Scars in their Eyes

In my last blog post, I provided a link to a new website which provides a wealth of information in support of the likelihood that the "Wadlow" portrait (detail, left) is a genuine portrait of William Shakespeare.

I believe it is, and in this blog post I shall point to just one of the features which helps to identify the sitter.

We'll be concentrating on the left eye (the sitter's left, that is) and, in particular, a distinctive scar immediately above the left eye.  It's clearly visible on the "Wadlow", cutting down from above the eyebrow to slice through the outer end of it.  Just in case, I'll provide another detail of the portrait, which brings us in a little closer.

There, see?  The scar comes down over the left forehead, meeting the left eyebrow about halfway across.  Something similar can be seen in the "Chandos" portrait of Shakespeare at the National Portrait Gallery:

It might look a little clearer in this detail of the above:

This scar was, apparently, something that Shakespeare bore for much of his life.  The evidence for this, I would suggest, is visible on the contested skull of Shakespeare at Beoley in Worcestershire (detail of photo by Richard Peach for The Village magazine):

A photo of the Beoley skull, taken at around the time of the Second World War, shows the scar over the left eyebrow very clearly:

Just in case, here's a detail of the same, showing the left eye socket and the scar above it:

So, Shakespeare had a scar over his left eye, cutting down over his left eyebrow, which is precisely what we see on the "Wadlow" portrait.

But, wait - what's that you say?  The Beoley skull was "proven" to have belonged to a mysterious, unknown female in her seventies and can't, therefore, have been Shakespeare?

Hmmnn ... tell you what: let's check one more image.

This is a detail from a facial reconstruction of the contested Shakespeare Death Mask in Darmstadt, Germany.  There it is, just above the left eyebrow - a scar which runs down to meet the eyebrow about halfway across.  The same reconstruction of Shakespeare's face from the death mask, only taken at a different angle, shows this scar very clearly:

And, for comparison, the scar on the death mask facial reconstruction alongside the scar on the Beoley skull:

They look pretty much the same, don't they?

Well, here's the odd thing.  That facial reconstruction of the death mask was done by Dr Caroline Wilkinson - the same expert who claimed that the Beoley skull was that of a woman in her seventies!

Admittedly, the Channel 4 Shakespeare's Tomb documentary, shown earlier this year, did rather railroad Dr Wilkinson into making that statement ... but maybe if Caroline Wilkinson had compared the skull with her own facial reconstructions of Shakespeare, she might have been less certain in her analysis.

The scar - on portraits, death mask, facial reconstructions and the Beoley skull - is one of Shakespeare's distinguishing features.

That, or a massive coincidence, requiring us to believe that the only skull to have been identified as the "veritable skull of William Shakespeare" actually belonged to an unknown septuagenarian, even thought it has exactly the same scar as Shakespeare had!

A Bit of Balance

It's been standard practice for some years now, in certain quarters of the British media, to strive for journalistic "balance".

So that, for example, if BBC Newsnight do a piece on climate change, they are obliged to wheel in some corporate shill who receives money from the fossil fuels lobby to pretend that there's no such thing as climate change.

Balance, geddit?

Well, the requirement for balance doesn't apply to all of the media.  Channel 4's Shakespeare's Tomb went out of its way to avoid any form of balance, which meant that the vast majority of the available evidence in the matter was ignored and only those with a certain point-of-view were featured.  Similarly, press coverage in advance of the documentary, and in response to it, was equally one-sided (see below).

Thank heavens, then, for Ben Russell, who wrote this piece for the Bromsgrove Advertiser and its sister papers, including the Redditch & Alcester Advertiser, this week.  Ben was genuinely interested in the background to the story and the way the documentary team mishandled it.  The result - a piece which allows another perspective to be heard.

So thank you, Ben.  I'll post a link to the article when I can find one.

Otherwise, as I say, the media really just parroted whatever came their way in a press release.  This is an interesting example.  It appeared on the BBC News Online website the day after the C4 documentary was broadcast.  I've been trying - with little success - to find out if the copy and quotations were all supplied to the BBC in a press release, which is how things tend to happen these days, and if so, who issued the press release.

I doubt it was Channel Four, who probably don't know much about the Stratford tour guide who is quoted in the piece.  The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, however, do know him.  Could it be the SBT, then, that got its press release out to the BBC ready to be published within hours of the broadcast?  The mention in the BBC article of the thwarted attempt to secure permission to study the skull properly sounds like an authentic SBT touch, given that it was the two top guys at the SBT who successfully shot down that application.

And why, we might ask, is nobody telling tales about this outside of school (so to speak)?  I've emailed the Church of England Team Leader responsible for Beoley church, who is quoted in the article, partly to find out if he really did say that the story of the skull at Beoley is "rubbish", but I've received no reply.

Where's the balance, then?  One side of the argument, if we can call it that, has direct access to the media.  That same side took control of the Channel 4 documentary and kept all other voices out of it.  They scotched the investigation, then co-opted the production.

It was quite a surprise, then, to find this piece on the curious Cult of Weird website.  I know nothing about the site, or who runs it, but they'd obviously done their homework - far more so than the mainstream media - because for once, my work gets a mention.

It's going to take a long, long time, and an awful lot of hard work, to combat the misinformation broadcast to the world by Channel 4 in Shakespeare's Tomb and uncritically taken up by the press, left, right and centre.  The very fact that there are still journalists and commentators who are prepared to look a little deeper, and to present the other side of the story, is verily a welcome relief.

The Mind's Construction in the Face

In a phone conversation on Thursday 26 November 2015, the director of the Channel Four documentary Shakespeare's Tomb tried very hard to assure me that the programme would not be spending very much time at Beoley, was not terribly interested in the skull, and didn't expect to discover much about the mysterious "veritable skull of William Shakespeare."

The director seemed startled when I mentioned Dr Caroline Wilkinson, who I already knew was involved.  No, I was told, Caroline Wilkinson probably wasn't going to be doing much with the skull - at most, maybe coming up with some thoughts about possible age and gender - and she almost certainly wouldn't be doing any sort of facial reconstruction from the skull or anything like that at all.

I'm still at a loss to explain why the director told me all that, unless it was to throw me off the scent.  Given that I had only just been made aware of the fact that I was no longer involved with the documentary, I can imagine that she was trying to mollify my (i.e. "No, don't worry, we won't be doing anything that directly concerns you and your work") or, to put it another way, I was being fobbed off and kept in the dark.

Anyway, surprise-surprise, Dr Wilkinson did do something of a facial reconstruction from the skull after all.  Maybe she had a bit of time on her hands, I don't know, or maybe that was the plan all along but the director didn't want me to know about it.  The image above is partly that of Dr Wilkinson's reconstruction, made under the apprehension that the skull is that of an "unknown woman in her seventies".  Obviously, for copyright reasons, I haven't reproduced the whole image.

Something about the eyes in the reconstruction reminded me of an early 17th-century portrait in the royal collection.  This portrait of an unknown man was flagged up by Lee Durkee on his fascinating Lost Shakespeare Portraits blog.  Lee Durkee knows his stuff, and when he suggests that the "unknown man" in the portrait might be Shakespeare, I'm inclined to think he might be onto something.

So the image of an "unknown female" you see at the top of the blog has been merged with the features of the "unknown man" from the portrait in the royal collection.  Look closely: it's difficult to see where the "unknown man" ends and the "unknown female" begins.

Now to the reproduction image proper.  For some bizarre reason, the forehead reproduced from the skull has been blurred.  This has the effect of focusing attention on the central features of the face - eyes, nose and mouth.  It is unfortunate, because (as those who follow my work will know) many of the identifying features of the skull which also show up, with a remarkable degree of consistency, in the Shakespeare portraiture, are to be found on the forehead.  Which, in the image taken from the Shakespeare's Tomb documentary, has been blurred.

