Some form of tribute to William Shakespeare existed in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, by 1623, for Leonard Digges referred to it in his poem for the First Folio, a volume containing "thy Workes", by which "thy name" will "out-live / Thy Tombe": "when that stone is rent, / And time dissolves thy Stratford Moniment, / Here we alive shall view thee still".
The tribute included, or consisted of, a plaque praising Shakespeare in a Latin couplet and six lines of English verse, which were copied by John Weever in
1631. The earliest visual representation of the monument is a sketch made in
1634 by Sir William Dugdale, preparatory to the engraving included in The Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated (1656).
Controversies arise concerning those features of Dugdale's representation which do not square with the monument as we know it. The subject looks elderly, with a gaunt face and a drooping moustache; the columns enclosing the monument are crowned with leopards' heads; and he is shown arms akimbo, resting his hands on a woolsack. As Richard Kennedy has argued, the woolsack suggests that the original monument was erected to John Shakespeare (1530-1601), father of the poet, who had been "a considerable dealer in wool". Shakespeare senior also held various civic offices between 1557 and 1571 (Alderman, Mayor, JP), before falling on hard times. Following his son's acquisition of a coat of arms in
1596, he regained his place on the borough council. Kennedy also showed that the leopards' heads were far from "irrelevant"', as E. K. Chambers judged, since they are found in Stratford's coat of arms, another detail making this monument more suitable for the father than for the son.
Dugdale recorded that the monument had been sculpted by "one Gerard Johnson", the Anglicized name of Gheerart Janssen, who settled in London in 1557 and became England's leading tomb-maker. His stoneyard was in Southwark, near the Rose Theatre, where he died in 1611. In 1594, Janssen was chosen by Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton, father of Shakespeare's patron, to construct a memorial tomb to his parents.
Sidney Lee claimed that the Stratford monument was sculpted by Janssen's far less prominent son, Garret. However, if we accept that Dugdale was referring to Gheerart Janssen, Shakespeare may have helped arrange the commission of a monument to his father. It is also possible that some admirer(s), near or distant (the plaque mistakes Shakespeare's age at death), celebrated the poet by adding a memorial to an existing family monument, near his grave under the chancel floor, rather than commissioning a new one.
This possibility arouses fierce dispute between the "anti-Stratfordians", who believe that Dugdale sketched a monument commemorating "a sack-holding commodity trader"
unrelated to Shakespeare, and the "anti-anti-Stratfordians", such as Jonathan Bate and Stanley Wells, who indignantly reject their theories.
