Keywords

10.1 Introduction

In Shakespeare’s early tragedy Titus Andronicus , the villainous Aaron the Moor boasts that “Oft have I digged up dead men from their graves” (Titus Andronicus 5.1.135).Footnote 1 Motivated by sheer malice rather than any form of archaeological curiosity, Aaron leaves these exhumed corpses at the doors of their loved ones as a ghastly surprise. Scenes of exhumation in Shakespeare’s later works are only slightly less ill-omened and bizarre (Schwyzer, 2007, pp. 114–137). Hamlet watches with horrified fascination as a gravedigger roughly tosses up old bones and skulls to make room for the body of Ophelia; in Romeo and Juliet , the heroine imagines dismembering her dead ancestors in their family tomb and using “some great kinsman’s bone” (Romeo and Juliet 4.3.53) to dash out her own brains. The playwright’s enduring preoccupation with grave-robbing culminated in his epitaph in Holy Trinity, Stratford, addressed to any future gravedigger who might be tempted to interfere with his remains:

Blessed be the man that spares these stones

And cursed be he that moves my bones . (Shakespeare, 2016, A9)

Shakespeare, it seems, never contemplated the prospect of exhumation with anything but violent distaste; yet he could not get the idea out of his mind. It is thus both ironic and fitting that Shakespeare’s works have so often been mentioned in the discourse of mortuary archaeology, from the dawn of the nineteenth century to the present day. The particular focus of this chapter is on how Shakespeare’s plays have been invoked and characterized, by journalists and sometimes by archaeologists themselves, in relation to three celebrated archaeological events: the exhumation of Richard III in 2012; the forensic examination of the putative remains of the Princes in the Tower in 1933; and the discovery of a pair of embracing Neolithic skeletons near Mantua in 2007. Although attempts to draw links between Shakespeare’s plays and archaeological discoveries, especially in the media, often seem to rely on a reductive and limited set of stereotypical associations, the unfolding encounter between Shakespeare and mortuary excavation has the potential to teach us more about the cultural status of both.

10.2 Hamlet and Archaeologists

Shakespeare has been woven into the history of British mortuary archaeology almost from its birth. It could be argued that the graveyard scene in Hamlet constitutes one of archaeology’s founding narratives—in a sense, all subsequent digging for the dead, every lifting of a skull from the ground, involves a reenactment of Hamlet, Act 5, scene 1. Watching the Gravedigger pull old bones from the earth, Hamlet speculates on the various professions once practiced by the dead, laments the rough treatment they receive at the Gravedigger’s hands, questions the workman closely on the process and temporality of decomposition (“How long will a man lie i’th’earth ere he rot?” [Hamlet 5.1.147]), and finally involves himself in a one-sided dialogue with the skull of the jester Yorick. While the roots of the scene lie in the memento mori tradition, which counsels the living to remember the death of the body so that they may ensure the health of the soul, Hamlet’s attention is fixed to an unusual extent on physical processes and material remains. His questions are not those of a spiritual seeker but of a would-be bioarchaeologist. The first English treatise dealing with pre-Christian mortuary remains, Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, Urne-buriall, or, a discourse on the sepulchrall urnes lately found in Norfolk (1658), inevitably glances back to this scene in Hamlet . When Browne writes of the pitiable fate of the exhumed body, “To be knav’d out of our graves,” he is recalling Hamlet’s comment on the Gravedigger: “That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once. How the knave jowls it to the ground” (Hamlet 5.1.68–69; Browne, 1977, p. 295).

