However, the will was not probated until 10 November 1615. This could have caused a long delay in the ordering and construction of the tomb so that for some time Combe’s grave was not covered by the elaborate marble tomb that stands today in the northeast corner of the chancel. While waiting for the permanent tomb, Combe’s grave could have been covered by a floor stone of the same type that covers Shakespeare and his family members’ graves at the front of the chancel behind the altar. The verses might have been carved in the stone or on the wall behind the grave, both locations now being obscured by the tomb. This would explain the language used by early witnesses who wrote that the verses were attached to the tomb. Weever most likely visited the church shortly after Shakespeare’s monument was erected but shortly before John Combe’s more elaborate tomb was installed. TOM REEDY Denton, Texas doi:10.1093/notesj/gju259 ß The Author (2015). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com A POSSIBLE ALLUSION BY MIDDLETON TO SHAKESPEARE’S DEATH? THE year 2016 will mark the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s death. While the occasion will no doubt elicit a flurry of tributes and biogra- phies, it might also provide an opportune moment to re-examine the evidence concerning how Shakespeare met his end. The case file is, regrettably, a thin one. Apart from the terse comment of Reverend Richard Davies, that Shakespeare ‘died a papist’, the only testimony comes from the journals of John Ward, a Stratford vicar: ‘Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.’ 1 Many biographers have been understandably sceptical. Before water sanitation, early modern Europeans drank shiploads of alcohol, but mostly ale and wine. High-proof spirits, such as aqua vitae, were not commonly consumed, making it unlikely that Shakespeare died of alcohol poisoning. The tale has been dismissed as medically implausible: excessive drinking does not induce fever. 2 Since he moonlighted as a physician, Ward himself may have under- stood this; his choice of words—‘it seems [Shakespeare] drank too hard’—may betray a doubt about the causal relationship between the drinking binge and the fever. Other details also render it suspect. Michael Drayton— although he visited Warwickshire on occasion and even knew Shakespeare’s physician son- in-law, John Hall—is reported to have been a temperate drinker. While Ben Jonson was some- thing of a toper, no evidence indicates that he ever set foot in Stratford. John Aubrey records that Shakespeare himself was ‘not a company keeper’. Finally, Ward did not arrive in Stratford until 1662—at which point Shakespeare’s bones had been entombed in the Holy Trinity Church for forty-six years. Ward’s anecdote thus looks highly dubious. 3 This essay forestalls a possible argument in support of Ward’s death-by-drink-induced- fever theory based on tempting new evidence from Thomas Middleton’s The Witch. At first blush, Middleton’s odd allusion to a ‘surfeit at a wedding’ in a play now thought to be com- posed within months of Shakespeare’s passing might appear to corroborate the scenario of the fatal ‘merry meeting’. Ultimately, however, this essay unmasks the passage as a topical ref- erence not to the death of Shakespeare but to that of Sir Thomas Overbury. In his magisterial study of Shakespearean biography, Samuel Schoenbaum explodes 1 John Ward, Diary of the Reverend John Ward ... Extending from 1648 to 1679, ed. Charles Severn (1839), 183. 2 The Stratford antiquarian Edgar Fripp, observing that the parish burial records register an unusually high number of deaths in the warm spring of 1616, proposed that Shakespeare died of ‘typhoid fever’. Edgar I. Fripp, Shakespeare (1964) II,824, and Shakespeare’s Stratford (Oxford, 1928), 75. Elaborating on this theory, Park Honan remarks typhoid would have been ‘virulent in a for- ward spring, and it is likely that Shakespeare’s New Place was dangerous because of the fetid stream which ran down beside it to supply the fullers of cloth near the River Avon’. Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford, 1998), 407. 3 The above account is indebted to Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford, 1991), 77–9. Aubrey’s note is reprinted in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford, 1930), II,252. 130 NOTES AND QUERIES 2015 at University of Huddersfield on March 9, 2015 http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from