We, the coroners of Warwickshire, convene this inquest, under the glory of God and of our King, to ascribe the cause of death of the noted gentleman, Will Shakespeare. He was a leading light of our town of Stratford-upon-Avon, and of our nation’s theater world. Death took him in the evening of St. George’s Day, April 23^rd, in the year of our Lord 1616. What sayeth the three learned men of physic, surgery, and the secret arts, who performed the necropsy? What conclusions made you?"

Mr. Pace, village barber-surgeon, arose from his seat and declared, "We knowest that Mr. Shakespeare supped with Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson, and later that evening, he developed ague and fever, and he died. We found the liver to be small, pale, and hardened, like seen in heavy imbibers of Rhenish wine, ale, sack, and other monarchs of the vine. T’is my finding that a wind draft, compounded by a mild effluvia from the bowels, caused by excess pickled herrings, resulted in a hepar decompensation that could not be endured, and that became the death blow." With that declaration, Mr. Pace sat down.

Dr. Harden then stood, faced Mr. Pace, and declared this initial opinion as plausible, but incomplete; "We all noted the swelling of the rising aorta, squeezing and pinching tubes and the nerve strings passing up to the voice box. Indeed, Mr. Shakespeare

was known to have an occasional croak in his voice. Therein the result of this syphilis, this affliction begotten by the loins’ covetness so many years ago when his face and limbs and corpor were sealed o’er with the weeping pox. A small sore of the upper mouth, the palate, sirs, was found; a predisposing to the open channels into the nose that cause so many afflicted with the late pox to speak through the nose, and to discharge drink and fluids as waterfalls cascading down onto the upper lip. This great pox killed the gentleman." And Dr. Harden sat down.

The magistrates then looked to Dr. John Hall, physician, and son-in-law, to Mr. Shakespeare. "And what profess you, sir, for you were the third medical man to assist in the necropsy? Dr. Hall looked quickly over his shoulder to his weeping wife, Susanna, a daughter of the deceased, and spoke.

"My father-in-law was known to be with this miserable passion, to be in a great life-loathing melancholy, accountable to the mischief of excess effusion of black bile. For some many months prior to his death, sleep, that sore labor’s bath, nature’s sweet nurse, and the balm of hurt minds, escaped him; his appetite absconded, for he ate what would not even fill a tit mouse, sirs. He overly partook of sack. All these perturbations resulted from London businesses most foul, and because of a disquiet from the Welcombe enclosure affair here in the town. Poisons, and blest infusions tied in silken bags, abounded in the household, derived from herbalists in London towne, and we know for a fact that Ben Jonson, who quenched tottering thirst with the deceased that very evening, carried vials of toxic, lust-inducing, sleep-procuring, and other lethal substances for his own peculiar pertinences. The necropsy revealed the organs to be full and congested and mottled. Galen, sirs, noted just those changes from ingesting the leaves of the yew tree. It is my opinion that Will was tired of this existence, and I could not minister to that mind diseased, I could not pluck from his memory rooted sorrows, nor raze out the written troubles of the brain. I had not that sweet oblivious antidote that could cleanse his stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff which weighed upon his heart. Death seized him, as was his wont, and he ended it all, the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that his flesh was heir to. That was his soul’s desire, sirs, that center of his sinful earth. Having his veins run with this cold and lethal humor, the remediless poison affected his organs, that was deadly to the partie, and stopped all functions, rewarding, a merciful, shrouded release for him, nay, but for his family, an unmerciful calamity." Dr. Hall glanced at his wife, both now with tears, and retook his seat.

The coroners declared that all three learned opinions would be listed as contributory influences to the death of one William Shakespeare, Gentleman.