It’s almost half twelve. Just got home. Everyone was going to The Works Dept bar for a drink after the show and I’m gonna have to get good at going to that sort of thing and not fidgeting every time someone goes to the bar. They had Becks Blue which I know of old, but you can’t have much of the stuff. Bars in general get very old very quickly without the draw of good old Al Cohol. I did a French exit very quickly and swung home in Bergman. Avoided Macdonald’s and knocked up a quick scran at home instead. Brian and Maddy have been out all day so Boo was very happy to have company. Misty was just sleeping as usual. She’s a bit put out as her favourite cat tree was replaced for reasons I can’t really comprehend either. It was a bit tatty? She’s mostly sleeping anywhere but the new cat tree in a silent protest and I don’t blame her.
I’ve been thinking about Shakespeare’s skull.
There was a rumour propagated in 1879 that someone had nicked Shakespeare’s head from out of his grave in 1794. The rumour connected it to a skull in Beoley that we now know to be a woman’s skull. It was dismissed as a hoax back then. But in 2016 some guys with a radar checked the grave out and feel pretty strongly that there’s no head in there. People with radars often end up thinking ridiculous shit as witness the pyramids, but this one strikes me as feasible. Think about it, if you’re thinking of someone holding a human skull, who do you think of first? For a lot of us it’s gonna be Hamlet. Alas Poor Yorick. Shakespeare is Person Most Likely to get his head stolen.
It doesn’t have to have been nicked in 1794. Ollie Reed might have gone on a massive bender during The Wars of the Roses and then woken up with it on his mantelpiece and been clueless as to how it got there. There might be an amdram wardrobe somewhere with a “fake” skull in it. Or some goth kid has a candle melted on to it somewhere.
Someone stole Shakespeare’s head.
It might still be out there folks!
There’s all sorts of material there. Good God I want to believe it ended up on stage somewhere with some Hamlet playing a blinder “I don’t know what possessed me in that scene! It was like I knew it better than anyone in the world!”
This was 2016 news. How is it not more widely known? Maybe the church that houses the bones don’t want it widely known that someone broke in and robbed a grave. But people have always broken into churches and nicked stuff, or pulled lead off the roof etc – look at what happens to Bardolph in Henry V. It’s sad, but these are big lovely trusting places and they must remain so despite so many people being arseholes.
I didn’t go to see the actual tomb when I was up in Stratford because there’s a lady there that wants a fiver and I don’t really think she ought to be there so she’s not getting my fiver. If I was Deadshakespeare wouldn’t want people to pay a fiver to contemplate my dead bones. I’d want them to contemplate their own mortality, the fragility of this brief existence, the need to live while we are alive. But I also probably wouldn’t like to think I would be separated from my head perhaps forever because of enthusiasts centuries after my death.
Maybe the church needs all those fivers to get better security. What other bits might a Shakespeare fan be after? His heart is long gone I’m sure. His writing hand, perhaps. He writes a lot of right write hands. You could have that in a jar above your desk for inspiration until you got arrested. I feel there’s not much call for his penis. It might do well in the cock museum in Iceland, but he never really turned his thoughts up there. You could have it on display in The Dirty Duck, he definitely liked his pubs. Rasputin’s willy is in a museum in St Petersburg, but the Russians are weird and Rasputin was very much a willy man. Our Will likes his dick jokes as much as the next writer of that era: “Come on my right hand, Antony.” The text is stacked with stuff for the groundlings. But anyway, a dick is but flesh. Like his heart, the worms have eaten it long ago.
Hopefully the rest of him can lie there undisturbed. IF IT EVEN IS HIM IN THERE. *tinfoil hat*
There should be a campaign to try and find the skull. Maybe it’s in a hospital store, a school science cupboard, a museum drawer, unattributed. Human skulls aren’t really the sort of thing you just chuck away, even if they’re old and anonymous. Maybe it can be found. Give it a run as Yorick in the RST and then put it back where it came from, I say. You’ll fund the search if you find it. “Guest starring William Shakespeare as Yorick the Court Jester.” Packed houses every night even if, God Forbid, the actor playing Hamlet isn’t off the telly box.
AlBarclay 