Moreover, the forehead is one of the best-preserved parts of the skull.  It is pretty much intact.  The face of the skull has been smashed to bits (much of that damage, I believe, done at around the time of death).  Which means that much of what we see most clearly of the face in the reconstruction is not actually taken from the skull, because those parts don't actually exist.  Where it is most in focus, then, the reconstruction is based on a reconstruction.

You have a laser scan of a damaged skull, onto which have been projected (we must assume) the missing parts of the structure (cheekbones, maxilla, lower jaw).  In other words, the facial reconstruction shown in the programme is based on another reconstruction - the conjectural reconstruction of the missing parts of the skull - which is itself based, not on the original skull, but on a laser scan thereof.

Complicated, isn't it?  But the point to be made here is that those parts of the skull which do exist, and which we ought to be able to see very clearly in the facial reconstruction, have been largely blurred, while those parts of the skull which don't exist, and therefore had to be speculatively reconstructed, have been rendered rather clearly.

Odd, hunh?  Even so, the image yields some interesting surprises.  Let me concentrate on the left eye, temple and forehead as shown in the facial reconstruction (part of which is blurred) for the Channel Four programme:

Let's start with the forehead.  Blurred though it is - so as not to give the game away - some features can still be made out.  Looking up from the outside half of the eye, it is quite clear that there are a couple of grooves or indentations, running down from the hairline, with something resembling a raised area in between.

I've blogged about this feature before: in Call ye Midwife I suggested that, along with a defining depression high up in the forehead, just left of centre, they were the result of the rushed and insanitary midwifery practices of the day, while in Shakespeare's Face (3) I used them as part of my evidence to indicate that the somewhat controversial Cobbe portrait is indeed of William Shakespeare.

Basically, that double groove running down the left side of the forehead is a fairly consistent feature of the Shakespeare portraiture.  And, let's remember, it's there on the skull - one of the remaining parts of the skull - from which Dr Wilkinson made her reconstruction.

Moving down a bit, there seems to be evidence of a scar running across the top of the left eyebrow.  I examined this in my 2014 paper for Goldsmiths University, The Faces of Shakespeare.  Again, the skull concurs with the portraiture, the scar being especially visible on the Wadlow portrait.

The outside of the left eye shows what appear to be two lines descending to meet in a sort of V-shape immediately to the left of the eye.  I have written about this extensively, describing and illustrating this feature in Who Killed William Shakespeare? and elsewhere.  It is another defining feature of Shakespeare portraiture and is caused by the breakage of the end of the facial bone and the lower edge of the orbit showing through the skin.  The crease which comes round from the left, just under the eye, in the reconstruction is also a feature of Shakespeare portraiture, clearly visible in the Droeshout engraving (First Folio, 1623) and the Chandos portrait (National Portrait Gallery).

The damage to the lower part of the eye socket shows up both in the Shakespeare portraiture (often as a faint, thin, bluish or greyish line, as in the Wadlow portrait) and is replicated in the facial reconstruction as a sort of puffy, saggy, bags-under-the-eyes look.  Indeed, a forensic archaeologist and biological anthropologist who studied the photos of the skull told me that the "guttering" at the bottom of the eye sockets would produce just such a look in the portraits.

Just inside the eye, alongside the nose, there is shading and a minor blemish, consistent with the portraits (the Cobbe shows this as a sort of bluish tinge with what a friend, who has seen the Cobbe portrait at Hatchlands Park in Surrey, described as a "slight boil or deformity on the nose side of the left eye orbit").  This is where a pointed instrument, a stabbing weapon such a poignard, was jabbed into the eye socket, puncturing the inner medial wall of the left eye.  This forced the eyeball forwards, and slightly to the left, as we see in the death mask and the "wall-eyed" look of the portraits.  The death mask shows the scar made by this weapon.  The portraits, and the facial reconstruction, reflect the damage that was done to the inner eye socket by this stabbing weapon (for more on this, see my paper for Goldsmiths and my Historical Honey article, Shakespeare and the Dragonfly.)

Finally, the cheek.  First of all, there appears to be something of a swelling, a raised area, where the (missing) cheekbone should be - and curiously enough, something very similar appears in much the same place on Dr Wilkinson's facial reconstruction of the Darmstadt death mask (Shakespeare, again). 

Look more closely at the facial reconstruction and you'll see a thin line meandering slightly as it runs down the left cheek, from just beneath the eye to just to the side of the mouth.  That really is a giveaway: you'll find it in the portraits, too, especially the Chandos, where I first noticed it - a thin grey slightly wavy line running own the left cheek, with another, fainter but similar, immediately to the left of it.

That's the outline of the broken maxilla (upper jaw).

So - even though they did their best to misinterpret certain features of the skull and to obscure the others, the facial reconstruction which Dr Wilkinson apparently wasn't going to do but then went ahead and did anyway does, in fact, confirm that the Beoley skull matches the portraiture of William Shakespeare.

How much longer, I ask you, must we allow the cover-up to go unchallenged and the world to remain in the dark about the true identity of the owner of the Beoley skull?

Shakespeare's Skull: The Eyebrow Test

This is a still from the Channel Four documentary, Shakespeare's Tomb.  Dr Caroline Wilkinson is analysing the laser scan made of the rogue skull in the ossuary at Beoley church.  What she's saying is this:

"In male skulls you tend to see a bulge just where the eyebrows sit, and you can see on this skull that we don't have a bulge of bone."

Ergo, we hear, the skull is probably female.

And, yes, Dr Wilkinson has a point: the skull really doesn't show much in the way of eyebrow bulges:

One might even suggest that the right eyebrow ridge (the one she's pointing to on the laser scan) looks somewhat damaged.  An earlier photo of the skull shows this quite clearly:

So we're agreed.  Eyebrow bulges not much to write home about.  But what's interesting is that, in the TV documentary, Dr Wilkinson had just been shown lining up the laser scan of the skull with two of the most familiar images of Shakespeare, the Droeshout engraving and the Chandos portrait.  Let's look first at the Droeshout:

Well, that's odd.  No real eyebrow bulges there, and especially not in the area indicated by Dr Wilkinson on the laser scan of the skull.  What about the Chandos, then?

Hmmnn.  You know what?  There aren't really any eyebrow bulges there, either.  And what's so strange about this is that Dr Wilkinson had been looking at both of the above images, apparently, before she told Kevin Colls and Dr Helen Castor that the absence of eyebrow bulges on the skull suggested that the skull might be female.

Funny, though, that she didn't think to mention the comparable absence of eyebrow bulges in the most famous images of Shakespeare, given that she'd just been looking at them.  Surely she can't imagine that the face in the Droeshout and the Chandos is female?

Okay.  Let's try some others.  How about that fond favourite of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the Cobbe portrait:

Well, whaddya know?  A remarkable lack of eyebrow bulges.  And what about the latest contender in the world of Shakespeare portraiture, the Wadlow?

Nope.  Same again - no visible bulging in the eyebrow area.  The Wadlow, of course, is interesting because it helped me to propose the theory that Shakespeare had a condition known as eyebrow ptosis (which he passed on to his illegitimate son, Sir William Davenant).  I came to that theory by way of the Beoley skull and the observation, made by a research student in forensic archaeology and biological anthropology, that the left eyebrow of the skull appears "bumpier" than the right, probably because the fatty deposits of the eyebrow were missing.  They had, it would seem, slipped.  As can be seen in the Wadlow.  That's eyebrow ptosis.

The Wadlow also shows a scar, immediately above the left eyebrow, which also shows up in the same place on the skull.

Now, either all of these portraits are actually of females, or the skull isn't necessarily female at all.  That, or portrait artists didn't understand eyebrows when the above portraits were made.  So let's look at this another way.

