Death and the Bard

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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. By the same token Shakespeare provides good evidence that he liked a drink. Many of his best-known characters are inseparable from booze: Mark Antony, Sir Toby Belch, Falstaff, Prince Hal and the other inmates of Mistress Quickly’s tavern. Macbeth is often played convincingly as a sot. Hamlet’s aversion to the bibulous culture of Elsinore may indicate the guilt of the penitent tippler. In Othello, alcohol is crucial to the story. The drunken antics of Cassio lead to his dismissal and this accelerates Iago’s plot against the Moor. But before we postulate that Shakespeare was ‘an addict’ who died of ‘alcohol abuse’ we should bear in mind a neglected fact of early modern history. Until the arrival of tea in the 18th century, the whole of Christendom was drunk all day, every day, because the only reliable means of sanitising water was fermentation.