The April 23 on which Shakespeare closed his eyes completed his cycle of
fifty-two years, according to ordinary reckoning. But strangely enough
there is entered on his tombstone "AEtatis 53," and this suggests that he
had been born on April 22. No records of his funeral have come down to
us, but it must have made a stir in his native place. He was a native of
the town, known to all in his youth, and loved by many. Yet, on the
other hand, he had offended all the traditions of the borough. He had
descended from the safe levels of trade to the vagabond life of a
"common player," especially detested in Stratford-on-Avon (see notes);
he had made money somehow in the city, and had returned to spend it in
his native town, but he had never taken office, and had never been "one
of them." And at the end he was to be buried in the Chancel, the select
spot for nobles and prelates and "great men." Verily the tongues of the
gossips of Stratford would wag on April 25, 1616. The authorship of the
doggerel lines on his tomb has been attributed to various people.
Probably they were a part of the stock-in-trade of the stone-cutter,
that satisfied Shakespeare's widow as expressing a known wish of her
"dear departed." Rude as they are, they have fulfilled their end:

"Good Frend, for Jesus' sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased here;
Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones."

Meanwhile Shakespeare's friends had been planning a monument to be
placed on the northern wall of the Chancel. The bust is said to have
been prepared from a death-mask, and to have been sculptured by one
Gerard Johnson, son and successor of the Amsterdam tomb-maker, whose
place of business lay between St. Saviour's Church and the Globe
Theatre. He may be presumed to have frequently seen Shakespeare in his
lifetime. The exact date of its erection is not known, but it would seem
to have been some time before 1623, as Leonard Digges refers to it in
his poem prefixed to the First Folio, "To the Memorie of the deceased
Authour, Maister W. Shakespeare":

"Shakespeare, at length thy pious fellowes give
The World thy Workes--thy Workes, by which outlive
Thy touche thy name must; when that stone is rent,
And Time dissolves thy Stratford monument,
Here we alive shall view thee still."

Crude and inartistic as it is, the bust must have had some likeness in
its earlier days to have satisfied critica