William Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, and was buried inside Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. The simple gravestone is inscribed with an epitaph that takes the form of a curse: “Blest be the man that spares these stones, and curst be he that moves my bones.” Seven years after his death, a group of actors and publishers produced the book we now call the First Folio, a collection of his plays. Just as Shakespeare’s tomb offers both a blessing and a curse, Shakespeare’s tome is presented as preserving and perfecting his literary corpus. As Ben Jonson declared in his poetic tribute, “Thou art a monument without a tomb, and art alive still while thy book doth live.”