The contraction of his world helps perhaps to explain how quietly he passed from it. His burial on April 25, 1616, is noted in the Stratford register, but there are no contemporary accounts of his last hours. He was not at all slighted: he was buried, as befitted such an important person, in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church, and already by the 1630s, the painted funerary monument, familiar to innumerable tourists to Stratford, had been erected. But no one at the time thought to record the details of his illness or his passing, or at least no documents doing so have survived.
