Look at that face: butter wouldn’t melt, as the English idiom goes. A picture of total innocence. Mouth slightly agape, and he has an expression of someone lost in thought. Considering that he wears a teacher’s academic gown, it might be he’s concerned for his pupils: when are they going to understand me? Or, perhaps something’s lost and it’s difficult to remember where it last was. He has his real feather pen, and a lovely clean sheet of paper, but wait! Where’s his ink? We shall soon see exactly what’s really going on under that guise. We might even find that ink.
This poor essay omits much background material covering the subject of Shakespeare. The reason for this is because there’s a mountain of information in the public domain, and we have neither time, nor space to search worn ground for well-chewed chestnuts, most of our material will be new. Although great effort has been expended to make understanding this essay as easy as possible, that understanding will be severely tested, if the reader has little staying power. Patience is the key, and the rewards gained will be profound.
We are at the place where the famous monument of William Shakespeare is contained: The Holy Trinity Church, at Stratford upon Avon.
The monument (fig 2 left) is fixed to the north wall of the chancel. It contains a half-figure effigy, said to be carved in the likeness of the playwright/poet Shakespeare. As we can see, the monument also depicts a blank page.
Below the monument, set in a line, are five “family” graves. More on these later.
The effigy displays two and four full fingers. The thumbs are not easily visible from ground level, so our focus shall be on the six fingers.
Consider the placard under the effigy: it contains one of two epitaphs, the second one is engraved into the the famous Shakespeare tombstone. Here, we deal with the epitaph text as shown in fig 2.
Now to scrutinize the hands of the effigy, or to be more precise, the six full fingers.
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