The mystery of Shakespeare’s missing skull

SussexWorld

Shakespeare’s skull was apparently missing when his grave was scanned a few years ago – the starting point for Bard Times, a new play from Ben Randall which gets its premiere at The Stables Theatre, Hastings from October 10-12.

Transcript

00:00Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Greek Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Lovely today

00:06to speak to Ben Randall, the writer of a brand new play, Bard Times, which intriguingly takes

00:11as a starting point the fact that when Shakespeare's grave was scanned, his skull was found to be

00:18missing. Now this play is coming to the Stable Theatre in Hastings in October. How did that

00:26become a starting point for a story and what are you doing with the fact that the head

00:29is missing? Well it was a complete mystery to me that that happened, I never knew that was the

00:37case and it was established in 2016 that this took place and it was actually a Channel 4 documentary

00:44and as I dug and dug and did a bit more investigation into this, I found more and

00:52more mysteries about him, you know, about that obviously he died and was born on the same same

00:58date, just 50 odd years apart. Also the fact that he wasn't buried in a tomb, he wasn't buried,

01:06he was buried in basically a sheet and only two foot deep underneath the grave, so the more you

01:14dug into it, the more interesting it became about this great playwright and what we do is we

01:19traverse time and we start to look at his influence on people's lives and answer some,

01:27potentially answer some of these strange... You come to some conclusions here do you?

01:33Yes, we suggest, we suggest because obviously it's very much an academic

01:38pursuit and I wouldn't pretend to know exactly what happened but looking at the evidence

01:43and the emotional side of it, very much so, yeah. We also look at the fact that, you know,

01:50it during, just really just after the Jacobite period,

01:59Shakespeare really wasn't very popular, he'd fallen out of favour and

02:07we look into how he, obviously he's now a very, very popular playwright, probably the most popular

02:13and the greatest playwright that we consider to have worked with arguably, but how did he

02:20become this popular when considering at one point he'd really fallen out of favour and no one really

02:25wanted to do his plays? Goodness, and as for the play itself, it's important to you that it's just

02:30two actors, isn't it, two-handed? Yeah, yeah. What was the appeal of that?

02:34Well, I think, I think with two actors it really, it really relies on the script and the drama and

02:40the acting. You're not distracted by anything else and it's so poetic for such a poetic character.

02:46Brilliant. So it's at the Sables Theatre in Hastings, October the 10th to the 12th. Ben,

02:51lovely to speak to you. Good luck with it. Thank you.

02:54Thank you very much.

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