The poem adorning Shakspere's funeral monument in

Holy Trinity Church goes as follows:

"Stay passenger, why goest thou by so fast?

Read if thou canst, whom envious death hath plast

With in this monument Shakspeare: With whome

Quick nature dide: whose name, doth deck this [YS] tombe,

Far more, then cost: Sieh all that[YT] he hath writt,

Leaves living art, but page,

to serve his witt."

Very few Shakespeare biographers have even tried to make sense of this poem.

Professor Sir Stanley Wells has admitted it is 'somewhat cryptic',

adding, "The only sense I can make out of the last bit is

that his compositions relegate the sculptor's art to the rank of a mere page -

with perhaps a forced pun on the writer's 'pages' - offering service to his genius;

or perhaps that all art subsequent to Shakespeare's is a page - servant - to his."

Wells also pointed out another discrepancy in the poem:

Shakespeare's name 'does not deck the tombe and it's not a tomb anyway'.

The 'thorn' sign to indicate Th -

sometimes represented as a Y -

is not unusual for the time.

But what about the gap between 'With' and 'in',

that random-seeming punctuation,

or the apparent typo 'Sieh'?

Let's return to the top of the poem and see what we can do with it.

'Stay passenger' seems to be inspired by Siste Viator,

which ancient Romans inscribed upon stones

set along roadsides to remind passing traffic of their dead.

Ben Jonson used a similar phrase in his Epitaph of Henry Delaware:

"If, Passenger, thou canst but read:

Stay, drop a tear for him that's dead."

On that basis, and on his general involvement with the First Folio and its poems,

some people have suggested that Jonson is the author of this poem too.

What about that second sentence

which in modern English says,

"Read if you can, whom envious death has placed with in this monument Shakspeare"?

One would assume if one has reached the second line of the poem,

the 'passenger' has basic literacy

So to make sense of 'read if you can' in the second line,

we might look to the other chief meaning of 'read' which is 'work out'.

The poem may be asking us to work out, if we can,

'whom envious death has placed with in this monument Shakspeare'.

Does that really mean 'within this monument'?

This monument is not a tomb,

and what would the spare 'Shakspeare' be doing in

the sentence if this was the correct interpretation?

Does it therefore mean

'within this monument Shakspeare'

with 'Shakspeare' being the monument,

which recalls Ben Jonson's declaration in the First Folio poem,

'thou art a monument without tomb'?

Or is the space between 'with' and 'in' deliberate and meaningful?

Is it an invitation to read this sentence with

the silent parentheses that would make it grammatical,

asking us to work out 'whom envious death has placed with (in this monument) Shakspeare'?

But there is more to it:

another three and a half lines of poetry

which make far less sense than the poem's opening.

'Quick' in 'Quick nature' means living (as in the phrase

'the quick and the dead'). But what of the rest?

Anyone who has ever spent time solving

cryptic crossword clues will be struck by the similarity of tone of the line

"Whose name, doth deck this tombe, far more, then cost"

to a cryptic crossword clue.

Since this part of the poem follows the challenge about

reading if we can and genuinely makes little sense in English

(which one might consider a bit of a howler, given whose tribute it is supposed to be),

we might perhaps be justified in looking at it as some kind of puzzle.

Answers to this puzzle tend to be candidate-specific

and this is a candidate-neutral course.

But one part of a possible solution that's worth discussing relates to the word 'Sieh' -

a non-word, that some have argued is meant to say

'Sith', an Elizabethan form of 'Since'.

But is it really likely that masons would have carved

a TYPO into this expensive marble monument?

As part of a larger possible solution which points to Christopher Marlowe,

Peter Farey suggested that 'Sieh' is a Rebus -

a puzzle popular with Elizabethans,

one form of which involves saying what you see.

S-I-E-H is H-E-I-S reversed -

or 'returned' as an Elizabethan might say.

So the rebus for 'Sieh'

is 'He is returned'

and 'sieh' is placed in that comma'd-off subclause, WITH 'all',

making the full rebus

'He is returned withal' -

withal meaning 'in spite of all'.

In the phrase that follows, the

HE of 'all that

HE hath writ' is in larger letters, which adds weight to this reading.

'He is returned in spite of all'

is especially fitting for Marlowe,

but it might be also applied to other candidates.

Obviously, you will find one solution you favour over others, but the chances are -

thanks to the way our brains are wired -

that it will be a solution that confirms something you

already believed, or were prepared to believe.

Any good solution will follow a logical and known method of puzzle solving.

It will account for every part of the poem's obscurities, leaving nothing

unexplained, and will result in a solution

which makes more grammatical sense than the original text;

the first rule of cryptography.

The second rule of cryptography is to demonstrate that

the alleged message cannot have happened by chance,

something fairly easily done by pointing out that the number of peculiarities of

the combined grave andmonument inscriptions are quite

exceptional for such an obviously expensive project.

We can be sure that where human beings are involved in creating something,

certain slips - a typo,

a poor piece of punctuation - will occasionally happen.

But when so many occur all together on an important and expensive monument,

we should recognize them for what they are:

a pattern of anomalies that require some kind of explanation.

A significant pattern of anomalies should not be

glossed over but should be treated as evidence:

as something to be tested against possible explanations.

Be aware, when you read about ways of solving

this puzzling poem, or if you attempt to solve it yourself,

of the many traps that people fall into looking for coded messages.

Numerology, for example, led many thousands of

American Christians to believe that the world would end on

the 21st of May 2011 because of numerical coincidences contained in the Bible.

Many were utterly convinced that they were right -

only to find themselves made into fools when Armageddon didn't arrive.

So no matter how persuasive some arguments may seem to be,

I'd encourage you to step back,

play Devil's advocate, and ask if there are

other equally good 'solutions' that provide entirely different answers.

To avoid the pain of cognitive dissonance later,

it's best not to commit to any one solution as THE TRUTH.

C 4.4 Analysis of the Monument Poem

Introduction to Who Wrote Shakespeare

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