No one dares disturb the grave of William Shakespeare. There is, after all, a curse upon those who would violate the bones that lay under the chancel of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon. On that subject Shakespeare made himself perfectly clear:

Despite such a warning, some admirers of Shakespeare during the eighteenth century and continuing into the nineteenth, expressed dissatisfaction with his gravesite at the Church of the Holy Trinity. They also expressed dissatisfaction with his burial location at Stratford, and with his memorial, including the lines of the epitaph on the grave and the bust that hangs on the wall above it. Periodically, that dissatisfaction developed into a proposal to forgo the curse and move Shakespeare to the more ‘fitting’ burial space of Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where he would lie near Chaucer, Spenser, Jonson, and Dryden. For this idea there was a precedent: William Basse expressed the sentiment very early on. In his elegy ‘On the Death of William Shakespeare’ (before 1623), Basse implores Spenser and Chaucer to make room for Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey by volunteering their own bones for removal:

Ben Jonson held the opposite opinion, answering Basse's view in his dedicatory poem to Shakespeare (which was printed in the First Folio of 1623), and arguing that Westminster Abbey's famous dead would overshadow Shakespeare:

For many, it was not enough that Jonson should make such a statement, nor was it enough that Shakespeare's sonnets (especially 18, 55, 71, and 81) appeared to support his apparent assertion that his work should be his best monument. Shakespeare's burial place, its location at Stratford, and the issue of whether Shakespeare's tomb was a fitting monument to his memory, continued to fuel discussion among authors, scholars, and actors.