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The Argosy Magazine. October 1879. Under the heading, 'How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen', the Reverend Charles Jones-Langston of the Vicarage in Beoley, a village on the outskirts of Redditch in Worcestershire, told a remarkable story.

It all started at Ragley Hall, the Palladian mansion belonging to the Marquess of Hertford which stands above the River Arrow, eight miles to the west of Stratford. In 1794, the Marquess hosted a dinner, during which the conversation turned to an announcement made by Horace Walpole that he would pay three hundred guineas for the skull of Will Shakespeare. Walpole, the famous Gothic novelist and fourth son of the prime minister, was a friend of the Marquess's.

A certain Dr Frank Chambers of Alcester decided to take Walpole up on his offer. Chambers hired three local men, at three pounds apiece, to acquire the skull of Shakespeare. Walpole, however, reneged on his offer, and Chambers was forced to tell his friendly neighbourhood grave robbers to return the skull to wherever they had found it. Sometime later, Chambers bumped into one of them (the Rev C.J. Langston named him as 'Dyer'), who told the doctor that they had been unable to replace the skull in its proper resting place at Holy Trinity. Instead, the skull had been deposited in a 'remote parish', and Dyer gave Chambers a fragment of bone from the skull's forehead, which would allow Chambers to identify the skull if ever he tracked it down.

He never did, but fifty years later the bone fragment came into the hands of 'A Warwickshire Man', in the words of C.J. Langston. A protracted search led this Warwickshire Man to the church of St Leonard in Beoley, near Redditch - Langston's very own parish church. With the help of the verger, the 'Warwickshire Man', who was possibly C.J. Langston himself, discovered a lone skull hidden in a side chapel erected by the Sheldon family. Langston wrote, 'The prominent forehead was marred by a jagged hole and over this I placed the fragment of bone I had brought with me. It fitted exactly - the veritable skull of William Shakespeare was there.'

Langston's sensational article coincided, more or less, with a call to have Shakespeare's grave in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, reopened. A Birmingham-born Shakespeare scholar named Clement Mansfield Ingleby had written a treatise entitled, 'Shakespeare's Bones: The Proposal to Disinter Them, Considered in Relation to their Possible Bearing on his Portraiture'.

Ingleby's proposal was prompted by the discovery, in Germany, of a plaster of Paris death-mask, said to be that of Shakespeare himself. The effigy of the Bard which adorns his funerary monument inside Holy Trinity was supposedly sculpted using this death-mask as a model. Ingleby was arguing that the only way to tell for sure whether of not the Kesselstadt death-mask really was that of Will Shakespeare would be to open his grave and compare his skull with the death-mask.

Although Ingleby's argument was published in London after C.J. Langston's tale of the stolen skull appeared, Langston had written to Ingleby to request a copy of 'Shakespeare's Bones'. His letter is at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, and it contains the tantalising remark: 'further revelations are in progress which will set at rest this much agitated question.' Those further revelations, which, presumably, were those expounded in Langston's article in The Argosy, included the news that the Holy Trinity grave did not need to be opened up because Shakespeare's skull wasn't in it.

Flash forward a century or more. In the 1990s, the German death-mask was subjected to scrutiny by the German equivalent of the British CID. Forensic techniques were used to determine whether or not the death-mask showed the genuine face of Shakespeare. The German scientists compared the plaster of Paris mask with portraits of Shakespeare which had been painted posthumously - the Chandos and Flower portraits. Not only did the forensic scientists identify sufficient similarities between the death-mask and the portraits to conclude that the mask was Shakespeare's, but they also found something else.

All three - the death-mask and the posthumous portraits - showed a swelling around Shakespeare's upper left eyelid. When a German professor, Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel of Mainz university, asked a leading eye specialist - Walter Lerche, of the Horst-Schmidt eye clinic in Wiesbaden - to examine the portraits, he suggested that the visible swelling indicated that Shakespeare might have died of Mikulicz Syndrone, a rare form of eye cancer.

The swelling might have resulted from another cause altogether. It should be remembered that the skull found by C.J. Langston in the Sheldon chapel of St Leonards, Beoley, had a 'jagged hole' in the forehead. Had a sharp blow been directed at Shakespeare's eyelid it might well have caused a 'jagged hole' with a loose fragment of bone in the forehead, as well as leading to the swelling in that area visible on the death-mask and the posthumous portraits of Shakespeare.