The above diagram comes from An Anthropological Study of some Portraits of Shakespeare and of Burns by Professor Arthur Keith, Conservator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, who gave his paper on this subject on 20 February 1914.  The outside line of the diagram shows the profile of the Shakespeare effigy in the funerary monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon.  The inner image is a drawing of a Bronze Age skull (enlarged 10%).

Look at the outline of the profile of the Shakespeare effigy.  No noticeable eyebrow bulge, is there?  This effigy was looking down on the programme makers when William Shakespeare's grave was being scanned - and yet no one looked up and noticed that the effigy has no significant bulges where the eyebrows sit:

Must be female, then.

Tell you what - just one more (though there are many I could choose from).  Look for the eyebrow bulges:

Now, what's interesting about this one is that we do see, quite clearly, certain features that also visible on the skull - the scar over the left eyebrow, the discoloured and depressed region over the right eyebrow, the damage to the lower edges of the eye sockets, and the loss of fatty deposits about halfway across the left eyebrow, which I described above in connection with the eyebrow ptosis.  What we don't really see is any major eyebrow bulges.  Some fatty deposits, yes, because we can also see where they're missing, but bulges in the bone?  Not many.

And this is where things get a little weird, because the image above is a detail from a 3-D computer reconstruction of the face of the Darmstadt death mask of Shakespeare.  It was made by ... Dr Caroline Wilkinson.

Who apparently had no idea that Shakespeare's eyebrows were remarkably and noticeably not very bulgy.  Even though she had been looking at his portraits and had previously done a facial reconstruction from his death mask.

But then, maybe she did realise that.  And the programme makers didn't want her to mention it.  Maybe careful editing made sure no one got to hear that the skull displays the same characteristics as the Shakespeare portraiture. 

Because let's be clear: in no way was Channel Four's Shakespeare's Tomb the serious scientific investigation it made itself out to be.  That would have left certain people with egg on their faces.

It would also have let the viewers know what they deserved to know.  That the Beoley skull probably isn't an "unknown woman in her seventies" and probably is what Rev C.J. Langston said it was - the "veritable skull of William Shakespeare."

Confirmation Bias

It's a fair point.

A journalist has put it to me that "it was not in the interests of [the Channel 4/Arrow Media] documentary makers to debunk the Beoley skull.  It would have been a much better story for them if they had found a skull that could be Shakespeare's."

I wholeheartedly agree.  It would have been a much better programme if proper consideration had been given to the Beoley skull.

Here's why I think that didn't happen.

Stage 1: Cognitive Dissonance

We all have our own sets of prejudices and firmly held ideas about the world, based on what we've been taught and told, our cultural background, political and religious beliefs, and so on.  When someone comes along with evidence that challenges one or other of those firmly held ideas, some if not all of us can react pretty strongly, as if we were under physical attack.  The fight-or-flight instinct kicks in.  The person goes into a state of denial.  They cannot accept this new evidence because it clashes with what they already believe, and to engage with it might throw their entire world-view into crisis.

Example: when I met with the documentary director, she surprised me somewhat by saying, "You don't believe the skull is Shakespeare's."  I told her that I was uncomfortable with the concept of belief, in these circumstances, but that I was roundabout 98.9% convinced that it is.

Why did she assume that I didn't believe that the skull might be Shakespeare's?  Hadn't she been briefed on who I was, what I'd written and published, how I'd been involved in the process so far?

When I showed her some of the evidence, including the graphic illustrations in my Who Killed William Shakespeare? book highlighting the specific comparisons between the Beoley skull and the Shakespeare portraiture, she said "I can't see it."

Small wonder, then, that having told me they'd want to film me going down into the vault ("How do you think you'll feel, seeing the skull for the first time?") and giving a potted account of Langston's story, they later decided to dispense with my services and film somebody else going down into the vault and describing Langston's story ... someone who doesn't think that the skull is Shakespeare's.

Because as far as the director was concerned, the skull couldn't be Shakespeare's.  The idea was too radical.  It challenged her firmly-held set of beliefs about life, the universe and everything.

Stage 2: Confirmation Bias

Having decided that the Beoley skull couldn't be - mustn't be - Shakespeare's, the documentary was prepped along those very lines.

Let's say you've heard or read something which challenges your deeply-held convictions, triggering cognitive dissonance.  You want to fight back, to reassure yourself, to put your previous ideas back together and be comfortable with them again.  So you go hunting for evidence.

Not any old evidence, of course.  You look for the evidence that supports your point-of-view.  Any other evidence, especially anything that confirms the thing you didn't like hearing, has to be ignored, denied, mocked or destroyed.  What you want - what you need to overcome that uncomfortable feeling of cognitive dissonance - is anything that agrees with what you want to believe.

Anything else has to go.

So, in comes the reassuring Shakespeare expert who told the church court hearing into the application to remove the skull for analysis that the Rev C.J. Langston's account of How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen and Found was nothing but "Gothic fiction".

Out goes the guy who provided you with evidence that the story was written by someone who knew what he was on about.

The original plan, to have an actor present the programme, is ditched.  An actor might ask awkward questions.  Instead, a historian is hired - one less likely to challenge the consensus - so as to give the show an air of irreproachable authority.

A facial reconstruction expert who had previously commented on the photos of the skull - and then denied ever having seen them - is approached with a laser scan of the Beoley skull.  Though she is briefly glimpsed superimposing the scan of the skull over the Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare from the First Folio of 1623, this will not be discussed or commented upon in the show.

(Before the crypt was opened and the scan was made, and before Dr Caroline Wilkinson had seen it, the director tried to convince me that Beoley and the skull would not form a significant part of the programme, that they weren't expecting any results, and when - shock horror! - I mentioned Dr Wilkinson, that she wouldn't be doing any facial reconstruction or anything else with the skull, for that matter.  Would I mind signing a form and promising not to mention her name?)

The expert offers a tentative opinion based on insufficient evidence, and that is pounced on.  PROOF, ladies and gentlemen!  The proof we've all been waiting for!  Everything we previously believed was true!  The Beoley skull story was just a myth!

(Except that, having scanned Shakespeare's grave in Stratford, Kevin Colls, archaeologist, began to suspect that the first half of Langston's story might, in fact, be true.  He has vowed to keep looking for the missing skull.  And good luck to him.  He could spend the rest of his life doing that, now that the Beoley skull business has been kicked into the long grass.  So, nothing to worry our pretty little heads about there, then.)

I have very little doubt that, within a week or two of the director being appointed to oversee the making of the documentary, any hope that the skull would be properly examined had gone right out of the window.  From that point on, the programme was essentially biased in one particular direction.  The Beoley skull theory must be disproved, even if it means surrounding ourselves with people who don't believe it, discarding all the available evidence and any uncontrollable witnesses, asking one expert for their opinion, and then misrepresenting what that expert actually said.

Of course, it would have made a better programme if the skull had not been so summarily debunked, and on the basis of hardly any evidence whatsoever.

It would have made a much better programme.  And it would have paved the way for a more intensive and detailed examination of the skull.

But that wouldn't have helped get rid of that nasty sense of cognitive dissonance, would it?  So it didn't happen.

History Repeats Itself

At the start of Who Killed William Shakespeare? (the contract for which I signed four years ago today) I tried to explain how, in the second half of the 18th century, a metropolitan elite - or what we might now call "The Establishment" - seized control of Shakespeare's memory, rudely dismissing what the locals knew and creating their own version of events.

Significantly, they achieved this partly by losing as much evidence as possible and ignoring or misrepresenting the rest.

Well, old habits die hard, and the net result of last night's Channel 4 documentary seems to have been as damaging, hopeless and borderline-farcical as David Garrick's infamous Shakespeare "Jubilee" of 1769.  Back then, hordes of educated sophisticates descended on Stratford-upon-Avon, much to the alarm and consternation of the natives, who were abused and mocked by the visitors.  Then Garrick went home and produced his own show, which made out that only he and his supporters really knew or cared about Shakespeare, and the locals up in Warwickshire were rustic clowns with no idea about Stratford's most famous son.