Hamlet’s encounter with Yorick has cast a long shadow. No single image serves as such an immediately recognizable reference to Shakespeare’s works in general (as well as Hamlet in particular) as that of a man holding a skull before his face, gazing keenly into its sightless eyes (Fig. 10.1). Since the eighteenth century, the encounter has been depicted again and again in paintings, engravings and, more latterly, photographs (Young, 2003). For well over a hundred years, the scene has been staged in a recognizably stylized way, the skull being held in profile, generally in the left hand which cups the base of the cranium, while the actor’s body cheats out slightly to present a three-quarter image to the audience. Yet even as certain conventions have endured, Hamlet’s relationship with the skull has evolved over time. Whereas stage directions in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century editions emphasize Hamlet’s disgust at the sight and smell of the skull, which he throws down at the first opportunity, modern productions and film versions tend to depict a more prolonged and even intimate encounter (Aasand, 2003). Rather than despising and rejecting the skull as gross, dead matter—flinging it aside precisely because it is not Yorick—the modern Hamlet contemplates the skull with a gaze that is at once tender and archaeological in spirit, striving to recapture Yorick’s lost personhood from the material evidence of his remains.

Fig. 10.1
figure 1

Postcard of Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet. (Lafayette Photo, London, 1899; public domain)

Full size image

If the Hamlet of modern stage and screen sometimes seems to play the archaeologist, modern (bio)archaeologists not infrequently find themselves playing Hamlet, recreating the classic Shakespearean pose for news articles and press releases.Footnote 2 The popularity of this specific pose is not accidental, and deserves some critical scrutiny. In these images, the archaeologists (frequently male, in these cases, and always alone) are not displaying the skull to the viewer in a straightforward way, but are instead displaying themselves looking at the skull, caught in a mute and private dialogue with death. These (bio)archaeologists look like Hamlet in a double sense—that is, they resemble him visually, and they mimic his way of looking, implying that his questions are also theirs.

Although the archaeologists depicted in photographs like these may not always be aware of the origins of the pose or its cultural connotations, many undoubtedly are. Reenacting Hamlet’s scene with Yorick can even form part of the education of budding bioarchaeologists. In Debra L. Martin’s osteology ‘Boot Camp’, students

start memorizing Hamlet’s graveyard monologue from the first week onwards. On the last day of class, a cart with a wide variety of mammalian, avian and reptilian skull casts are available, and students can choose one for their recitation of the full monologue as they stand in front of the class and gaze into their skull of choice. (Martin, 2016, p. 7)

These examples of the (bio)archaeologist-as-Hamlet, posing for the camera or in the classroom, exemplify the playful appropriation of a widely recognized cultural emblem. Yet there is arguably a more serious point to the performance. Archaeologists today are still asking many of the same questions Shakespeare’s Danish prince posed four hundred years ago. Unsurprisingly, no other Shakespearean text is referenced so frequently in archaeological publications (though other plays such as Julius Caesar are sometimes invoked in similar ways, e.g. Usai et al., 2014). To take one example, Hamlet’s query to the Gravedigger, “how long will a man lie i’th’earth ere he rot?” crops up repeatedly in studies of the processes of postmortem decay published over the last few decades (Boddington, 1987, p. 27; Cohen et al., 1994, p. 634; Pokines & Baker, 2013, p. 74). The Gravedigger’s observations in response to Hamlet’s question, bearing on differential rates of decomposition (“a tanner will last you nine year”) and the role of environmental factors (“your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body”), are sometimes also cited in these studies (e.g. Cohen et al., 1994, p. 634; Turner-Walker, 2008, p. 11), where they are employed to illustrate general truths, if not precise facts, and to demonstrate long-standing cultural understanding of the processes under discussion. In a similar way, the Gravedigger’s casual treatment of old bones may be referred to as an explanation for the wide scattering of skeletal matter in old graveyards (Henderson, 1987, p. 52; Rodwell, 2012). While the Gravedigger is clearly a font of practical knowledge, it is Hamlet, the elite amateur, who is usually seen as the figure of the modern or postmodern archaeologist avant-la-lettre, a point made by Frands Herschend in a playful parable:

Hamlet—who is an early example of the royal Danish archaeologist, and a postmodernist—visits an excavation site and an interpretative context (the churchyard) with his assistant, Horatio. Hamlet starts to collect information by talking to the grave-digging sexton, who is an experienced field archaeologist insofar as his competence has the quality of being so limited that he is an expert, but in the graves of his graveyard […]. This clown is caught in the action, digging up the past as usual; he is satisfied to label only the remains which he takes for granted. Hamlet, on the other hand, enquires about the context, takes out the skull, and give us, and his audience (i.e. the present world), his much more intriguing interpretation of the find […]. (Herschend, 2015, p. 127)

