in twos, and all of them, including this triad, go across intact into the secret message.  That’s why they’re connected—to make it easier for the decipherer.  SJE  becomes part of the word JESJE , on the secret side.

              ²For good photographs of both the gravestone and monument inscriptions, see Halliday 127 and 116.

              ³The deciphering of both epitaphs is copyrighted by Roberta Ballantine.

Works Cited

Camden, William. Remaines Concerning Britain. 1605. Rpt. London: S. Waterson

and R. Clavell, 1657.

Chambers, E.K. William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. Vol. 2.

Oxford: Clarendon P, 1930.

Evans, G. Blakemore, ed. The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,

1974.

Friedman, William and Elizabeth S. The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined.

Cambridge; Cambridge UP, 1957.

Halliday, F.E. Shakespeare: A Pictorial Biography. London: Thames and Hudson,

1969.

Lewis, B. Roland. The Shakespeare Documents: Facsimiles, Transliterations,

Translations, & Commentary. Vol. 2. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1941.

Schoenbaum, S. William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life. New York: Oxford

UP, 1975.

Wadsworth, Frank W. “Shakespeare’s Life.” In the Pelican edition of The Complete

Works. Gen. ed. Alfred Harbage. Baltimore: Penguin, 1969. 10-18.