Shakespeare's Tomb spent an awful lot of its time showing us pretty pictures of Stratford.  For some reason, a man who had conspired to try to prevent the documentary team from investigating the Beoley skull was given a prominent part in the programme as the authority on all things Shakespearean.

The programme stuck to the party line about the story published by the Rev C.J. Langston in 1879 and 1884 concerning the theft of Shakespeare's skull and its discovery at Beoley.  Even though the programme makers had been given abundant evidence that the Vicar of Beoley had identified himself as the author of the story, and that a surprising number of details in the story are verifiable, that was all ignored.

The skull at Beoley was scanned and then Dr Helen Castor and Kevin Colls sat with Dr Caroline Wilkinson, who showed them the scan on her screen.  The conversation went something like this:

Wilkinson: "This little bit here suggests that it might be dark greyish."

Castor: "So you're saying it's black?"

Wilkinson: "Well, we have to be cautious ..."

Castor: "No - you're saying it's black!"

Cue press release: "Skull is black."

I've altered the wording slightly.  But when an osteoarchaeologist/biological anthropologist tweets: "I'm intrigued #ShakespearesTomb - how did you come to the conclusion it was a 70yr old woman?! Magic new ageing techniques?!" you do have to ask how conclusive the results really were.

And the answer appears to be, not conclusive at all.  But right there, on screen, the expert was cornered and forced to make a definitive statement which, as she had tried to point out, couldn't really be made.  This instantly became a Truth Universally Acknowledged.

Of course, if the programme-makers had bothered to explore the existing research into the similarities between the skull and the Shakespeare portraiture, as well as Rev C.J. Langston and his skull story, we'd have got something more nuanced.  But they didn't want that.  They didn't even want any suggestions from the one and only witness called.  They wanted an Unequivocal Statement indicating that the skull is of no interest whatsoever, so we can all move on.

In the meantime, the folks at Beoley seem to be up in arms over the way they've been treated (see comment under previous blog post).  A geologist informs me that anyone who started a university paper claiming that Shakespeare's skull was stolen from the grave, based on the evidence shown in the programme, would be in very big trouble.  And now I hear from somebody else who helped out with the documentary, but who went unpaid and uncredited.

So what happened - apart from two years wasted (in my case)?

The best I can suggest is that, for a good long while, as the documentary project was being developed, it was all in the hands of an intelligent and amicable person who worked hard to bring all the relevant parties together and to lay the foundations for a genuinely interesting, and potentially startling, investigative programme.

Then a director was hired, along with a couple of producers.  The development producer stepped aside.  From that point on, things quickly began to unravel.

It was as if the "metropolitan elite" had come to town, determined to put the locals back in their place.  Yes, use them for as long as they're useful.  Then dump them.  They're not important.  Their local knowledge and their research are irrelevant.  They might as well be on zero-hours contracts.  We don't need to worry about them.

But the POSH people, the ones who've been on TV before, THEY'RE important.  Better still, they can (by and large) be trusted not to stray from the script.

Remember, we're not here to rock any boats, folks.  Langston's story is anonymous - got it?  The skull at Beoley?  Pah!  Who cares?  Skull, no skull, what's the difference?  Let's have some nice shots of Stratford, talk to some nice people, then back to London as quick as we can.

And if an expert isn't being quite as emphatic as we'd like in denying a very promising lead, we can force her - Inquisition-like - to say what we want her to say, and we can do it on camera, just in case anybody else feels like being properly scientific about all this.  No one will notice.  The press release will already have told everybody what we want them to think.  Now, where's my BAFTA?

It's shocking to realise how much hard work and good will was completely and utterly trashed in such a short space of time, by people who were new to the project, and what an unashamedly wasted opportunity the programme turned out to be.  Our knowledge of Shakespeare and the fate of his skull wasn't advanced one iota.  If anything, we've gone backwards.  And the programme-makers are surely patting themselves on the back for stirring up much ado about nothing and making a very pretty looking documentary that avoided upsetting their sophisticated metropolitan friends.

Meanwhile, the rest of us continue the ongoing work of trying to find out and publicise what really happened to Shakespeare and his skull.

By the way - that subsidence in the chancel at Holy Trinity Church, under Shakespeare's gravestone?  That's Will Shakespeare turning in his grave.

I've Seen That Face Before

It is with great anticipation that we await the screening of the Channel 4 documentary Shakespeare's Tomb on Saturday evening.  Apparently, said documentary has determined that the Beoley skull is that of an "unknown woman in her seventies" and not William Shakespeare after all.

Obviously, it would be wrong of me to prejudge the documentary without having seen it.  And, for now, we can pass over the multiple similarities between the Beoley skull and the Shakespeare portraiture, which I have published and blogged about ad nauseam.

Instead, allow me to outline one area of concern I have regarding the identification of the skull.

Back in 2012, I was working on the manuscript for my book Who Killed William Shakespeare? in which there was a fair amount of discussion and analysis concerning Shakespeare portraiture, the Beoley skull and the supposed death mask of Shakespeare in Darmstadt.  As well as spending a lot of time studying these images, I also went through the prolonged and costly process of acquiring permissions to reproduce some of those images in my book.

One image I had seen which intrigued me was a computer reconstruction of the face of the subject of the Darmstadt death mask.  This reconstruction had been carried out by Dr Caroline Wilkinson of the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification at the University of Dundee.  Dr Wilkinson is the media's go-to person for facial reconstruction from human remains.

I wrote to Dr Wilkinson on 20 August 2012, explaining that I was working on my book about Shakespeare and enquiring about the copyright status of the image she had previously created for a History Channel documentary - the reconstruction of the face from the death mask.  In my letter I mentioned the photographs of the Beoley skull, which I had been studying, and offered to forward them to her.  I also explained that I aimed to follow up the publication of my book with a documentary analysing the skull, the death mask and the portraiture, and rather hoped to be able to call upon her services for any such documentary.

I received no reply.

Who Killed William Shakespeare? was published about a year later.  I had succeeded in negotiating the rights to the death mask reconstruction image through an agency - which made it the most expensive image in my book, by far.  Very quickly, Lion Television, a documentary production company, expressed interest in following up the results of my research into the skull.  However, they would need a little more hard evidence before approaching a broadcaster (the rule of thumb being that documentaries don't tend to film these things until they're pretty sure of what they're going to find).

The producer at Lion TV contacted Dr Wilkinson to ask if it were possible for a 3-D reconstruction of the Beoley skull to be made using 2-D photographic images, and if that could then be compared with the 3-D laser scan image she already had of the Darmstadt death mask.  Dr Wilkinson confirmed that this was theoretically possible, and so she was invited to go ahead with the comparisons and Richard Peach's high-quality photos of the Beoley skull were sent up to Dundee.

We had a bit of a wait after that.  The initial findings were positive - Caroline Wilkinson concluded that there were "superficial similarities" between the skull and the death mask.  However, when she and/or her research students measured the orbits of the eye sockets of the death mask and the skull, they determined that there was no obvious match.

A bit of a blow, that, because it meant that the project with Lion TV ground to a halt.  However, I soon made contact, through a research student in biological anthropology, with a research fellow who showed immediate interest in the skull and the comparisons with the Shakespeare portraiture.

At the same time, I discovered that documentary makers from Arrow Media had very recently visited Beoley church in connection with a documentary on Shakespeare that they were developing.  This is the documentary which is due out this Saturday.

I worked fairly closely with Arrow Media over a period of about a year and a half, although bizarrely I was not invited to present evidence at the church court held to determine whether or not the Beoley skull should be "exhumed" for laboratory analysis - although I had been called in to help them prepare for the hearing.  The programme makers subsequently told me that Dr Caroline Wilkinson would be brought in to carry out a facial reconstruction of the skull based on a laser scan which would be made in the vault at Beoley.

