Here’s The Deal
At some point, modernity has to face the facts contained in the historical record and objectively acknowledge the separate, accompanying body of circumstantial evidence.
At some point, fanciful conjectures have to be jettisoned and Shakespeare biographical scholarship has to become serious and not rooted in feel good narratives, not embedded in the make-believe, not foundated on made-up revisionism and not conjured from rumours bringing smooth comforts false.
At some point, academia will have to accept the fact Digges explicitly names Juliet and her Romeo in his 1623 Folio elegy and does so in a manner that defends their suicides and by so doing Digges expressly connects their deaths with Shakespeare’s death.
At some point, scholarship will have to acknowledge the true meaning of Digges’s half-Sword parlying Romans and how those two Romans died. Which were important enough to Digges to mention in his 1623 Folio elegy and then refer to them again in 1640. In so doing, Digges explicitly connects Shakespeare’s death to the deaths of Brutus and Cassius.
At some point, Shakespeare lovers will have to square themselves with the fact their beloved killed himself; it happens. It should come as no huge surprise or horror the author of the most famous soliloquy in the English language – which can be modernized as ‘Do I kill myself or not’ – took his own life. What is shockingly surprising is that such a huge body of evidence never made it past the blinders of academia; even the clearest of new schools of thought and ideas usually break through most orthodoxy – at some point – usually. How Digges’s two clear tells in his elegies – 1623 and 1640 – escaped notice for 400 years is the puzzler. That, is shocking.
Here’s the deal: Shakespeare committed suicide.
Shakespeare told us, the historical record points to it and Digges confirms it.
But, really, does it matter how Shakespeare died?