General Discussion

Key findings:

The GPR survey found that William Shakespeare, his wife Anne Hathaway and other members of the family whose ledger (grave) stones lie beside his, were not buried in a large family vault deep underground, as has long been thought, but in shallow graves beneath their tombstones.
Each grave is shallow in depth, less than 3 feet, and there is no evidence of coffins.
There is evidence of a mysterious and significant repair to the head end of William Shakespeare’s grave, leading to Kevin Colls’ theory that this localised repair was needed to correct a sinking of the floor possibly caused by a previous disturbance to the grave.
Kevin Colls believes these findings give new credence to a story published in The Argosy magazine in 1879, hitherto dismissed as fiction, which claimed that Shakespeare’s skull was stolen from his shallow grave by trophy hunters in 1794.
William Shakespeare’s grave was found to be significantly longer than his short stone – extending west towards the head end, making it the same size as, and in line with, the other family graves. (Anne’s grave is also longer than her stone suggests.

https://blogs.staffs.ac.uk/archaeology/projects/secret-history-shakespeares-tomb/