The Shakespeare Will Project

The desire to understand Shakespeare and to somehow touch his mind remains as strong or is perhaps stronger than ever. A multitude of scholars have tried for many years to separate the fact from the fiction and the man from the myth and the one document that has aroused great interest has been his last will and testament. It is one of the few items that can connect us to him and contains evidence of the thoughts that preoccupied him in the weeks leading up to his death. It also contains his final three signatures. (There are only six signatures in existence and half of them are on his will.) "Surprise has been felt that the will contains no mention of books or manuscripts. There was no reason why it should, unless the testator wished to make a special bequest of such articles. A will is a legal instrument for devising property, and not a literary autobiography. Books and manuscripts may have appeared in the lost inventory*. In any case, they would pass to John and Susanna Hall under the residuary bequest of ‘goods’. In fact Hall, by his will of 1635, left his ‘study of bookes’ and his manuscripts to Thomas Nash, and under Nash’s will of 1642 any that remained probably passed to his wife as his residuary legatee. Whether books belonging to Shakespeare were among them, and whether he kept any manuscripts of his plays, or handed them all to the King’s men, we do not know!" * The inventory exhibited at probate has not been found Pg.170 from A Short Life of Shakespeare with the Sources abridged by Charles Williams from Sir Edmund Chambers’s William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. Published by the Oxford University Press London in 1933 and reprinted in 1946,1950,1956,1963. The Shakespeare project (as I call it) was born really more by accident than design. We've had an interest in wills and history for quite some time; and I'm also a bit of a movie buff. When the movie Shakespeare in Love was premiered in London in 1998 I fell in love with it. I was especially taken by the scene in which the young William Shakespeare practiced and re-practiced the writing of his signature. There had been a lot of publicity about Shakespeare at this time, and amongst other things, we learned that there were only six of his signatures in existence and that half of these were on his will! 'On-the-spur' we decided to do some research of our own and went to the British National Archives (where we had discovered that the will was kept) to ask them if we could possibly see it. Fully expecting to be refused, we also asked if we could reproduce some copies of the will from their master transparency. To our surprise they said yes to both questions and issued us a license to print a limited number of copies. Later, when the thrill of what our luck had achieved began to dawn we realised that to have our license was one thing, to do something with it was a completely different issue. We knew absolutely nothing about printing or publishing, very little about marketing and the internet was, and still is, a total mystery. However, we did know that if our copies of Shakespeare's will were to become a product, then we wanted it to be a satisfyingly 'full' and good value-for-money one. We decided that the will should have a companion booklet. We were also (fairly) unanimous in the decision that the front cover of our booklet would feature the Droushout engraving. It's how I've always imagined Shakespeare in his middle-life, bold and confident, the Bard of Avon. (Good examples of the illustration, and others, can be found at Mr Bill Kemp's website Shakespeare images). We spent many months of researching information to put into the booklet, during which time we met dozens of interesting and interested people, we had our squabbles and ups and downs with the various packaging dilemmas, but bit by bit, we eventually completed the project. We’re proud of our finished product and have many happy customers. To the memorie of M.W.Shakes-speare. WEE wondred (Shake-speare) that thou went'st so soone From the Worlds-Stage, to the Graves-Tyring-roome. Wee thought thee dead, but this thy printed worth, Tels thy Spectators, that thou went'st but forth To enter with applause. An Actors Art, Can dye, and live, to acte a second part. That's but an Exit of Mortalitie; This, a Re-entrance to a Plaudite. James Mabbe's To the memory of Master William Shakespeare. From the First Folio, 1623