If Hamlet continues to present a model for the human encounter with excavated bones, the text has also been cited by antiquaries and archaeologists across several centuries as a source of potentially illuminating historical detail. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the archaeological study of early English graves advanced, the graveyard scene was frequently invoked, especially in relation to a particular ‘pagan’ practice. In 1793, in his Nenia Britannica, or a Sepulchral History of Great Britain , the Reverend James Douglas describes opening a tumulus in which he observed “several shards or pebbles […] which I have reason to think were intentionally thrown in with the body.” “It is not improbable,” he continues, “that this custom furnished Shakespeare with this line in Hamlet: ‘Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her’” (Douglas, 1793, p. 10).

The lines are those of the Priest explaining to Laertes how his sister Ophelia ought to have been buried, given her death by suicide.

Her obsequies have been as far enlarged

As we have warranty. Her death was doubtful,

And, but that great command o’ersways the order,

She should in ground unsanctified been lodged

Till the last trumpet. For charitable prayers,

[Shards,] flints and pebbles should be thrown on her […]. (Hamlet 5.1.205–210)Footnote 3

Suicides in Shakespeare’s era, Douglas concludes, “being deprived the Christian rites of burial, were perhaps interred in this manner peculiar to the pagans.” Writing less than two centuries after the composition of Hamlet, Douglas does not find it difficult to suppose that in Shakespeare’s era pre-Christian burial rituals were still practiced. This unlikely hypothesis is enabled by the powerful tendency in the eighteenth century to credit Shakespeare with a deep insight into the national spirit, and a viewpoint, as some German critics were disposed to argue, “by nature Nordic and pagan” (Paulin, 2012, p. 324).

The application of a single line from Hamlet to the observation of broken ceramic objects in pre-Christian English graves became a staple of Victorian archaeology . In William Wylie’s important 1852 report on the Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Fairford, the presence of broken Roman pottery in the graves prompted a reference to Ophelia’s burial. John Yonge Akerman drew the same connection in his Remains of Pagan Saxondom , and remarked that it was worthy of note that Wylie, who was unacquainted with Douglas’s earlier work, had independently been inspired to draw a link between the ancient burial practice and “the well-known passage in our great poet” (Akerman, 1855, pp. xvi–xvii; cf. Akerman, 1853, p. 265; and see Williams, 2008, p. 69). In later Victorian archaeological reports, reference to the phrase from Hamlet is all but ubiquitous. For George Rolleston, digging graves in Berkshire, “Shakespeare’s well-known lines” proved that the pagan practice had

strongly impressed itself upon the public mind […]. They show also that the presence of these shards cannot be explained as being due to accident. (Rolleston, 1869a, p. 428; see also Hall, 1867, p. 167; Johnson, 1912, pp. 286–289; Rolleston, 1869b, p. 177; Woodruff, 1874, pp. 27–28)

It was left to the Reverend J. E. Jackson, a Wiltshire antiquary, to express a slight reservation, for, of course, “the passage applies in the first instance to Denmark, where Ophelia was buried” (Jackson, 1854, p. 202).

Victorian antiquaries certainly knew the difference between a play and an excavation report. They concluded, nonetheless, that the Priest’s line in Hamlet must reflect a real practice—either an enduring custom in the case of suicides who were denied Christian rites, or at least the folk memory of a pagan ritual , preserved across the centuries.Footnote 4 Concomitantly, the discovery of so much broken pottery in pagan graves helped convince them that the word “shards” in Hamlet must refer specifically to ceramic fragments, or potsherds—though in the sixteenth century the word often referred simply to splintered rock, which is indeed its most probable meaning in Hamlet.Footnote 5 The Swiss antiquary Ferdinand Keller (who, like Wylie, seems to have drawn the connection independently), boasted that his discovery provided “an explanation of an obscure passage in Shakespeare’s Hamlet […] hitherto unexplained by the English Commentators on Shakespeare” (Keller, 1846, pp. 502–503).