When the development producer for the programme explained that they would want to bring in experts who had no previous connection with the material, and no way of knowing that we were investigating the possibility that the skull was Shakespeare's, to examine the relevant evidence, I felt it necessary to point out that Dr Wilkinson had already seen the photos of the skull in 2013-14, and would recognise them as part of a Shakespeare-related investigation.  The producer thanked me for letting them know and suggested that they might look instead for an expert in the United States who would be in no way prejudiced about the case.

A short while later, the producer assured me that Caroline Wilkinson had not seen the photos.  She had denied all knowledge of them.

Which struck me as odd.  It meant that, either her earlier statement regarding the skull/death mask mismatch was questionable, because she hadn't actually seen the photos of the skull ... or that she was not being entirely frank with the Arrow Media documentary team.

There's a coda to all this: when I finally discovered that I was no longer to play a part in the Shakespeare's Tomb documentary, the recently-appointed director tried to assure me that Beoley and the skull would not be playing a large part in the documentary, that they weren't spending much time on it, and they didn't expect to be able to reveal any results about it.  I raised the question of what Dr Caroline Wilkinson would be doing then, given that it's a long way to travel, all the way to Dundee (correction: Dr Wilkinson is now at Liverpool John Moores University), just to feature a facial reconstruction expert not doing any facial reconstruction.

The line went rather quiet, and then a bit of stammering happened.  Caroline Wilkinson, I was told, wasn't really going to be doing very much at all in the documentary.  Certainly nothing in the nature of a facial reconstruction.

And then the director rang back.  If I wanted to pop over to Beoley, go down into the vault and see the skull (for the first time) during a break in the filming, I would have to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement.  Was I prepared to do that?  And if I did, of course, I would not be allowed to mention Caroline Wilkinson to anybody (those were the director's words).

In the end, I did not sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement.  I felt that I had been elbowed out of my own story, after I had spent many hours helping the documentary along, and was now being bribed into silence with the offer of a chance to see the skull - the skull which I had spent more than four years studying.

I raise these matters here because I believe they are germane to the issue of the skull and the (provisional?) identification of the skull as that of an "unknown woman in her seventies".  Presumably, that is based on the opinion of an expert who had already seen and passed judgement on the photos of the skull, and whom I was asked not to talk about.

No other evidence was considered - including the rather extensive body of evidence which I have marshalled over the past four years, and which I have published and talked about in illustrated lectures.

Is it just me, or does something seem not-quite-right about all this?

(PS: viewers of the programme would have seen Dr Wilkinson offer opinions about possible age and gender of skull, only to have those magically transformed ON SCREEN into incontrovertible statements of fact by a historian.  That's not how science works - or history, for that matter.  Worse, a genuine investigation with abundant research already on its side has now been set back by an irresponsible and woefully inaccurate documentary, though hopefully not irremediably.  Ed.)

Shakespeare's Tomb

Well, the wait is nearly over.  Channel 4 TV started showing a trailer, this evening, for the forthcoming documentary, Shakespeare's Tomb.  You can view the trailer here.

So a tense few days lie ahead.  What do we know?  Well, judging by the trailer, the team from Arrow Media and the University of Staffordshire spent quite a bit of time in the vault beneath the Sheldon Chapel at Beoley, and then working with Caroline Wilkinson (University of Dundee) on some sort of analysis of the laser scan that was made of the skull when the team were in the vault.

(Incidentally, the documentary producer tried to convince me that they really weren't devoting much time or attention to the Beoley skull, and I was asked to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement to stop me mentioning that Caroline Wilkinson was involved in the programme.)

Elsewhere, the Telegraph recently revealed that Shakespeare's grave is to be subjected to a high-tech laser scan - apparently, a follow-up to the scan performed last year, the results of which will be revealed in the Channel 4 documentary (one instantly wonders what the "initial" scan failed to reveal).  So something's afoot.

Anyway, the Shakespeare's Tomb documentary will be aired in the UK this Saturday - 26 March 2016 - at 8.00pm.  Regular readers of this blog will recognise the skull in the vault at Beoley, and will probably have some idea of the background to the documentary.  More background to the story is currently being researched - and some interesting things have already been found. 

But for those who don't know much about the background, and why the only researcher ever to have studied the skull and published his findings was excluded from the Channel 4 documentary, allow me to include this link to an interview I did with Julia Robb in Texas, which lifts the lid on some rather shifty behaviour.

Watch this space ...

(PS: just in case link to the trailer does not work, here's another one.)

Historical Honey is Back!

Those wonderful honeys have relaunched their Historical Honey website. 

First up, a piece by yours truly, flagging up a rather interesting development concerning a certain disarticulated human skull, an archaeologist from the University of Staffordshire, and a forthcoming Channel 4 documentary.

Read all about it here.

Breaking my Silence

Hi, folks!

Julia Robb is a Texas-based writer.  I've known her - online - for a while now, and have reviewed a couple of her books, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

She's passionate about Shakespeare and has been very interested in developments since Who Killed William Shakespeare? was published in 2013.

Now she's interviewed me for her website/blog about Shakespeare, the Beoley skull, and the forthcoming Channel 4 documentary which will feature the skull.  It's a pretty free and frank, no-holds-barred interview, and you can read it here:

Skull-Duggery - Julia Robb interview with Simon Stirling

So I'm no longer biting my tongue, and the truth is out there.

Meanwhile, my very first copy of Shakespeare's Bastard: The Life of Sir William Davenant is on its way to me from The History Press.

All in all, it's going to be an interesting time ...

2016: Year of the Skull and the Bastard

Belated New Year greetings!

You know, I've a feeling that it's going to be quite a year.  Come April, we'll be hearing a lot about Shakespeare, it being the 400th anniversary of his death.

Before then, my latest book - Shakespeare's Bastard: The Life of Sir William Davenant - will be published by The History Press.  And we can also look forward to a documentary, to be broadcast on Channel 4 here in the UK, which will show the very skull, hidden in a crypt under St Leonard's Church, Beoley, which might well be Shakespeare's (long time followers of this blog will know something about this skull already, as will anyone who's read Who Killed William Shakespeare?).  So there's a lot to look forward to in just the first four months of this year.

In anticipation of which, I take great pleasure in linking the reader to a fascinating and colourful infographic on the subject of "Shakespeare in Pop Culture".  This was sent to me, a little while ago now, by Roslyn Willson, and it is with great thanks to Roslyn that I include the link here.

Enjoy!

Shakespeare's Skull - Latest

Working through the proofs of my Davenant book, "Shakespeare's Bastard", due out in February, and coming to the sections which deal with St Leonard's Church, Beoley, the Sheldon Chapel, and the "veritable skull of William Shakespeare" ...

It's been an interesting week, as far as "Shakespeare's Skull" goes.  The crypt in which it resides was opened up, this Tuesday, and the skull scanned by archaeologists from the University of Staffordshire.  All this was filmed for a Channel 4 documentary, due to be aired in April.

I didn't get to see the crypt, pictured above in a photo from circa 1939, so I didn't get to see the skull either.  But here I am, going through the passages on Beoley and the skull in Shakespeare's Bastard, and I turn to an endnote I made about Anthony Wood, an Oxford antiquarian who wrote about Sir William Davenant.

Anthony Wood's close friend and benefactor was "The Great Sheldon", Ralph (1623-84), whose grandfather (also called Ralph) built the Sheldon Chapel alongside the chancel of Beoley church.  It was in the elder Ralph Sheldon's funerary urn, deposited in a small ossuary adjoining the vault underneath the Sheldon Chapel, that the Reverend C.J. Langston apparently found the "veritable skull of William Shakespeare" in about 1884.

