Will's Last Testament by Mary Hoffman

When I heard that Shakespeare's will was going to be on display in Stratford-upon-Avon - less than an hour's drive from where I live - I felt I had to go and see it. Containing three of Shakespeare's known signatures (of which more below) and the bequest to his wife of his "second-best bed," this must surely be one of the most famous last testaments in the literary world.

It is normally housed in the National Archives, where fascinating restoration work has been undertaken, but was on display earlier this year in London and now, briefly, in a special exhibition yards away from where the poet is believed to have been born, at the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford.

This is what one page of the will looked like before restoration:

New research at the National archives has established that page two remains from an earlier draft and that pages one and three are the ones drafted in January and amended and dated March 25th 1616, about a month before Shakespeare's death.

Just to recap and remind readers, in 1613 Shakespeare bought the Blackfriars Gatehouse in London and by 1616 was a substantial man of property. At the time of his death, he was living in New Place, bought in 1597 (around the time he was writing Henry lV, part two) and moved into in 1610 (when perhaps Cymbeline was written).

The plot sits on the corner of Chapel Street and Church Street:

At the time he bought it, it was the second-largest house in town and had been built about a hundred years earlier by Hugh Clopton. It had two gardens and two orchards and was also known locally as The Great House. Here is a sketch of it made in the 18th century, with the front door opening on to Chapel Street:

In his will, Shakespeare left this and other property to his first child, Susanna, who married Dr John Hall, eight years older than her, in 1607. Their only child, Elizabeth Hall, married Thomas Nash, whose house was next to her grandfather's property:

That house still stand but, alas, New Place does not. Although Elizabeth Hall inherited New Place, by that time her first husband was dead and she had re-married and never lived there. In the 18th century it belonged to an irascible-sounding vicar, The Reverend Francis Gastrell, who was so incensed by sightseers and Bardolaters trespassing in his gardens that he first cut down the mulberry tree Shakespeare was believed to have planted and finally, in 1759, demolished the house itself!

Back to Will's will. Susanna wasn't his only child: there were the twins Judith and Hamnet, born in 1585 and probably named after a couple of friends, surnamed Sadler (Hamnet Sadler, a witness, is left money in the will to buy a memorial ring). The Sadlers might have been the twins' Godparents and if so, must have shared in the parents' grief when eleven-year-old Hamnet died in 1586, the year before the purchase of New Place.

But Judith survived and married Thomas Quiney not long before her father's death. It was discovered that Quiney had made another woman pregnant, which perhaps made him a less favoured son-in-law than reliable John Hall. At any rate, Judith's bequest was £300, the second half dependent on her husband settling on her land of the same value.

The will was drawn up by Francis Collins, a local lawyer, and uses typical legal language of the time. (Collins was left £13.6s.8d). Shakespeare left his sword to Thomas Combe and money to other male friends to buy rings, including Hemynges and Condell, who published the First Folio of the plays in 1623, and Richard Burbage, who bodied forth so many of poet's great characters.

The will is signed on every page. Here are the three signatures in order:

I am no handwriting expert and it may be fanciful to detect a wobble in the writing and a firmer effort for the final, legitimising autograph. Not that I could see it so clearly on the actual exhibited will. They are spelled respectively William Shakspere, Willm Shakspere and William Shakspeare, none of the versions the one we use today. But the standard version is how his signature was printed in editions of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece in his lifetime.

I've been a regular visitor to Stratford since we moved here fifteen years ago but this was only the second time when we were not there to see a play. So we decided to see some of the other sites and went to the Birthplace Trust.

Creative Commons

I had been rather snooty in advance about the so-called birthplace, expecting a Disneyfied sort of Ye Olde Englishe approximation.  But I was pleasantly surprised. Although only "probably" where Shakespeare was born, in the house owned by John Shakespeare, alderman and glover, it looks convincing enough:

The Birthplace as seen from the garden

The entrance is actually through the cottage of Joan Hart, Shakespeare's sister, whose will allows her to remain in that house at a nominal rent, during her lifetime.

On the ground floor of the house, with a window on to Henley Street, is the workshop where John Shakespeare made his gloves. Upstairs, there is a bedroom where all eight Shakespeare children, four boys and four girls, are supposed to have been born. William was the third child and first son. Both his older sisters died before his birth in 1564.

