It is unlikely the dark conjecture would have occurred to me were I not offspring of one, but my prejudicial lens has no bearing on whether Shakespeare died a suicide. I have scoured biographies old and new and find that nobody over four centuries has entertained the idea in print. Hardly an exception is Edward Bond’s 1973 play Bingo—the character Shakespeare, guilt-ridden for failing to thwart land enclosures near Stratford, takes sugar-coated poison tablets left behind for him by Ben Jonson. Is our myriad-minded Shakespeare, the suicide taboo silently at work, above the degradations of Dante’s seventh circle, reserved for suicides, who must keep company with usurers and sodomites? Or is there no evidence?
Shakespeare’s suicide is plausible as a speculation consistent with what we tend to believe about the connection between creativity and depression. My father, Ross Lockridge, Jr., with a loving wife and four young children, died a suicide at thirty-three, just as his unagented, 1,060-page debut novel, Raintree County, topped the nation’s best-seller lists in early 1948. No, he wasn’t Shakespeare—one problem was that he aspired to be—but I’ve grown antennae in this matter of depression and the life of writing. It is unnerving to hear that Shakespeare, the deepest human mind, may have chosen not to be. But I’ll air my conviction that death by suicide is more probable than the notion that Edward de Vere, Francis Bacon, William Stanley, Christopher Marlowe or Queen Elizabeth wrote those plays—still only plausible, yet unsettling and maybe instructive to ponder.
I tucked the speculation into a short satirical novel, The Woman in Green, where I had no need to address alternative theories fully but could have a character succinctly and cheerfully lay out his case to another one who is skeptical, even indignant. My character George, who is writing a biography of Shakespeare, bears a resemblance to Lord Byron and his interlocutor to Percy Shelley. George is protective of his theory and spells it out on April 23, 2000, while the two are out of everybody’s hearing, exploring Wyandotte Cave in southern Indiana.
“BLESTE BE THE MAN THAT SPARES THES STONES / AND CURST BE HE THAT MOVES MY BONES.” George takes this for a disguised suicide note. “Is this the inscription of someone content to retire and drown his book like Prospero, having had his say? Odd, don’t you think, coming from the great humanist?” George thinks it the “most petulant epitaph in modern letters.”
Shakespeare’s plays are full of elaborate curses, but this one, believed by most biographers to have been written by Shakespeare himself, comes right to the point. Despite what they will tell you at Holy Trinity Church, no comparable inscription on an English seventeenth-century tombstone has ever been found. George has done his homework and thinks it’s not simply that Shakespeare doesn’t wish his bones moved by the sexton to the nearby charnel house. “The assumption that Shakespeare died a natural death hangs on a sentimentality. The contented genius of forty-nine retires to his hometown in 1613 where he sits in magisterial calm for three years and dies of natural causes, maybe a bellyache. Suicides in those days could look forward to being buried at crossroads and trampled on for all eternity, a stake through the heart and all property confiscated. Shakespeare was proud finally to have become a ‘gentleman’ and preferred not to suffer indignities. The curse guaranteed he’d stay in place.”—in the event it was at some point discovered he had died a suicide.
Richard II, while not contemplating suicide, had the same fear, imagining himself “buried by the king’s highway…where subjects’ feet may hourly trample on their sovereign’s head.” A direct linkage to the fate of suicides is among the grislier of Shakespearean gothic utterances. As dawn approaches, Robin Goodfellow warns Oberon, “Damned spirits all, / That in crossways and floods have burial, / Already to their wormy beds are gone. / For fear lest day should look their shame upon. / They willfully themselves exile from light / And must for aye consort with black-browed night.”
Percy is in no way persuaded and tells George he needs “an algorithm or two.”
I’ll add that Shakespeare apparently elected to have no name placed on his grave marker, as if ducking under. Recent radar findings show the grave is shallow, about three feet, with no coffin and no skull—the curse already ignored by a grave robber. An Anglo-Saxon scholar who visited the church in 1694 wrote in a letter that “they have laid him full seventeen feet deep, deep enough to secure him.” Most unlikely if only because of the water table, but if this was in some measure his genuine unheeded request—one that survived in local legend for seventy-eight years—the Bard was quite set on staying dead and buried.
Shakespeare’s plays contain many instances of characters terrified by exhumation—Hamlet, Macbeth, Juliet, and Richard III. Could this uniquely weird epitaph be explained by his anticipated disqualification from Christian burial and a fear of subsequent exhumation? “Good friend for Jesus’s sake forbear to find me out!” Well, maybe.
But George continues with a deeper speculation: “The heart of the matter? The Muse deserted Shakespeare and the man was depressed. Shall I repeat? The Muse deserted Shakespeare. After the great Tempest of 1611, just about all he could write was a collaborative abortion, Henry the Eighth. During an early performance in 1613, a theatrical cannon started a fire and the Globe went up in smoke. Shakespeare lost the venue for his plays. That’s depressing. Worse than a writer today losing his agent or publisher. So he left town and for three years wrote nothing—nothing! People in the performing arts keep at it or they cease to exist. No reason to think Shakespeare was any different. His plays were performances, not some sorry pile called literature. Performances disappear. Actors and playwrights aren’t sure they ever really happened. A charcoal Globe made them all the more unreal. I repeat, the man was depressed. Now tell me, what’s the most efficient cure for depression?”