Wood attended the burial of his patron, "The Great Sheldon", which took place "in a vault situate & being under the Chappell of our Lady joining to St Leonards Church of Beoly".  Presumably, then, Anthony Wood saw the crypt, under the Sheldon Chapel, in which Ralph Sheldon was laid to rest.  Maybe he also saw Shakespeare's skull in there.

Although the Sheldon Chapel itself was built by the elder Ralph Sheldon in 1580, there is little to indicate when the crypt underneath it was constructed.  The assumption tends to be that the chapel came first, and at a later date - before 1684, the year in which "The Great Sheldon" was buried in it - the crypt was constructed underneath the chapel.  But is that necessarily the case?

The elder Ralph Sheldon appears to have built the Sheldon Chapel (or Chapel of Our Lady, as Anthony Wood seems to have thought of it) strictly for the use of his own family.  It was invisible from the road but accessible from the Sheldons' manor house nearby.  The Sheldons were Catholic, and no doubt wanted a chapel to worship in (the black marble altar table in the Sheldon Chapel was reputedly blessed by Pope Gregory XIII).  However, the law required everyone to attend a Church of England place of worship.  Cunningly, Ralph Sheldon created a chapel which would allow his Catholic family to appear to be attending an Anglican church, as the law required, without actually setting foot in an Anglican church.  They attended, rather, their own Catholic chapel, alongside the Anglican chancel.  Clever, eh?

But what if a priest had been celebrating Mass in the Sheldon Chapel?  What if the family had been in attendance?  Where would they hide in the event of a government raid?

The obvious answer would be - under the chapel.  Access to the crypt is by removing a couple of steps which lead up to the Sheldon Chapel (the chapel, like the adjacent chancel, being a fair deal higher than the body of the church).  Today, concrete steps lead up to the chapel, and these had to be removed to allow Arrow Media to film the skull inside the crypt this week.  Previously, the steps would have been stone or, more probably, wood.

Examples exist of priest-holes which were accessed via "false" steps in staircases.  A step or two would be removed, or swung on a hinge, to open up the secret entrance to the hiding place.  Steps would also have to have been installed to connect the main body of the church to the Sheldon Chapel, and so it would be reasonable to expect that these stairs could have been designed to "open up", allowing access to the secret vault underneath the chapel to those who knew about it.

So, if the G-Men suddenly appeared, surrounding the church and its Catholic chapel, any priest or celebrant in the Catholic chapel could quickly disappear into the vault beneath the chapel, and the pursuivants would find the chapel empty.

The vault is large enough to hold a number of people, possibly for quite some length of time.  It would need to have been somewhat more capacious than the average priest-hole if it might have to accommodate several celebrants, plus a priest, all at once.  Only later did the readymade crypt become a handy burial vault for the family that built it.

A gap in the wall of the crypt opens into the little ossuary adjoining it - the "bone-house" in which the skull which looks suspiciously like it might be Shakespeare's was "found".  This can be thought of as an additional hiding place - a cramped "priest-hole" of last resort, in which a small priest could hide if the entrance to the vault was discovered.  It could also have been a repository for all that Catholic paraphernalia (rosaries, vestments, prayer books, candles, etc.) which could not be safely hidden anywhere else.  Everything needed for an illicit Catholic Mass in the Sheldon Chapel would be stored directly underneath it, and if it all went wrong, the priest - and some of his flock - could hide in the vault till the priest-hunters had gone.

I suspect, then, that the crypt and the ossuary were constructed at the same time as the chapel above, but not as a burial vault.  They were hiding places.

Shakespeare's head, collected after his sudden death - probably by his first love, Anne Whately, whose relatives were supported by the Sheldons of Beoley, and whose family name appears in various parts of the church, including on a churchwardens' chest in the Sheldon Chapel - would have been taken to Beoley church because there was a safe hiding place under the Sheldon Chapel.  It would have joined those priestly items necessary to hold a Mass in the chapel above.

There could have been no safer or more sacred a place for such an extraordinary relic as the head of the Catholic martyr, William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's Skull - Setting the Record Straight

The news broke on Sunday evening.  Could Shakespeare's skull have been found? Why Church ruling means we may never know ran the headline in The Telegraph.  Since then, the story has gone around the globe.

It came as a surprise, partly because those of us involved in the story have been keeping pretty quiet about how it's all going (hence the lack of blogging in recent months) and partly because it is, in fact, old news.

I was informed - by a TV producer - back in March that the Chancellor of the Diocese of Worcester had turned down our application for a faculty to remove the rogue skull in the ossuary beneath the Sheldon Chapel at Beoley for forensic analysis.  That judgement came after a consistory court hearing, paid for by the TV production company and held as a sort of appeal against the Chancellor's previous ruling, made some six months before, that we had no real grounds to justify the exhumation of the skull.

I'll come back to the Chancellor and his rulings in a minute.  The first question, I guess, is: why did the news suddenly break this weekend, when the decision to deny us the faculty was made months ago?

I can only suggest that it's because a TV documentary is about to go into production, with the story of the Beoley skull playing a part in that forthcoming documentary.  And, I suspect, somebody is out to scupper that documentary, and its findings, before the camera even starts rolling.

Some background: I first picked up a hint that Shakespeare's skull might not be in Stratford ten years ago.  After a while, I tracked down the story - and I've been working on it, one way or another, ever since.

Charles Jones was born in Alcester, Warwickshire, in 1837, the son of an attorney.  He grew up in Alcester, and the neighbouring parish of Wixford, and studied theology in Birmingham before taking holy orders.  By the 1870s, he was Rector of the small parish of Sevington, close to Ashford in Kent.

It was while he was in Sevington that, in 1879, he did two interesting things.  First, according to The Times of 26 September 1879, he changed his name, adopting his mother's maiden name of Langston.  Secondly, he published a story in the Argosy magazine, that October, under the nom de plume of "A Warwickshire Man".

Langston's extraordinary tale was entitled, "How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen".  It described how a local doctor had been inspired by a conversation around the dinner table at Ragley Hall to steal Shakespeare's skull from the grave in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford.  This was apparently because Horace Walpole, the antiquarian, had offered George Selwyn MP 300 guineas if the latter could acquire the skull of Will Shakespeare for him during David Garrick's farcical Shakespeare "Jubilee" in 1769.  According to Langston, Dr Frank Chambers recruited three local ne'er-do-wells and stole the skull, but could not agree terms with Horace Walpole.  Chambers arranged for the skull to be returned to its grave, although the story ended with some doubt in the air as to whether this had actually happened.

Langston's story did not come out of nowhere.  There was something of an international debate raging at the time, initiated in part by Hermann Schaaffhausen, Professor of Anatomy at the University of Bonn, who in 1875 published a piece calling for Shakespeare's skull to be exhumed.  Others were equally keen to examine the skull of the Bard, principally to know what he looked like and to compare the skull with the supposed death mask of Shakespeare, which is now in the library at Darmstadt Castle.  Langston's story appears to have been a deliberate attempt to attract attention to the possibility that Shakespeare's skull was not in the grave at Holy Trinity Church after all.

Rev. C.J. Langston had to wait a few years before someone took the bait.  Then, in 1883, the Shakespeare scholar Clement Mansfield Ingleby published his own proposal to disinter Shakespeare's Bones.  In a footnote, Ingleby praised How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen by "A Warwickshire Man" for its amazing "vraisemblance" - its likelihood, or believability.  All bar the concluding part of the story which, Ingleby felt, wasn't up to scratch.

C.M. Ingleby was rewarded with a letter from Rev. C.J. Langston, sent from the Vicarage at Beoley, Worcestershire, and dated 2 January 1884.  In this letter - a copy of which I have received from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. - Langston identified himself as the "compiler" of How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen (thereby undermining the claims that "A Warwickshire Man" has never been identified) and added, "Further revelations are in progress which will probably set at rest this much agitated question."  That question being, should Shakespeare's skull be exhumed from his Stratford grave?