The Birthplace Trust has a very good bookshop, where I was pleased to find Shakespeare's Ghost. I knew they liked it and were going to stock it but it was still good to see it there.

Nash's House, next to New Place, also contains a bookshop and will house an exhibition but sadly New Place was still behind builders' hoardings. It should have opened on 1st July but torrential rain has held up the work. We'll just have to go back again as tourists rather than playgoers.

Signatures: Creative Commons
Will: The National Archives
All other photos the author's own

THE STARS' TENNIS BALLS by Ann Swinfen

We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and bandied
Which way please them.
            John Webster (1580?-1625?), The Duchess of Malfi, IV.iv.52 

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
            William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar, I.ii.134

It seems appropriate on this astronomically important day, which sees the spring equinox and an eclipse of the sun, to take a brief look at the relationship between celestial bodies and humankind. 

The two quotations above from near contemporary Renaissance dramatists reflect two diametrically opposed views: is our fate determined at our birth by certain conjunctions of the stars, or is our fate in our own hands? It is the age-old dispute between predestination and freewill, which has torn mankind apart in violent religious disputes. If it is less bitter nowadays, it is perhaps because we live in a largely secular society. 

When for thousands of years humans lived in a world free of light pollution, it is little wonder that they looked up at a night sky peopled by a changeable moon and wheeling stars and believed that their own lives must be inextricably linked to these distant and unknowable bodies. Early peoples developed extensive astronomical knowledge, as demonstrated by their monuments like Stonehenge:

and Maes Howe:

Tales of the gods living amongst the celestial bodies must have existed long before writing and are firmly embedded in the traditions of all early nations. The Greeks saw and named images in the patterns of the stars which we still recognise today in the symbols of the Zodiac.

The wise men, coming from the east, were led to the birthplace of Jesus by a wandering star, which may have been a comet.

Comets, even more than fixed stars, evoked wonder by their seeming visitations from some incomprehensible Elsewhere and by their mysterious transit of the heavens. Surely they must foretell some joyous event or – more likely – disaster. The Norman invasion of England:

Even more terrifying is an eclipse of the sun, when (depending on your religion) the sun is gobbled up and spat out by some monster, or the hand of God blots out the sun as a warning to mankind of His power and mankind’s helplessness. According to Virgil, there was an eclipse of the sun on the day Julius Caesar was murdered:

If our fate is somehow tied up with the movement and positions of the stars, especially at the moment of our birth, then surely a man skilled in reading the heavens can help us make sense of our lives, warn us of times and places to avoid, inform us of appropriate dates for important ceremonies, even foretell our death. The art of drawing up astrological charts was known to the Romans and persisted right through the Renaissance and beyond, until the development of science in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment cast scorn on such beliefs.

Simon Foreman

 Simon Foreman, apothecary, alchemist, astrologer and serial rapist was a contemporary of our dramatists Shakespeare and Webster. He made a very comfortable living out of the preparation of astrological charts for his clients, who came from every walk of life. (At any rate, those who could afford his fees.) 

John Dee

Another contemporary, Dr John Dee, mathematician, mystic, book collector, alchemist, astrologer, and amanuensis to angels, cast charts for the greatest in the land. Queen Elizabeth I chose the most auspicious date for her coronation based on his advice, and she was a woman of immense intelligence and learning. It was not merely the ignorant and gullible who believed in the influence of the stars.

Today, of course, we know better. Or do we? Why, then, do magazines and newspapers persist in publishing predictions based, it is claimed, on reading the stars? And it seems that the ancient debate about predestination versus freewill must continue for ever.

 By the way, I’m a Libra, so that must mean that I am a rational, well-balanced person, mustn’t it?

Ann Swinfenhttp://www.annswinfen.com

The Hollow Crown by Mary Hoffman

I want to talk about Shakespeare as a writer of historical fiction. If you saw the remarkable BBC2 mini-series The Hollow Crown (Richard the Second, Henry the Fourth, Parts 1 and 2 and Henry the Fifth) in July, you might be more or less aware of how he took historical facts and bent them into the shape required for his drama.

For example, Henry Percy (Hotspur) and Prince Hal were not contemporaries. Percy was born in 1364 or 1366, the man who would be Henry V in 1386. It was his father, Henry lV (born 1367), who was more nearly Hotspur's contemporary. But it makes a much better story to have the old king of the middle two plays in this history cycle - the second Shakespeare wrote although the events date from earlier than in the first tetralogy - worrying about how different his scapegrace son is from the fiery warrior of the north.