C. H. Woodruff likewise expressed the hope that archaeology could in this case “throw some light on a difficult passage in Shakespeare” (Woodruff, 1874, p. 27). In a virtuous circle, the passage from Hamlet provided an explanation for the archaeological phenomenon, while archaeological discoveries helped explicate the full meaning of Shakespeare’s line. Indeed, Victorian editions of Hamlet postdating Akerman’s Remains of Pagan Saxondom display far more certainty in glossing “shards” as broken pots or tiles than do earlier editions, in which this is noted as merely one among several possibilities. Where Samuel Weller Singer’s 1826 edition is careful to state that “It does not only mean fragments of pots and tiles, but rubbish of any kind […] [as in] shardes of stones” (Singer, 1826, p. 326), J. O. Halliwell’s 1865 Hamlet glosses shards as “broken pieces of earthenware, pot-sherds, something shorn off” (Halliwell, 1865, p. 343) and Charles Knight’s 1867 edition flatly declares “Shards were broken pottery” (Knight, 1867, p. 298).

10.3 The Forensic Examination of the Putative Remains of the Princes in the Tower in 1933

By the early decades of the twentieth century, invocations of Ophelia’s burial in archaeological reports had come to seem old-fashioned; as Hadrian Allcroft remarked,

the days [have] passed when the world could be impressed by whispers of Druidical sacrifices or conjured with ‘shards, flints and pebbles’. (Allcroft, 1920, p. 678)

Nonetheless, a symbiotic, mutually affirming relationship between Shakespeare and British mortuary archaeology persisted well into the twentieth century. One remarkable example is the examination of the bones purported to belong to the young Edward V and his younger brother Richard, the so-called Princes in the Tower who disappeared in the reign of Richard III (1483–1485). Discovered under a set of stairs in the Tower of London in the 1670s, the bones had been deposited in an urn in Westminster Abbey (Schwyzer, 2013, pp. 48–51). In 1933, the contents of the urn were examined by William Wright, a distinguished osteologist who had previously published work on the early Bronze Age skulls found in the barrow burials at Driffield, Yorkshire (Wright, 1904). Wright concluded that the bones in the urn were those of closely related males, the younger between nine and eleven, the elder not yet thirteen (the right ages for the princes). Working alongside the antiquary Lawrence Tanner, keeper of the Abbey Muniments, Wright was clearly determined to demonstrate that the remains were those of the princes and, moreover, that they had met their deaths in the grisly manner described in the sixteenth century by Thomas More and Shakespeare. A stain on the larger skull’s lower jaw, “of a distinctly blood-red colour,” was interpreted as residue of the blood that had suffused the prince’s face when suffocated under a pillow, as described by More (Tanner & Wright, 1935, p. 18). For evidence that such haemolytic staining might occur, Wright referred not to osteological science but to the greater authority of Shakespeare. In Henry VI Part 2, Wright observed, comparable hemorrhaging is plainly evident on the face of the suffocated Duke of Gloucester:

See how the blood is settled in his face

[…] his face is black and full of blood. (Henry VI Part 2 3.2.160, 168)

In Wright’s implicit reasoning, if suffocation could have this effect on the physiognomy of one fifteenth-century English aristocrat (and Shakespeare must be taken at his word), it could have it on another. The old circle was as virtuous as ever. Shakespeare provides crucial evidence to confirm the findings of bioarchaeology; those findings in turn confirm Shakespeare’s relevance and reliability.

Tanner and Wright concluded their study of the Westminster bones by observing how much better the princes have fared in the long run than their wicked uncle:

while the bones of Richard III have long since disappeared, trampled into common clay, those of the princes freed from all undignified associations rest secure, in the company of those of their mighty ancestors, at the very heart of the national shrine. (Tanner & Wright, 1935, p. 20)

Splendid as this sentiment may have seemed, it has not stood the test of time. When the long-lost bones of Richard III reemerged from beneath a car park in Leicester in 2012, they initiated yet another encounter between Shakespeare and mortuary archaeology. On this occasion, however, the relationship between the Bard and the bones proved anything but harmonious.