Langston was as good as his word.  Later that year - 1884 - he published an engaging booklet, price one shilling, which he entitled, "How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen and Found".  The first part was merely a reprint of the story he had published in the Argosy, five years earlier.  The second part described how the narrator had finally tracked "THE VERITABLE SKULL OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE" down to a private family vault beneath a chapel in an "outlandish parish".  That chapel was the Sheldon Chapel, built in about 1580 by Ralph Sheldon on the side of St Leonard's Church, Beoley - the very church of which Langston was now the Vicar.

Langston's story is without doubt intriguing.  There were two important aspects, in particular, which struck me when I first read it.  They chimed with my own research into Shakespeare.  And so I resolved to dig a little deeper.

After several weeks spent combing through census records and the like, I had discovered that most of the individuals named in Langston's remarkably detailed accounts had been real people and were in the area during the period in which Langston's story was set.  These included some extremely obscure local personages - like the grave-robbers recruited by Dr Frank Chambers - and an ancestor of Langston's, Lieutenant Joseph Langston of the Royal Marines, who appears to have been a close friend of Frank Chambers's.  The places were real, and the people were real ... so could the story have been true?

Well, no.  I doubted it very much - and Langston himself was cagey about how much of his story was fact and how much was fiction.  All the same, a Church of England clergyman had, over the space of five years, published two halves of a minutely detailed and meticulously researched account of how Shakespeare's skull had been tracked down to the funerary urn which once held the viscera of Ralph Sheldon.  Ralph Sheldon, a wealthy Catholic, died three years before Shakespeare and was related to him by marriage, via the Sheldon-Throckmorton-Arden nexus of Catholic families in the Midlands.

It was only after I had started putting together the manuscript for Who Killed William Shakespeare? The Murderer, The Motive, The Means (The History Press, 2013) that I discovered, to my surprise, that there is a spare skull in the ossuary beneath the Sheldon Chapel at Beoley.  Better still, that skull had been photographed by Richard Peach for The Village, a local magazine, in September 2009.  Peach had been put onto the story by Morris Jephcott, a villager who now lies buried in Beoley churchyard.  Like others in the village, Jephcott believed the story of the skull to be substantially true.

When I first saw Richard Peach's excellent photos, my eye was drawn to two parts of the skull.  My research had already suggested that there should be some sort of damage or discoloration to Shakespeare's right forehead, just above the eye.  And then there is the evidence of the Droeshout and Chandos portraits of Shakespeare, which both show a distinct swelling on the outside edge of the left eyebrow.

Startlingly, there was an area of actual damage and discoloration clearly visible on the right side of the skull, above the right eye, and on the outside edge of the left eyebrow, where the bone is broken, jagged burrs poke out in the exact same spot where, in the Droeshout and Chandos images, there is clear evidence of a noticeable swelling or injury.

Over the next nine months, while I wrote Who Killed William Shakespeare?, I went back to the photos of the skull time and time again, comparing them with the death mask and portraits of Shakespeare.  I met Richard Peach and studied the photos he had taken of the skull in as much detail as I could.  Little by little, I spotted more distinguishing features and anomalies, linking the skull to the Shakespeare images, which I graphically illustrated in my book:

Such as the thin scar across the bridge of the nose on the death mask, which seems to correspond to a couple of small, triangular puncture wounds on the inside of the left eye socket.  It would appear that a sharp pointed weapon - a poniard - was driven into the eye socket here, forcing the left eyeball forward (hence the "wall-eye" look in the Shakespeare portraits);

Or the distinctive depression, high up on the forehead, very near the top of the frontal bone, which looks a bit like a crater on the skull and is clearly visible in the Shakespeare portraiture (including the so-called Davenant Bust of Shakespeare, which belongs to the Garrick Club, and the half-length effigy of Shakespeare in his funerary monument in Holy Trinity, Stratford, not to mention the Droeshout engraving in the First Folio, which replicates the depression very faithfully);

Or the strange jagged lines running down and across the cheeks of the death mask and the Chandos portrait (National Portrait Gallery), amongst others, which appear to show the damage to the cheekbones and maxilla (upper jaw) instantly visible on the skull;

And so on.  In March 2014, I was invited to give a paper on these matters, which I entitled, "The Faces of Shakespeare", at Goldsmiths, University of London.  That paper was later published in the university's GLITS online journal.

By then, I already knew that a television documentary company was looking into all of this, with a great deal of willing help and co-operation from the Vicar and churchwardens of St Leonard's, Beoley.  Plans were drawn up to extricate the skull and subject it to a range of scientific examinations, including radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis.  The application was submitted to the Diocese, with the full support of the church, for a faculty to remove the skull for laboratory tests.

Sadly, although the advisers to the Chancellor (chief legal officer) of the Diocese were rather in favour of the project, Sir Charles Mynors - the Chancellor himself - was sceptical.  As such, he was only doing his job, and I believe he did so as assiduously as anyone could want.  It would have been natural and proper for him to have sought the opinions and advice of leading Shakespeare experts.  And I have no doubt whatsoever that they gravely misled him.

I know of no one who has looked into Langston's story, researched it, and followed it through to an analysis of the skull identified by Langston as Shakespeare's.  No one.  Until, that is, I undertook that research myself, publishing the results in Who Killed William Shakespeare? and The Faces of Shakespeare (plus, I might add, in my forthcoming biography of Sir William Davenant, due out next February).  No one has ever looked into this.  Nobody from Stratford, to the best of my knowledge, has ever shown the slightest interest in Langston and his story or been moved - by curiosity, if nothing else - to inspect the skull.  No one.

Rather, the line coming out of Stratford has been consistent.  The experts don't want to believe the story, so they rubbish it.  They pretend that it's "folklore" (which it isn't), that the skull was returned to Stratford (which it wasn't), and that Langston only published his story to raise money for the restoration of the church (which doesn't stand up to reasonable scrutiny).  Indeed, there are reasons for believing that Langston made little if any impact with or money from his publication, and certainly not enough to repair his church, if a rather forlorn and desperate letter he sent to James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips in 1887 is anything to go by (I have a copy of that letter too - again, Langston identifies himself as the author of How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen, only now he is living in Bath and looking for someone who will actually pay him for an article he has written entitled, Shakespeare in his cups.)

The point needs to be made: the Shakespeare experts have gone to quite extraordinary lengths to bury the story of Shakespeare's skull, written by a local clergyman with local knowledge.  It doesn't fit in with their idea of Shakespeare, so it must be ignored, ridiculed, rejected out of hand.  They have refused to look into it and they certainly don't want anybody else to go delving.  The very subject is taboo.

And I'm pretty sure that when Sir Charles Mynors, in all good faith, approached them for their expert opinion, they just showered him with their prejudices.  Which is not, in fact, expert opinion.  Truth be told, they've never bothered to research or investigate the story at all.  Ever.

And now, shortly before filming starts on the TV documentary, a story mysteriously appears out of nowhere in The Telegraph, and then all across the world, rubbishing the very idea that the story of the skull is anything other than "Gothic Fiction".  Sir Charles Mynors had found no evidence to link Shakespeare to the skull.  Of course he hadn't.  Because the Shakespeare fraternity had absolutely no idea that such evidence exists, and if they did, they certainly weren't going to let Sir Charles know about it.

The last thing they want is for someone actually to study the skull, forensically, and compare the idiosyncrasies of the skull - all those dinks and dents and breakages - with the portraits of Shakespeare.  Still less to compare the skull's DNA with a sample taken from one of the descendants of Shakespeare's sister.  You'd think, if they were so sure of themselves, they'd say, "Why not?  Go ahead!  You'll be proven wrong."  But that's not what they've done.  Rather, they've tried to obstruct a legitimate investigation.

