Whodunnit? The Strange Case of Shakespeare’s Will

William Shakespeare is a mystery. What we know about the facts of his life is outweighed by what we don’t know. His life can be likened metaphorically to a jigsaw puzzle in which most of the pieces are missing. It is no wonder, therefore, that he continues to puzzle historians.

One of the most puzzling pieces of the puzzle is the spiritual will and testament of John Shakespeare, the poet’s father, which was discovered in 1757 and has been the cause of controversy ever since. Most recently, Matthew Steggle has argued in the Shakespeare Quarterly that “John Shakespeare’s ‘Spiritual Testament’ Is Not John Shakespeare’s”. On the contrary, he argues, it was not written and/or signed by Shakespeare’s father but by the poet’s sister, Joan Hart.

Before we consider the evidence that Professor Steggle presents, let’s look at the history of the contested document, in which the signatory, be it the poet’s father or sister, affirms a devout and unequivocal belief in the doctrines of the Catholic faith.

In 1930, the Shakespearean scholar, E.K. Chambers, published William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, in which he affirmed the genuineness of John Shakespeare’s spiritual will in the face of earlier suggestions that it had been a forgery.¹ Four years later, G.B. Harrison, another eminent Elizabethan and Jacobean scholar, best known for his edition of Shakespeare’s works (1952), concluded cautiously that “Shakespeare’s family was apparently Catholic” and that, therefore, “it follows that Shakespeare was brought up in the old faith”.² Then, in 1946, John Henry de Groot, in his work of groundbreaking scholarship, The Shakespeares and “The Old Faith”, asserted that the spiritual will “offers strong evidence that John Shakespeare was a Catholic throughout his life, and that his household was infused with the spirit of the old Faith”.³

The spiritual will was discovered in 1757, as we have said, during renovation of the house in which Shakespeare had been born almost two hundred years earlier. During the retiling of the roof, the builder, Joseph Mosely, noticed a small, handwritten booklet wedged between the tiling and the rafters. Mosely kept the curious document for many years but eventually, on June 8, 1784, he passed it to Edmond Malone, the most prominent Shakespearian scholar of the time. “I have taken some pains to ascertain the authenticity of this manuscript,” wrote Malone, “and after a very careful inquiry am perfectly satisfied that it is genuine.”⁴ He continues:

The writer, John Shakespeare, calls it his Will; but it is rather a declaration of his faith and pious resolutions … It is proper to observe that the finder of this relique bore the character of a very honest, sober, and industrious man, and that he neither asked nor received any price for it; and I may also add that its contents are such as no one could have thought of inventing with a view to literary imposition.⁵

As for the spiritual will itself, it demonstrates John Shakespeare’s Catholic bona fides and itemizes his earnest desire to die a Catholic, in good faith and conscience. Item IV is particularly striking for its enunciation of his desire that he should receive the last rites of the Church, and his hope that the desire for the last rites should suffice should there be no priest to administer the sacrament at his moment of death. In the time of persecution in which John Shakespeare was living it was a crime, punishable by death, to harbour a priest in one’s home. It was, therefore, very possible that no priest would be available for the Catholic in extremis. It is in the spirit of this gloom of persecution, with the cloud of unknowing looming overhead, that John Shakespeare’s defiant desire for the last rites should be read:

I John Shakspear do protest that I will also pass out of this life, armed with the last sacrament of extreme unction: the which if through any let or hindrance I should not then be able to have, I do now also for that time demand and crave the same; beseeching his divine majesty that he will be pleased to anoint my senses both internal and external with the sacred oil of his infinite mercy, and to pardon me all my sins committed by seeing, speaking, feeling, smelling, hearing, touching, or by any other way whatsoever.

Item IX of the spiritual will renders “infinite thanks” to God for all the benefits he has received including “Vocation to the holy knowledge of him and his true Catholic faith”, and Item X invokes the Communion of Saints with the Blessed Virgin named as the “chief Executress” of the will.