10.4 The Exhumation of Richard III in 2012

Amid the extraordinary media frenzy that followed the discovery of Richard’s skeleton , it was hard to find a trace of the old Victorian confidence in Shakespeare’s authority. Instead, archaeological and dramatic perspectives were generally seen as fundamentally opposed. Like Wright’s investigation of the Westminster bones, the Greyfriars excavation meshed easily with the popular trope of the archaeologist as detective (Holtorf, 2007, pp. 75–84); this time, however, Shakespeare was no longer cast as the helpful witness furnishing a crucial clue, but rather as the criminal mastermind who had conspired to kill off Richard’s reputation. It was not so much that anything specifically discovered in the excavation refuted any particular aspect of the play Richard III ; the bones themselves were apparently enough (Toon & Stone, 2016). Having shaped popular perceptions of Richard III for over four centuries, in 2012 Shakespeare was not so much disproved as displaced; his murderous monarch was unmasked as an airy nothing, once the historical Richard had recovered a local habitation and a name. In an earlier era, the discovery that the king’s spine had indeed been curved, as it is repeatedly said to be in Shakespeare’s play, might have been taken as mutually confirming evidence of the skeleton’s identity and Shakespeare’s veracity. Instead, the fact that the skeleton’s spine revealed a sideways rather than a forward curvature—scoliosis rather than kyphosis—was presented as damning proof of Shakespeare’s malicious misrepresentation of Richard as a hunchback or “bunch-backed toad” (Langley & Jones, 2013). A Bloomberg headline from May 2014—“Shakespeare’s Deformed Richard III Disputed by Scientists”—sums up the general mood. As the article continues, breezily paraphrasing Hamlet:

The slings and arrows of literary insults aimed at King Richard III grossly embellish the deformities of the supposed hunchback whose villainy endures thanks to William Shakespeare. That’s the conclusion of scientists who used 3D printing to reconstruct the spine of the last English ruler before the Tudors […]. The findings may overturn centuries of maltreatment by the Bard and other writers. (Kitamura, 2014)

For all this, disentangling the bones from the Bard has not proven easy. In the years since the identity of the skeleton was confirmed, Shakespeare has stuck to Richard III like a bur, even as his credibility is repeatedly declared to have been exploded. With each successive flurry of stories in the media—reporting the initial discovery (2012), the scientific confirmation of the skeleton’s identity (2013), the controversy over the place of burial (2013–2014), and the burial itself (2015)—Shakespeare came back like a bad Tudor penny. References to Shakespeare and his play crop up everywhere in Leicester’s King Richard III Visitor Centre, always to be confuted and rebuked, but never successfully dismissed from the scene that archaeology has claimed as its own. As an excerpt from Philippa Langley’s diary, featured in the exhibition, declares hopefully,

With the extraordinary story of the search generating new interest in learning about Richard, I am encouraged to see that people are now talking about him as a medieval king and that Shakespeare’s anti-hero is no longer a realistic portrayal.

Yet, as Langley’s remarks go some way toward acknowledging, the bones of Richard III are still noteworthy primarily for belonging to the man about whom Shakespeare told such awful untruths.Footnote 6 If the explicit message of the Visitor Centre and wider media coverage of the Richard III affair is “Forget Shakespeare”, the implicit corollary is that we must continually remind ourselves of what we are conscientiously forgetting. On this evidence, Shakespeare and archaeology may be stuck in a very bad marriage, but there is no divorce in sight.

