Radar scan of Shakespeare's grave confirms skull apparently missing

Shakespeare's skull is acceptable missing from his grave, an archaeologist has concluded, acknowledging rumors which accept swirled for years about grave-robbers and abacus to the abstruseness surrounding the Bard's remains.


Four hundred years afterwards his afterlife and burying at the Abbey of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon, axial England, advisers were accustomed to browse the grave of England's greatest author with ground-penetrating radar.

But in the breadth beneath the abbey attic area the Bard's skull was accepted to be, they begin signs of interference.

"We accept Shakespeare's burying with an odd agitation at the arch end and we accept a adventure that suggests that at some point in history someone's appear in and taken the skull of Shakespeare," said archaeologist Kevin Colls from Staffordshire University.

"It's actual actual acceptable to me that his skull isn't at Holy Trinity at all."

The allegation deepen the abstruseness about Shakespeare's endure comatose place.

The grave does not buck his name, alone this admonishing rhyme: "Good friend, for Jesus' account forbear, to dig the dust amid here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And accursed be he that moves my bones."

In their adventure to acquisition Shakespeare's skull, Colls's aggregation aswell advised a abiding account that it was hidden in a closed catacomb in addition abbey 15 afar (24 km) beyond the English countryside in Worcestershire.

But assay of that skull showed it to be that of a woman who had been in her 70s if she died.

The adventure of Shakespeare's missing skull appeared in The Argosy annual in 1879, which abhorrent the abatement on bays hunters from the antecedent aeon if grave-robbing was common.

Skulls were account accession because genius, anticipation some at that time, would be axiomatic in the charcoal of a man like Shakespeare, whose appearance Hamlet abundantly holds a skull while absorption on death.

The browse of the grave area Shakespeare's charcoal blow next to those of his wife Anne Hathaway was conducted in a non-intrusive way, said the team, who will present the after-effects in a Channel 4 television documentary due to air in Britain on Saturday.

"There are so abounding adverse belief and legends about the tomb of the Bard," said Colls in a statement.

"These after-effects will assuredly atom discussion, bookish agitation and arguable theories for years to come. Even now, cerebration of the allegation sends all-overs down my spine."