Shakespeare's will

• 1. Introduction

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  Shakespeare's will was signed on the 25th of March 1616, just under a month before William Shakespeare died. It is a document that scholars have pored over for centuries, not for what it says about his plays, but for what it might reveal about the man himself. Who was he fond of? Who did he distrust? And what did it mean that he left his wife a bed, the second-best one at that? Those questions have never fully been answered. The will was first drawn up in January 1616, after Shakespeare called his lawyer, Francis Collins, to begin drafting it. But before he could sign it, events intervened. A scandal touched his family. His daughter Judith had just married a man named Thomas Quiney, and that man had a secret. The alterations Shakespeare then made to the document, written in a shaky hand on lines that waver up and down, would become the most discussed revisions in literary history. The will points toward a Shakespeare no play can quite show: a father, a husband, a man with debts and grievances and loyalties, arranging the world he was about to leave behind.

• 2. The Quiney Scandal

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  Thomas Quiney had married Judith Shakespeare on the 10th of February 1616, just weeks before the will was signed. Shortly after the wedding, it emerged that Quiney had made another woman pregnant. Her name was Margaret Wheeler. In mid-March, Margaret Wheeler died in childbirth, and her baby died with her. Both were buried on the 15th of March, only ten days before Shakespeare put his signature to the will. The timing left its mark on the document in the most direct way. In the original draft, there had been a provision directed toward "my sonne in Law", meaning Quiney. That phrase was struck out and Judith's name was written in its place. Shakespeare restructured Judith's bequest so that the money he left her was explicitly withheld from Quiney unless he settled on her lands of equal value. The entail over the bulk of the estate, which passed through Susanna Hall and her male heirs through a long chain of descending preference, placed Quiney at the very end of that chain. Scholars have generally read these changes as a sign that Shakespeare no longer trusted the man his younger daughter had married.

• 3. What Judith Received

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  Judith's share of the estate was laid out in careful, conditional terms. She received one hundred pounds described as being "in discharge of her marriage porcion". A further fifty pounds was tied to her relinquishing the Chapel Lane cottage. Then, if she or any of her children were still alive three years after the date of the will, she would receive another one hundred and fifty pounds, though she was to receive only the interest on that sum and not the principal. Added to these financial provisions was a single personal object: "my broad silver gilt bole", a broad silver-gilt bowl. The conditions around her money suggest that Shakespeare was trying to protect Judith from her husband rather than from herself. The interest-only arrangement and the clause blocking Quiney from receiving the funds without compensating Judith with land of equal worth point to a father doing what he could within the law to insulate a daughter from a man he no longer trusted. Whether Judith herself understood the will that way is not recorded.

• 4. The Second-Best Bed

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  The most debated line in the will reads: "Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture". It is an interlinear addition, written between existing lines in such a trembling hand and on a line that moves so unevenly across the page that it took scholars a full century to decipher what it actually said. It may have been the very last thing written into the document before the signatures were applied. Shakespeare's wife was Anne. She received no other explicit bequest in the will. The rest of his goods, chattels, leases, plate, jewels, and household stuff passed to Susanna Hall and her husband John. The phrase has generated speculation ever since. Some have read it as a slight, a mark of coldness toward a wife he had largely left in Stratford while he worked in London. Others have proposed that the second-best bed was the matrimonial bed, the one the couple actually shared, making it a sentimental rather than a dismissive gift. Germaine Greer has argued that the bulk of the estate going to Susanna reflected agreements made at the time of Susanna's marriage to Dr Hall, not any coldness toward Anne. Anne's eventual support by her children has also been put forward as an explanation for why the will does not provide for her more directly.

• 5. The Globe Theatre Friends

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  John Heminges, Henry Condell, and Richard Burbage were three men Shakespeare had worked alongside for years. All three were actors, founding shareholders in the Globe Theatre, and colleagues in the London theatre world. Each of them had a son named William. In the will, Shakespeare left each man twenty-six shillings and eightpence to buy mourning rings. Stanley Wells and others have wondered whether that bequest was something more than a token of friendship. Shakespeare would have known that Ben Jonson had been working for four years on a collected edition of Jonson's own plays. The bequest to his three colleagues has been read by some as an implicit encouragement to do the same for his work. Burbage died in 1619 and so never lived to see it. But within six years of the signing of the will, the First Folio was in print, with Heminges and Condell serving as its editors. Whether the mourning rings carried that instruction or whether the Folio came about for other reasons entirely, the connection has fascinated scholars ever since.

• 6. Susanna and the Estate

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  The bulk of Shakespeare's estate passed to his daughter Susanna Hall. That estate included New Place, his main house in Stratford; two houses on Henley Street; and various lands in and around the town. Shakespeare set up an entail specifying exactly who would inherit in what order if Susanna died without male heirs. The list ran through Susanna's first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh sons before reaching her firstborn daughter Elizabeth, then Judith and her male heirs, and finally whatever heirs the law would recognise by default. The elaborateness of that chain has struck scholars as deliberate. The most common reading is that Shakespeare was ensuring Thomas Quiney would never get his hands on the inheritance, by routing it through so many other claimants first. A minority view holds that it simply reflects how strongly Shakespeare favoured Susanna as a child. Whatever the motive, Susanna and John Hall moved into New Place after Shakespeare's death, and Hall had already been working alongside Shakespeare in business ventures before the will was signed.

• 7. Religious and Personal Clues

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  The preamble to the will is written in the conventional form standard for the period, commending Shakespeare's soul to God and his body to the earth. But one phrase has attracted particular attention from religious historians. Shakespeare wrote that he hoped to be made "partaker of life everlasting" through "the only merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour". That phrase, making Christ the sole and unique agent of salvation, is identified as explicitly Anglican or Protestant in its formulation. Pre-Reformation Catholic wills typically called on saints and other members of the celestial company to intercede for the soul. Shakespeare's preamble does not. Scholars have used this to argue against the theory that Shakespeare held Catholic sympathies, though the conventional nature of the preamble means it cannot be treated as a definitive personal statement. The will as a whole also lists friends and business associates in both Stratford and London, including theatre colleagues, offering a partial map of the relationships Shakespeare valued in the final years of his life.