Many other characters are changed or combined from their historical equivalents and I certainly don't expect anyone, not even Shakespeare, to be as interested in the Plantagenets as I am. Suffice it to say that when Edward, Duke of York, says in Henry the Sixth, that "Edward the Third had eight sons," he - and Shakespeare - is simplifying!

But there is a book that will sort you out beautifully and it is by John Julius Norwich. I can't recommend Shakespeare's Kings (1999) too highly; he takes each play (including the doubtful Edward lll) and sets out the historical facts before showing how and what Shakespeare changed.

But back to The Hollow Crown. It was beautifully produced, costumed and acted, yet the first three plays were watched by an audience of only 800, 000 - "we few, we happy few" as one reviewer put it. I can only hope that iPlayer, catch-up TV and foreign rights will eventually boost those numbers considerably. I can remember John Barton's Wars of the Roses on TV and The Hollow Crown was a worthy successor.

Ben Whishaw played Richard the Second as a cross between Michael Jackson (complete with pet monkey) and Jesus Christ. That was fine by me but the addition of Saint Sebastian into the mix diluted the Christ-symbolism.

And here the director decided to add a bit of historical fiction of his own. Rupert Goold, to satisfy his own vision of the piece, took a step too far. In the play the deposed Richard is killed by Sir Pierce (pun intended?) of Exton, a character apparently invented by Shakespeare. The likely version is that the king was starved to death in his captivity in Pontefract Castle (or The Tower of London, if you are Rupert Goold).

This invention probably made the director think he had carte blanche to reinterpret the murder any way he wanted. But to give the deed to Aumerle was crass in the extreme. And having it done by crossbow was just so that he could underline the homo-erotic Saint Sebastian imagery he had spuriously introduced.

Aumerle (or Aumale) was the second Duke of York and cousin to both Richard the Second and Henry the Fourth. His closeness to Richard made him a conspirator against the new king but he repented. Nevertheless, it is absurd to think he would have chosen to show his loyalty by assassinating the deposed one.

At least, I think so! Which means I can accept some tampering with historical facts but not others. I suspect we all have our limits.

In the second play, Henry the Fourth had transmuted from Rory Kinnear to Jeremy Irons, a magnificently hollow-cheeked monarch, already racked both with the illness that would kill him and by guilt over the deposition and death of his cousin.

Prince Hal, later Henry the Fifth, was played by Tom Hiddleston, who is surely in line for a BAFTA.

And the two middle plays were groaning with well-known faces: Julie Waters as Mistress Quickly, Maxine Peake as Doll Tearsheet, Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff.

It was a masterly performance of Falstaff, but I was surprised to see comments on Facebook about his being "an unpleasant character"! Of course he was - that was part of Shakespeare's point. Too many people misunderstand him as just a fat, jolly Lord of Misrule and forget that he corruptly accepts payment to let recruits off the muster for the wars, steals money from supposed old friends and consistently bad-mouths his supposed young friend Hal.

And yet, and yet. Doll cares for him and Mistress Quickly's account of his death in Henry V is always truly moving. And I have never found the rejection scene in Henry lV Part Two as painful as it was  played by Russell Beale and Hiddleston.

There was so much too admire in these productions that the odd blemishes diminish to quibbles. I wish they hadn't cut the bits in Richard the Second that explain why Bolingbroke and Mowbray were fighting at the beginning and why the king banished them both.

But there was one omission by Thea Sharrock, the director of Henry V, that was extraordinary. Henry's order to kill the French prisoners leaves a very unpleasant taste (see John Sutherland's essay "Was Henry the Fifth a War Criminal?"). But to leave out the French murder of the boys who were pages and squires to the English army at Agincourt!

"Kill the poys and the luggage!" says the Welsh captain, Llewellyn and I shall never forget how Jonathan Slinger delivered it in the RSC History Cycle at Stratford. Sharrock seems to have cut it just in order to have the Boy (perhaps the same as Falstaff's Boy) grow up to be John Hurt, the Prologue.

What did you all think? Did the directors tamper too much with Shakespeare? Did Shakespeare tamper too much with Plantagenet history? Was Henry the Fifth a war criminal? Am I too picky? Do you have a crush on Tom Hiddleston? All answers welcome.