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Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm from an anointed king. (William Shakespeare, Richard II) |
Mistah Kurtz—he dead. (T.S.Eliot, “The Hollow Men’’) |
Sometime in 1790, William Cowper composed his “Stanzas on the Late Indecent Liberties Taken with the Remains of the Great Milton.” “Ill fare the hands,” Cowper writes, “that heav’d the stones /Where Milton’s ashes lay! /That trembled not to grasp his bones, /And steal his dust away” (1926:399). A small stone in St. Giles, Cripplegate, still marks the spot where Milton was buried. But the poet’s body is no longer there:
In the eighteenth century, drunk after a party, some “gay young blades” dug up the body and pulled it to bits. Hair, teeth, fingers, ribs, and leg-bones were said to have been peddled by relic-mongers. So, the last remains of [England’s most famous Puritan poet] suffered the fate of a Catholic saint.
(Wilson 1983:259)
Six years later, in 1796, a group of workmen dug a vault next to the grave of Shakespeare in Holy Trinity and reported that when they accidentally “opened one side of the poet’s tomb,” they “found nothing except a hollow space where the coffin may have lain” (Hamilton 1985:4).1 Had Shakespeare fallen victim to grave