Eight and forty days after the death of Francis Beaumont, all that was mortal of William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon was buried in the chancel of his parish church, in which, as part owner of the tithes and consequently one of the lay rectors, he had the right of interment. Over the spot where his body was laid, there was placed a slab with the inscription imprecating a curse on the man who should disturb his bones, “Good friend, for Jesus sake forbeare To digg the dust enclosed here Bless be ye man yt spares this stown And curst be he yt moves my bones.” This rude, absurd and ignorant epitaph has given much trouble to writers on the subject of Shakespeare. The usual explanation of the threat is given that the Puritans thought that the church had been profaned by the ashes of an actor. These ignorant words could not have been written as a deterrent to the Puritans, for they did not belong to the ignorant section of the population, but to the middle class, nor would they have been deterred from invading Shakspere’s tomb by the superstitious fear of a threat contained in doggerel verse cut on the tomb. There was not the least danger that the actor’s grave would be violated by the Puritans, for Dr. John Hall, Shakspere’s son-in-law, was a Puritan. If he had had this warning epitaph cut on the tomb it would have been written in scholarly English. The doggerel lines, rude as they are, satisfied, doubtless, the widow and daughters, themselves ignorant. The most pleasing epitaph, it seems to us, would have been one expressing a known wish of their “dear departed” in words, when read by others, that would best suit their understandings, for the Shakspere family were uncultured. They could not read the stupid epitaph on his tomb, and so their hearts were not saddened as they gazed upon an inscription of barbaric rudeness. Some slight circumstance may have given rise to William Hall’s conjecture, during his visit to Stratford, in 1694, that Shakspere authored his own epitaph, and that these lines were written to suit the capacity of clerks and sextons, who, according to Hall, in course of time would have removed Shakspere’s dust to the bone house. This is not improbable from the point of view taken by those who believe that Shakspere of Stratford wrote the doggerel epigram on John Combe, money lender, and the vituperative ballad abusing the gentleman whose park he (Shakspere) robbed, for the three compositions are of the same grade of ignorant nonsense. But we do know that had the author of “Hamlet” written his own epitaph, it would have been as deathless as the one over the Countess of Pembroke: “Underneath this sable hearst Lies the subject of all verse Sidney’s sister—Pembroke’s mother Death, ere thou hast slain another Learned and fair and good as she Time shall throw a dart at thee.”