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[/audioplayer]How did the Bard kick the bucket? The 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death reignites interest in a great literary mystery. All we know for sure is that he was buried on 25 April 1616 in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, and it’s a fair assumption that he died a couple of days earlier, around his 52nd birthday.
A dearth of evidence compels us to sift the plays for clues to his lifestyle, which may, in turn, help with the autopsy. Historians condemn this kind of detective work but their reasons seem pretty unfair. Imagine that the biographies of the last century’s leading dramatists had perished and we were trying to reconstruct their characters from their writings. We’d feel entitled to guess that Coward was a bit camp, that Beckett had his gloomy spells, that Pinter could get quite shirty, and that Stoppard enjoyed puns and had a brain the size of Canada.
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