A paleoanthropologist, Percy replies, “Digging? Sailing?” “No, innocent, it’s suicide! Shakespeare killed himself, I figure with poison. There’s evidence, but nobody’s ever seen it staring us in the face.”
In his memoir of suicidal ideation, Darkness Visible, William Styron writes of the sense of having come “fatally full circle,” as I do in Shade of the Raintree, a biography of my father. George continues, “Homecoming is a depressing full circle for Shakespeare. It feels like entrapment, an admission that life is over. A homecoming to a tedious provincial community after the excitements of the London stage.” George cites the amply documented small-beer affronts the great playwright, a stingy landowner, suffers in his petty-paced hometown retirement. Ailing, he stabs his bloodless will three times, scrivener’s palsy in evidence. The final signature, in Samuel Schoenbaum’s words, “collapses into the wavering scrawl of the surname.” Beyond this, George observes that “shortly before his death he learns that his friend and rival Ben Jonson will be getting his works gathered up in a handsome folio. His own exist here and there only in crappy quartos. The world’s greatest writer fears he is vanishing.”
There’s another circumstance almost as depressing. The hackneyed consolation of retirement is spending more time with one’s grandchildren. But Shakespeare’s two daughters disappoint. Susanna births a single daughter, Elizabeth Hall Bernard, delightful but incapable of perpetuating the family name. She will die without children at age sixty-one. To be sure, witty Susanna has married well and successfully defends herself in court against having spread the clap—maybe a limited source of joy in itself. Not long before he dies, Shakespeare’s illiterate, already out-of-favor younger daughter Judith marries a sleazy fornicator, Thomas Quiney, who wants her ailing father’s money. He writes Quiney out of his will and almost his daughter. Though he wouldn’t know it, the couple’s three sons will all die without issue. “His only son, Hamnet, died at eleven, so no hope of grandchildren bearing the Shakespeare name. Remember, he wrote those weirdo sonnets to a fair youth begging him to procreate. Now he’s failed to sire a single surviving son of his own. ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child.’ True to his worst fears, the Shakespeare line will die out.”
Shakespeare’s plays are full of suicides, some noble, others not very—thirteen or more, depending on how you count and whether Hamlet makes the cut. But George doesn’t bother citing these or the great dark soliloquies as evidence, silently acknowledging that literal extrapolations from the larger actions of the plays to the author’s life are usually circular and presumptuous. Rather, he dwells on a pervasive sensibility in life and work regarding sex and ignores the current celebration of a Shakespearean sexual plasticity. After all, Shakespeare’s plays are full of cuckolds, sexually abused women, and dirty language. Its significance debated, he left that second-best bed to Anne. The most powerful words of sex nausea ever written are “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action.” George concludes that the playwright was “fucked up in his sexuality. Of course depressed people forget they have any. They kill themselves.”
Syphilis, a stroke, alcoholism, pneumonia, a “fever,” possibly typhoid, said by a contemporary to have been caught after an evening of heavy drinking with Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson—these have all been proposed. I’d argue that the evidence for any of these—including typhoid thanks to the Avon, not ale, or mercury poisoning thanks to syphilis—is thinner on the ground than the striking convergence of suicidal circumstances I’ve briefly described. Also less possessed of human meaning, however dark. For that matter, any of these other slings and arrows could have helped usher in that asp, that bodkin, that poisoned cup.
George saves another bit of evidence for last. “There’s something else, something so obvious it’s rarely been written about. What day of the year was Shakespeare born?” “April 23, 1564, give or take a day or two, everybody knows that,” replied Percy. “And when did he die?” “It was, well, it was April 23, 1616. Good timing, dying on his birthday like that.” “You got it, Perse. Suicides often clutch at some last-ditch meaning, something commemorative. They take stock on their birthdays and see that they’ve failed at life. Suicide pros call it the birthday effect. Not a few kill themselves on their birthdays.” I’ll add that Cassius plans his suicide at Philippi with the words, “This day I breathed first. Time is come round / And where I did begin, there shall I end./ My life is run his compass.”
“Okay George…. Maybe you should write this up.”
“Yes, imagine the warm reception. I’d rather not. To come to the point, I hope to enlist you in digging this up—Shakespeare’s stiff, that is. It’ll take some planning. I need pharmacological evidence of poison to placate the magistrate if we get caught. Nobody wants to believe my theory, but frankly it should be enough to ponder that Shakespeare of all people might have killed himself. Think what this would mean about suicide, about humanity!”
“I’d rather not.”
“Whatever the findings, Shakespeare’s skull would make a great drinking cup, if somebody hasn’t already run off with it. Will retracts his curse and joins the party. If anybody can pull this off, we can.”
How to begin to answer George’s questions? That Shakespeare might have died a suicide acknowledges as much as mortality itself that he was a poor, bare, forked animal like the rest of us, without a superhuman wisdom that could rescue him from major depression once the cold manacles had taken hold—depression ending only in suicide. And for those who have endured the loss of a loved one to suicide and the stigma that often obtains, there could be some comfort in the recognition that even a Shakespeare may have chosen not to be, to the extent a person imprisoned by depression retains the power of choice.