No dispatches, private or diplomatic, carried the news of his death beyond Britain to the wider world. Why did the death of Shakespeare cause so little public grief, so little public excitement, in and beyond the country of his birth? Other more pressing matters were now absorbing the nation. Shakespeare had made a remarkably modest exit from the theatre of the world: largely un-applauded, largely unobserved.
It was a very quiet death. The silence that followed the death of Shakespeare is the more remarkable coming as it did in an age that had developed such elaborate rituals of public mourning, panegyric, and commemoration, most lavishly displayed at the death of a monarch or peer of the realm, but also occasionally set in train by the death of an exceptional commoner. Camden was a man of quite humble social origins — like Shakespeare himself, whose father was a maker of gloves and leather goods in Stratford.
Eulogies were delivered at Oxford and published along with other tributes in a memorial volume soon after his death. At Westminster his body was escorted to the Abbey on 19 November by a large retinue of mourners, led by 26 poor men wearing gowns, followed by soberly attired gentlemen, esquires, knights, and members of the College of Arms, the hearse being flanked by earls, barons, and other peers of the realm, together with the Lord Keeper, Bishop John Williams, and other divines.
There were particular reasons, then, why Camden should have been accorded a rather grand funeral of his own. At this quite extraordinary moment in the history of English letters and intellectual exchange there was more than one contender for that title. Martin Mitchell, in his insightful biography of Shakespeare's physician and son-in-law , Dr. John Hall, presents the following hypothesis: "I have formed the opinion that it was more likely than not in the nature of a cerebral hemorrhage or apoplexy that quickly deepened and soon became fatal.
There are three reasons for this. Richard Burbage who daily shared the same theatrical life, himself died of such a seizure after twenty-four hours illness [in ]" Mitchell, Unfortunately, Shakespeare's death at the age of fifty-two will almost surely remain a mystery.
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