In its July-August issue the Yale Alumni Magazine celebrates Shakespeare's will, pun intended, the Center for British Arts having landed it -- the will -- which is on display there from now through mid-September.
It's a good article, and most likely will be of interest to all Exlibrans. It offers a wonderfully-clear photo of the will's page 1, plus very interesting comments about the document from luminaries, such as -- [excerpts:]
* Lawrence Manley: "His younger daughter, Judith, who had long been without a husband, got married in Feburary to a man named Thomas Quiney -- apparently in haste. They married during Lent, and marrying in Lent required a special license, which they didn't get... Quiney, meanwhile, had made another woman pregnant, and both she and the baby died that March. So things were rather a mess..."
* Manley again: "...he's written in, 'to my Fellows' -- the word often used by players for their theatrical colleagues -- 'John Hemynges, Richard Burbage and Henry Cundell, 26 shillings 8 pence apiece to buy them rings.'... Hemings and Condell were the two colleagues who put together the collected edition of Shakespeare's works in 1623, 'to keepe the memory of so worth a Friend, & Fellow aliue.' So his affectionate bequest was reciprocated. For those who try to argue that Shakespeare didn't write the plays of Shakespeare, this is a high hurdle."
* Also Harold Bloom, on the "second best bed": "It is the most debated bequest in literary history... theirs was a shotgun marriage, as all the world knows. Susanna was born six months after the marriage was legally recorded. One can surmise, surely, that it was not a flaming love relationship... But whatever the difficulties had been, if they existed, the two were reconciled by the end of his life: he was living at home with her. And as impish as he could be, it is hard to believe that, in a will, one would include such a palpable irony."
* plus see also Lena Cowen Orlin, on the same subject: "the first will was a great deal simpler, and whatever Shakespeare wanted to say about Anne was originally on the first page... It may be that, with all the concern about Judith [later, during the will's revision], Anne got squeezed off the first page, and the place that they found to reintroduce her was on the third page -- and then [lawyer] Collins neglected to tidy up... A bed might be left to a wife because she brought it into the marriage originally as her property, or a bed might be left to a daughter because it's the one she sleeps in. It's likely that in Shakespeare's family, as in many families, the best bed was reserved for guests..."
Great reading -- fascinating document -- recommmended... also, a trip to New Haven to see the original, if you like "'secretary hand', the crabbed cursive of Tudor and Jacobean England... full of legal formulas whose meanings are now obscure..."
"Last Will: How to read between the lines of the Bard's bequests", in _Yale Alumni Magazine_ (July/August 2006), pages 32-35.
* The full YAM article text, altho sadly no fotos, is online at: http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/current/shakespeare.html
* And the Yale Center for British Art, current exhibitions page is: http://ycba.yale.edu/exhibitions/exhibition_current.asp
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com