Holy Trinity is Stratford-upon-Avon's oldest building. There has been a church on this riverside site since Saxon times - the present fabric dates from around 1210, raised over the foundations of an earlier monastic settlement. In the 14th century John de Stratford founded a chantry which was substantially rebuilt between 1465 and 1497 by Dean Thomas Balshall, whose tomb still lies in the chancel he built. The original wooden spire was replaced in 1763 by William Hiorne; the present stone spire reads from the river path as a single sharp note above the lime canopy. The church became collegiate, then parish, served by an obelisk-marked roll of organists going back to the 1840s. It remains an active parish church, serving about 17,000 people. The Royal Shakespeare Company has performed inside it - most notably Henry VIII in 2006 - but for most of the week it is the village church it has always been.

Shakespeare was eligible to be buried inside the chancel - the most sacred section of any Anglican church - because he had bought, in 1605, a share of the parish tithes. This made him, in the language of the time, a lay rector. The arrangement was an investment as much as a status; the tithes paid him an income. It also gave him a burial right inside the chancel where ordinary parishioners could not go. He lies just inside the altar rail, in front of the high altar, in the floor itself. Anne Hathaway, his wife, is buried next to him. Their eldest daughter Susanna lies beside her mother. The placement is unusually intimate: four generations of immediate family, all within touching distance of each other in stone.

Across the slab over Shakespeare's grave is carved an inscription that, oddly, never mentions him by name. It reads: 'Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare, To dig the dust enclosed here. Bleste be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones.' Tradition holds that Shakespeare wrote it himself. The lines are bad doggerel and uncertainly attributed, but their effect has been remarkable. The 17th and 18th centuries were enthusiastic about exhuming famous Britons and re-interring them in Westminster Abbey, where they could be conveniently visited and properly commemorated. Several requests were made for Shakespeare. None succeeded. Even in 2008, when church restoration work disturbed neighbouring graves, the slab was left untouched. A 2016 ground-penetrating radar survey, conducted very respectfully, suggested that his skull may have been removed at some point, but his bones have otherwise lain undisturbed for 410 years. The curse, on the evidence, has worked.

Above the grave, set into the north wall of the chancel, is the painted limestone bust that constitutes one of only two contemporary likenesses of Shakespeare - the other being the engraving in the 1623 First Folio. The monument was carved before 1623, probably by the Anglo-Flemish sculptor Gheerart Janssen, whose workshop was near the Globe in Southwark and who may have known the man. Shakespeare is shown holding a quill in his right hand and a piece of paper in his left, his cheeks pink, his head bald above a high forehead, his moustache neat. The bust has been repainted several times. The first recorded renovation, in 1746, was funded by the proceeds of a production of Othello - the earliest documented Shakespeare performance in Stratford-upon-Avon. The audience that paid for that paint job were watching one of his plays in order to save his face.

Shakespeare signed his Last Will and Testament on 25 March 1616 in what witnesses described as a 'shaky hand'. The day after he signed it, his son-in-law Thomas Quiney was hauled before the church court and convicted of fathering an illegitimate child by a woman called Margaret Wheler, whose own infant had recently died in childbirth along with its mother. It was a domestic disaster, publicly aired, in the family of a man who was visibly unwell. Within a month William Shakespeare was dead. His funeral and burial took place at Holy Trinity on 25 April 1616. Anne survived him by seven years. The Latin inscription on her grave, possibly written by their son-in-law John Hall, asks Christ to come quickly, so that her body 'though shut within this tomb may rise again and reach the stars'. It is, in its way, a more affecting epitaph than the one on her husband's stone.