1. What have you been working on this month for the project?
I’ve been busy adding data to our master spreadsheet of Shakespearean epitaphs. Before the start of the project we had already compiled more than 400 examples of these, which were kept in a Word document with fairly basic information (Quotation; Name; Date of Death; Location). The spreadsheet includes many more fields for recording potentially relevant data, from the Gender, Profession, Age, and Religion of the deceased, to the geographical coordinates of the cemetery, the style of monument, and any imagery accompanying the epitaph. We are also recording the epitaph’s relationship (or ‘degree of fidelity’) to the Shakespearean source passage, employing categories such as ‘Accurate’, ‘Pronoun Substitution’, ‘Substantial Alteration’, ‘Pastiche’. It’s a time-consuming but illuminating process, involving some interesting judgement calls.
2. What is your favourite or most surprising thing you’ve learned on the project this month?
In addition to at least twenty countries (not to mention the moon), Shakespearean epitaphs can also be found in the imaginary worlds of computer games. In Red Carpet Diaries Book 3, as the characters are leaving a cemetery, we spy the headstone of one John Chadbourne (d. 1882), with the inscription ‘HELL IS EMPTY | AND ALL THE | DEVILS ARE HERE’. And in Trails of Cold Steel 3, a moving scene plays out before the grave of Crow Armbrust (a schoolmate of the protagonist Rean, who fought against him in the civil war, but returned to his side to combat an ancient evil). Crow’s grave bears the epitaph from Shakespeare’s own ledger stone in Stratford: ‘Good friend, for Jesus sake forbear, | To dig the dust enclosed here. | Blest be the man that spares these stones, | And cursed be he that moves my bones.’ (Could there be a sly reference here to Shakespeare as the ‘upstart crow’?)
I don’t know a whole lot about gaming, so I have no idea if these two examples are the tip of a larger iceberg. (How often do characters in games visit graveyards, anyway?) If anyone comes across further cases like this I’d be delighted to hear about them!
3. Have there been any challenges for your work on the project this month?
Although inscriptions on graves and memorials are by definition in the public domain, we are conscious that research in this area should not intrude on private grief. In our publications and in the data released at the end of the project, personal details relating to private individuals who died after 1960 will be anonymised. This will have a significant impact on how we present our findings, since more than half of the epitaphs currently in our dataset belong to this group. A number of epitaphs that have become notably popular in recent years (including ‘Though she was but little, she was fierce’; and ‘To unpathed waters, undreamed shores’) aren’t attested at all before the 21st century.
As we build the spreadsheet, the task at hand is to ensure that identifying personal details for the recently dead are confined to columns that can be omitted from the public dataset. There will be additional issues to consider when it comes to writing about epitaphs in this category.
4. What are you looking forward to coming up for the project?
Up until this point we’ve been focusing solely on physical memorials bearing Shakespearean inscriptions. It’s with a mixture of excitement and trepidation that I look forward to the next stage, when we expand our search to include textual commemoration in forms such as obituaries, funeral readings, and memorial addresses. One thing we already know is that the scale of the data is massively greater. To take one example, the Chronicling America newspaper archive alone includes more than 1000 instances of obituaries and reminiscences quoting Macbeth’s ‘after life’s fitful fever he [/she] sleeps well’ – that’s just one quotation from just one country, exceeding the total number of epitaphs on physical memorials we’ve collected so far! Will we be capable of recording all these instances with the same thoroughness we’ve been applying to gravestone inscriptions? At what point do we adjust our methods to manage this mass of material?