There is evidence linking Shakespeare to the skull, be it Langston's painstakingly researched (if somewhat fictionalised) accounts, the visible similarities between the skull and the Shakespeare portraiture, or the links between Shakespeare and the Sheldons, whose funerary vault his skull apparently shares.

Or how about this?  The story began, so Langston claimed, with Horace Walpole's offer to George Selwyn MP of 300 guineas in return for the skull.  Horace Walpole was in a better position than most to know that Shakespeare's skull was not in Stratford but underneath the Sheldon Chapel at Beoley.  Walpole's "intimate friend" and neighbour in Twickenham - he jokingly called her his "wife" - was Lady Browne, born Frances Sheldon, in Beoley.

There is also the matter of why Rev. Charles Jones chose to change his name to Charles Jones Langston just as his first instalment of the story was going to press.  Could it have had something to do with the fact that, shortly after Shakespeare died in 1616, his "cousin", Thomas Greene, promptly resigned his post as steward and town clerk of Stratford-upon-Avon?  The man elected to replace Greene as town clerk was one Anthony Langston.  On 18 August 1619, this same Anthony Langston witnessed a deed by which Shakespeare's old friend and colleague, Henry Condell, conveyed some property in Worcestershire to Edward Sheldon of Beoley.  Was Rev. C.J. Langston seeking to highlight his ancestral link to Anthony Langston, town clerk of Stratford and a man who had a connection with both the co-editor of the First Folio and the son of Ralph Sheldon, in whose funerary urn Shakespeare's skull was allegedly found?

The Chancellor's judgement that no evidence exists to justify the proper forensic examination of the Beoley skull was wrong.  Not his fault, though.  He was misinformed or misguided by those very experts he had turned to for advice.

The same experts who, I suspect, are now trying to undermine the TV documentary about these things by letting the world know that we have been debarred from running DNA tests on the skull and so the case might well never be proven.

One really needs to ask - what are they so afraid of?

The Faces of Shakespeare

Morning, all!

I'll be on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire local radio this morning, talking about the story of Shakespeare's skull.  There have been developments in that arena, but I can't go public with them just yet.

HOWEVER ... Goldsmiths, University of London, have just published their GLITS e-journal for the past year, and my illustrated paper on The Faces of Shakespeare - Revealing Shakespeare's Life and Death through Portraits and Other Objects is the second item on the menu.

Here's the link to my paper in the Goldsmiths GLITS journal.

More to come later.

A Warning to the Curious ...

... or "How History Works" (Part II?).

I was flicking through this book the other day.  It's on sale at Tudor World in Stratford, where I'm currently doing the odd Shakespeare Tour and Ghost Tour (and great fun they are, too).  What's more, the "Horrible Histories" Gruesome Guide to Stratford-upon-Avon is actually dedicated to the owner, and the phantom residents of, the Tudor World property.

I admire Terry Deary's achievement.  His entertaining brand of History-Without-The-Dull-Bits appeals to young and old, no doubt to the despair and disapproval of the more academic types out there.  And he does a good job of digging up those obscure facts and stories which tend to be omitted from the standard accounts.  In that respect, his Gruesome Guide to Stratford is probably a helluva lot more interesting than the typical guidebook.

He even includes the story of Shakespeare's skull!  Yes, the local "legend" which I spent months researching for Who Killed William Shakespeare?  So, extra marks there for Mr Deary.  Except that he concludes his short account of Shakespeare's missing skull with the information that the skull was safely returned to the Stratford grave.

Almost every account I read of the legend of Shakespeare's skull, as originally recounted by "A Warwickshire Man" (Rev. Charles Jones Langston) in his 1884 publication, How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen and Found, ends with the information that the missing skull was returned to Stratford.

This recurring "fact" intrigued me while I was researching the story.  You see, thanks to the infamous "curse" on Shakespeare's gravestone, the town of Stratford, and Holy Trinity Church, have always been rather diffident about opening up his grave.  So how, I wondered, had they managed to get the skull back into the grave, sometime in the late 19th century, without anyone noticing, and with no record surviving of the grave having been reopened?

It puzzled me for quite a while.  And then, while I was starting work on the manuscript for Who Killed William Shakespeare? - a breakthrough!  The skull is still inside the crypt at Beoley Church.  It was NEVER returned to Stratford. 

Various photos of the skull were taken at different times in the 20th and 21st centuries - on those rare occasions when the crypt was opened up for an architect's inspection - and those photos prove that the skull stayed exactly where Rev. C.J. Langston found it: in the vault beneath the Sheldon Chapel.

Okay, so ... Why do so many accounts of the story end with "The skull was returned to Stratford", when it quite evidently wasn't?

I've never yet managed to track down the source of that little bit of historical misinformation.  I don't know who first decided that the skull had probably been returned to its owner, or who first sneaked that falsehood into the legend.  But here's the thing: ever since that bit of false information was added to the story, it has been repeated, over and over again, whenever somebody stumbles across the legend, including, of course, Terry Deary, when he included the tale in his "Gruesome Guide" to Stratford.

I'm not attacking Mr Deary.  But I am questioning the way that, once a lie has been introduced into the historical account, it tends to stay there, repeated over and over again, until it becomes a "fact".

I've blogged previously about the will which names Anne/Agnes Whateley, the woman William Shakespeare was first given a licence to marry.  Because Samuel Schoenbaum failed to find that particular will, he concluded that Anne Whateley was a clerical error: she never existed.  And because Sam Schoenbaum said that, it became "The Truth"!  Anne Whateley: the woman who never was.  But she did exist.

The case of Anne/Agnes Whateley and the case of Shakespeare's skull are somewhat similar.  In both instances, something has been introduced to the approved story of Shakespeare which doesn't suit the peddlers of that orthodox account.  Whenever that happens, it seems, the race is on to quash that little problem.  With any luck, something will quickly get sneaked into the historical record which neutralises the threat posed by that rogue story.  So, Anne Whateley, we are led to believe, "did not exist".  The skull "was returned to Stratford".  Neither statement is true, and yet both have been repeated ad infinitum.

The skull story is particularly intriguing, in this regard.  Given that Stratford has, on the whole, sought (a) to ignore the story of Shakespeare's skull - and the actual existence of that spare skull at Beoley, and (b) to rubbish the story whenever someone mentions it, you do have to wonder.  If, as the Shakespeare folks in Stratford insist, the missing skull simply could not have been Shakespeare's, then why is it so important that we all believe it was returned to Shakespeare's grave after Rev. C.J. Langston discovered and identified it?  Isn't that a case of having your cake and eating it?  If it never was Shakespeare's skull, then there's no need to put out the false rumour that it was returned to Shakespeare's grave. 

I think the claim that the skull was returned to Stratford was a deliberate attempt to "close down" the story.  An interesting legend, yes, but no need to get excited because the skull came back to Stratford anyway.  Certainly, definitely, no need to probe any further.  Like the mysterious Anne Whateley, the skull doesn't exist.  At least, it doesn't as long as you don't go looking for it.

So, someone set a hare running.  To stop anyone from really investigating the strange tale of Shakespeare's missing skull - as told by that pillar of respectability, a Victorian clergyman - somebody made up the part about the skull having been returned to Stratford.  Which it never was.  But that's what you'll keep reading is what happened.

Unless you read Who Killed William Shakespeare? of course!

Seriously, though.  History is not, or should not be, a Wikipedia entry, which anyone can alter as they see fit.  The facts matter.  Anyone who "plants" a piece of misinformation - such as "the skull was returned to Stratford" - is deliberately misleading people.  And the people who seem most easy to mislead are historians, who keep repeating the lie, if only to make sure that you don't go getting any ideas.