One of the most famous of all Shakespeare portraits - Martin Droeshout's engraving for the First Folio of 1623 - might well have been based on the death-mask. There is a clear line down the side of the face and, especially, between the ear and the chin. The head is out of all proportion to the body and it seems to have two right eyes. The left eyelid (the one with the swelling) has been 'replaced' with a copy of the right eyelid. The intention, it would seem, was to disguise the obvious swelling on Shakespeare's left eyelid - the one that can be seen on the death-mask, the Chandos Portrait and the Flower Portrait.

Ben Jonson was pleased to note of this censored engraving:

"O, could he but have drawn his wit
As well in brass as he hath hit
His face, the print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass!"

Note that line - 'as he hath hit his face'. Because one person who seemingly was with Shakespeare when the Bard contracted his fatal illness was a certain Ben Jonson.

The Reverend John Ward, vicar of Holy Trinity in 1662, had garnered the information locally that 'Shakepeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.'

Now, no one wants to imagine Shakespeare effectively drinking himself to death. That, it seems, though, is the gist of Ward's anecdote. Shakespeare partied too hard with his fellow poets - and it was the death of him.

A sharp blow to the eye socket would lead to fever symptoms - haematoma, meningitis. Likely effects of such traumatic damage to the thin bone of the orbital cavity would inclde nausea, vomitting, unconsciousness, coma and death.

It is possible, then, that what killed Shakespeare - the cause of his terminal 'fever' - was a jab to the left eye socket. This yielded the swelling, which shows up on posthumous portraits of Shakespeare (though not on the one approved by Mr Ben Jonson), and would explain the 'jagged hole' in the 'prominent forehead' of the skull found at Beoley.

Chillingly, Shakespeare's death in these circumstances was hardly unique. His contemporary, probable friend and trendsetting mentor, Christopher Marlowe died in pretty well the same way. He had been drinking with friends. He lay down on the bed. Minutes later, a dagger had been thrust into his right eye socket, killing him instantly. The three men who had been present then concocted a rather dodgy sounding cover story (Marlowe attacked Frizer out of the blue, Frizer was forced to defend himself), but the original plan may have been not to kill Marlowe on the spot but rather to inflict a traumatic injury to the eye socket. Marlowe might then have died with as little fuss as Shakespeare later did, and there would have been no need for a coroner's inquest.

What is more, Shakespeare had predicted this very ending for himself. His official farewell to the stage, 'The Tempest', was performed five years before his death. In it, Caliban plots to overthrow his cleverer master, Prospero:

"I'll yield him thee asleep, / Where thou mayst knock a nail into his head."

Prospero, it has long been suggested, was something of a Shakespearean self-portrait, and Caliban, the foul-mouthed monster whom Prospero taught to speak, was almost certainly a less than flattering portrait of Ben Jonson. So, in 'The Tempest', the Ben Jonson figure plans to render the Shakespeare figure sleepy and then 'knock a nail into his head.'

Jonson, of course, had a bit of a track record. He had at least two murders on his conscience - a soldier, whom he had killed in the Netherlands, and an actor named Gabriel Spencer, whom he stabbed in a duel. Spencer had previously disposed of a man named Feeke by thrusting the tip of his scabbarded sword into the poor man's skull, between the eye and its socket. Feeke had 'languished' for three days before dying of his injury. This sounds suspiciously like Shakespeare's dying 'of a fever there contracted', having met up with Ben Jonson for a drink.

There were reasons (if anyone's interested) why Jonson might have silenced Shakespeare in the spring of 1616. It can hardly be a coincidence that Jonson was awarded with a pension that year by the King. But for now, we can conclude that C.J. Langston's story, 'How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen', might have more credibility than was previously suspected. For he was able to identify the skull found at Beoley by means of a loose fragment of bone which fitted 'exactly' over the 'jagged hole' in the forehead.

That injury to Shakespeare's forehead is visible in two posthumous portraits of the Bard and allowed German forensic scientists to identify the Shakespeare death-mask.

The selfsame injury was quite possibly the cause of Shakespeare's death. Stranger still, Shakespeare apparently predicted this.

It would be interesting to know where the skull is now.