10.5 The Discovery of a Pair of Embracing Neolithic Skeletons Near Mantua in 2007

A final example from the early twenty-first century illustrates how Shakespearean exhumation has moved beyond the confines of British archaeology to become something of a global trope. In February 2007, a week before Valentine’s Day, a team of Italian archaeologists led by Elena Menotti announced a remarkable discovery. Digging in a Neolithic burial ground in Valdaro, on the outskirts of Mantua, they had unearthed a pair of skeletons locked in an apparent embrace (Fig. 10.2). The bones were described as belonging to a young man and woman, probably aged around twenty judging by the good condition of their teeth. Fragments of weapons including flint knives and a spearhead found associated with the bones hinted at a tragically violent end. In early interviews, Menotti emphasized the rarity of double burials from the Neolithic period and expressed the emotional impact of the discovery: “From thousands of years ago we feel the strength of this love. Yes, we must call it love” (David, 2007). Rather than separating the skeletons, Menotti arranged for them to be lifted together from the site in a single block of sediment.

Fig. 10.2
figure 2

The Lovers of Valdaro, Museo archeologico nazionale di Mantova. (Photo: D. Hollmann, Wikimedia Commons license CC BY-SA 4.0)

Full size image

The image of the embracing skeletons instantly became and remains iconic, reproduced on t-shirts, pendants and earrings, and album covers. In Italy they became known as the Lovers of Valdaro. Internationally, however, the skeletons were immediately hailed as a Shakespearean couple. “Prehistoric Romeo and Juliet Discovered” ran the headline of the Associated Press story in the Washington Post (David, 2007); “Archaeologists find prehistoric Romeo and Juliet locked in eternal embrace” (USA Today, 2007). According to Jason Urbanus in Archaeology magazine, “Archaeologists were suddenly quoting lines from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet ” (Urbanus, 2008). As the Daily Mail reported the story:

It is the city where the exiled Romeo dreamed he died and Juliet’s kisses breathed life back into his body. Tragically, the lifeless bodies of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers would soon lie side by side. Yesterday at Mantua, in an amazing echo of that heartrending story, archaeologists revealed the discovery of a couple locked in a tender embrace, one that has endured for more than 5,000 years. (Daily Mail, 2007)

In terms of historical fact, any linkage between Romeo and Juliet and the so-called Lovers of Valdaro is elusive to say the least. In the 1590s, Shakespeare described two lovers, who never really existed, lying dead together in a tomb. Roughly five thousand years earlier, two people, who may or not have been lovers, were buried in what our eyes interpret as an embrace. It is of course the proximate location, Mantua, that provides the journalistic hook, transforming this almost nothing into almost everything. Even this is something of a stretch, for the skeletons were discovered in the village of Valdaro, several kilometres from the historic center of Mantua, and Mantua is only a secondary location in Shakespeare’s play, which is mostly set in Verona (where the lovers are buried). In any case, it is difficult to see how the coincidence of location could amount in practice to anything more than a mild irony. Yet the real force of the connection between the Valdaro Lovers and Romeo and Juliet is indicated in the Daily Mail description of the skeletal embrace as “an amazing echo of [Shakespeare’s] heartrending story.” Urbanus likewise saw in the remains “a symbol of eternal love that echoes the doomed Shakespearean couple” (Urbanus, 2008). Shakespeare may have lived several millennia more recently than the Valdaro Lovers, but by a strange temporal wrinkle he also precedes them, so that the skeletons are capable of providing an echo—and a confirmation—of his play’s tragic truth. The Valdaro echo would give rise to further reverberations, as subsequent discoveries of embracing skeletons from Siberia to Greece, and dating from the Neolithic to the late medieval period, were subsumed in the Shakespearean paradigm (Geller, 2016, pp. 98–102). Thus a headline from 2013, “Romanian archeologists uncover Romeo and Juliet: medieval couple buried together with hands clasped” (Romania-Insider.com, 2013) makes a return in 2018 in The Sun, this time with reference to an excavation in Kazakhstan: “ETERNAL LOVE: skeletons of 5,000-year-old Romeo and Juliet ‘lovers’ found buried alongside remains of two sacrificed horses” (Stewart, 2018).

The vision of doomed romantic love summed up in the reference to Romeo and Juliet has arguably had an impact on the archaeological interpretation of these human remains, as well as their public reception. As Pamela Geller has pointed out, the sexes of the two Valdaro skeletons had not been determined by forensic examination at the time the story broke—it was simply assumed. Subsequent analysis has suggested that the figure on the right is female, but the skeleton on the left is only “probably” male. This caveat has had very little impact on how the skeletons are presented, either in the media or in Mantua’s Archaeological Museum. Moreover, they were not necessarily alone together in the grave. Early photos of the dig, which were much less widely publicized than the iconic image of the embracing lovers, show another skeleton lying just three feet away (Geller, 2016, pp. 90–98). There is also nothing to suggest that their relationship was ‘star-crossed’, or that the love they appear to testify to in death had been thwarted during life. The early assumption, now disproved, that one or both skeletons might have been killed by the flint weapons found with them in the grave was clearly encouraged by the Romeo and Juliet paradigm.

References to Shakespeare, then, have been employed to confirm a certain interpretation of the archaeological evidence from Valdaro. Reciprocally, the archaeological evidence also confirms something about Shakespeare. There is a sense in which the Lovers of Valdaro prove Romeo and Juliet true—not because the bones belong to the children of feuding Renaissance families, but because they suggest that a certain experience of romantic heterosexual love is both timeless and eternal. Feminist and New Historicist critics may attempt to explore the roots of Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy in a specific set of economic conditions and cultural assumptions about gender, class, and the family—yet how can we presume to historicize what turns out to be prehistoric? The Valdaro Lovers tell us that Shakespeare’s play really is about what we used to think it was about (and probably want it to be about), and they tell us that Shakespeare’s play is true. The virtuous circle between Shakespeare and archaeology established at the close of the eighteenth century continues to operate at the dawn of the twenty-first. Its constricting force seems ever more clear. The Neolithic skeletons can only ‘echo’ Romeo and Juliet if a certain reading of the play is allowed to stand (therefore it is assumed to stand), and if the bones are indeed those of a young man and woman (therefore they are assumed to be so). Interpretation on either side of the equation is stripped out; textual and archaeological phenomena are brought to bear on one another in a way that requires each to be understood as a preestablished fact. Here we are a world away from Matthew Johnson’s suggestion that an archaeological site might resemble a Shakespearean text precisely in that each is open to a wide range of valid interpretations, with no prospect of a “final” reading (Johnson, 1999, p. 106). Instead, the link between Romeo and Juliet and the Lovers of Valdaro sets a definitive seal on how we are to read both.

10.6 Conclusions

This brief survey of the relationship between Shakespeare and modern mortuary archaeology is potentially somewhat dispiriting. Their conjunction too often seems to encourage a set of naïve and simplistic tropes relating to each, harkening back to modes of interpretation that have long been rightfully discarded in the respective disciplines. The version of Shakespeare invoked at Leicester and Valdaro amounts to a cast of larger than life, two-dimensional characters: hunch-backed villains and star-crossed lovers. Archaeology, likewise, is all about dramatic discoveries and extraordinary individuals. For any reader interested in both Shakespeare and archaeology, it is a sad state of affairs. What is it about these two that makes them bring out the worst in one another?

There is, of course, real Shakespearean archaeology, involving substantive and illuminating dialogue between the disciplines. Excavations at the sites of the Rose and Curtain Theatres in London have shed remarkable new light on early modern performance conditions and staging practices, and the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries have proven genuinely useful to archaeologists in interpreting the material evidence (Bowsher, 2011; Bowsher & Miller, 2009). The use of ground-penetrating radar to examine Shakespeare’s grave in Stratford in 2016 (Colls & Carrick Utsi, 2017) was the product of a genuine negotiation between an archaeological research project and a Shakespearean text (the epitaph’s injunction, still honored by church authorities, not to “move my bones”). Yet examples such as these do not indicate why Shakespeare should be any more central to the discourse of mortuary archaeology than Geoffrey Chaucer or Jane Austen. If there is any good reason why archaeologists should find themselves, again and again, “suddenly quoting Shakespeare,” it does not depend on his ability to provide relevant evidence regarding Anglo-Saxon or Neolithic burial practices, but rather on the cultural status accorded to the playwright and his works. That status is increasingly intertwined with—and analogous to—the cultural status of archaeology itself.

By way of a conclusion, I would propose that the pleasure and satisfaction the modern public derives from mortuary archaeology is akin to the pleasure and satisfaction traditionally derived from the works of Shakespeare. The kinship is rooted in the broader affinity between archaeological excavation and theatrical performance as improvisatory, unrepeatable, endlessly interpretable events (Pearson & Shanks, 2001), but there is more to it than this. In secular modernity, Shakespeare and mortuary archaeology have emerged as two of the most potent cultural technologies for communing with and paying honor to the dead. It is crucial to observe that in each of the cases surveyed above, archaeological excavation has been seen not as a violation of the dead, but rather as an act of respect, rescue, and potentially of reparation. Thus, through the osteological investigations of William Wright, the bones of the Princes in the Tower were “freed [them] from all undignified associations”; at the reburial of Richard III, the Bishop of Leicester gave thanks for the opportunity afforded by archaeology to accord “these mortal remains the dignity and honour denied to them in death” (Stevens, 2015). The decision to preserve and display the Valdaro skeletons in their entwined posture was likewise hailed as a compassionate act of rescue: “Scientists to save 5,000-year-old embrace” (Stewart, 2007). From London and Leicester to Valdaro, archaeology is the means whereby long-silenced witnesses are granted the opportunity to testify (be it to their suffering, their innocence, or their love). Although the rule may not apply to the large majority of anonymous human remains encountered by bioarchaeologists, exhumation in these celebrated cases takes on the characteristics of a public performance, enacting and enabling an earthly afterlife.

Shakespeare, by this definition, was doing mortuary archaeology all along. Aaron the Moor might have been speaking for the playwright himself when he declared “Oft have I digged up dead men from their graves.” Whatever private horror the prospect of physical exhumation may have held for him, Shakespeare’s plays unambiguously celebrate the capacity of the theatre to revive the dead and make them live again on stage. As one of Caesar’s assassins, Cassius, is made to remark:

How many ages hence

Shall this our lofty scene be acted over

In states unborn and accents yet unknown! (Julius Caesar 3.1.112–114)

Indeed, one of the earliest critical responses to Shakespeare’s works situates him in a theatre of exhumation, where the figurative raising of dead bones offers satisfaction to both the dead and the living. Thomas Nashe wrote in 1592, after witnessing one of Shakespeare’s earliest works, Henry VI Part 1 :

How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times) who in the tragedian that represents his person imagine they behold him fresh bleeding. (Nashe, 1592)

In Nashe’s account, Shakespeare’s resurrective theatre takes the long-dead bones of John Talbot, the first Earl of Shrewsbury (d. 1453) on a triumphant posthumous public journey. The exhumation of Talbot’s remains is of course figurative rather than literal, yet the idea of Shakespeare’s stage as a site where old bones are displayed, applauded, and redeemed is not wholly fanciful. Reading Nashe, it is easy enough to understand why a succession of men and women—especially those facing a life cut short by disease or execution—have bequeathed their skulls to the theatre in hopes that they might triumph again on stage in the part of Yorick (Menzer, 2015, pp. 31–66). In such cases, the afterlife afforded by Shakespeare is strikingly similar to that afforded by archaeology. Indeed, the triumphant progression described by Nashe—from entombment to exhumation, public revelation, vindication, and redemptive reinterment—could with the juggling of a few words be applied to the cultural voyages undergone in recent years by the remains of Richard III or the paired skeletons from Valdaro. For contemporary consumers of media narratives of mortuary archaeology, as for Shakespearean audiences yesterday and today, a distinctive source of pleasure and satisfaction lies in imagining what consolation the deadFootnote 7 would feel, if only they could know how we adore them now.