The mystery surrounding John Shakespeare’s spiritual will deepened in 1923, when Herbert Thurston, S.J., found, in the British Museum, a Spanish version of a spiritual testament which corresponded, phrase for phrase, from the middle of Item III to the end, with the spiritual will of John Shakespeare. Printed in Mexico City in 1661 it was entitled “The Testament or Last Will of the Soul” and was ascribed to St. Charles Borromeo. Father Thurston subsequently discovered another Spanish version of the “Testament”, dating before 1690, and a version in the Romansch dialect that had been printed in Switzerland in 1741, both of which also ascribe authorship to St. Charles Borromeo, the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan who died in 1584.

How does this trail of manuscripts, stretching across two centuries and three thousand miles, connect with Shakespeare’s father? It has been suggested by several scholars that the connection is St. Charles Borromeo himself, via the Jesuit missionaries to England, Edmund Campion and Robert Persons.

If St. Charles Borromeo was the original author of the document, as ascribed to him by the printed editions of it discovered by Father Thurston, it seems reasonable to assume that it would have been written between 1576 and 1578 when the plague struck Milan, killing an estimated 17,000 people. In such circumstances it would have been impossible for priests to hear the confessions and give the last rites to all the dying. The “Testament” would, therefore, have been written as a “spiritual insurance policy”, asserting the person’s desire for the sacrament of extreme unction, and serving as a “confession of desire” in the absence of a priest. The saintly Shepherd, Charles Borromeo, would be supplying his sickly sheep with a standard formula by which they could prepare themselves for a holy death in difficult circumstances.

Although the reason that the penitent soul might die in the absence of a priest was very different in the plague years in Milan than in the penal times in England, the need for the “Testament” was the same in both places. It would seem reasonable to assume, therefore, that the Jesuits brought copies of the “Testament” with them when they arrived in England in 1580. It is known that Edmund Campion and Robert Persons stayed with Charles Borromeo on their way to England from Rome, remaining with him for eight days in May 1580.⁶ Other priests from the English College in Rome also stayed in Milan with Charles Borromeo en route to England, and we know specifically that he entertained another group of England-bound priests in September 1580, only four months after Campion and Persons had stayed with him.⁷

Let’s now return to Professor Steggle’s claim that the spiritual testament was not John Shakespeare’s. His argument is based on other printed texts of the spiritual testaments, which are ascribed to other authors or editors, i.e. not to St. Charles Borromeo, and which are all later than Charles Borromeo’s time. Since the editions that ascribe authorship to Borromeo are later than these editions, Professor Steggle argues that Borromeo’s alleged authorship was a later pious fabrication by those who venerated him as a saint.  The earliest printed editions that have been discovered date from 1613 and 1622 and are ascribed to two different authors or editors. Since John Shakespeare died in 1601, he could not have seen or signed a document which did not yet exist. It is on this seemingly solid evidence that Professor Steggle rests his case. Since John Shakespeare can’t be the signatory of the testament, and since it is clearly not a forgery, he concludes that it is Joan Hart, John Shakespeare’s daughter and the poet’s sister, whose name is on the document, she having reverted to the use of her maiden name following her husband’s death. It is, therefore, not John’s spiritual will and testament but Joan’s and it was she, presumably, who had hidden it in the rafters of the house.

The problem is that Professor Steggle bases his evidence on a logical fallacy. He assumes that the earliest discovered text is the original text. He assumes that any pieces of the jigsaw puzzle which we do not possess ipso facto do not exist. It goes without saying that we cannot assume that they exist, nor should we base anything but speculative arguments on their supposed existence, but we cannot state categorically that what has not been discovered does not exist. In point of fact, however, there is evidence of the existence of the text of the spiritual will and testament which dates back not merely to Charles Borromeo’s time but is listed amongst his very possessions. Buried in the footnotes of Professor Steggle’s paper is the following:

A manuscript entitled “Ultima volonta dell’anima fatta in forma di testamento,” with blanks which have been filled in, in a different hand, with the name “Carolus,” and annotated in a different hand “20 dec 1560,” is found bound in with a Book of Hours which belonged to Charles Borromeo during his time as Archbishop of Milan (1564–84).

Wait a minute. Let’s pause to catch our breath. Having asserted that the spiritual testament had not been written until after Charles Borromeo’s and John Shakespeare’s respective deaths, Professor Steggle confesses in a footnote that a manuscript bearing a remarkably similar title to the spiritual last will and testament of John Shakespeare was listed amongst Charles Borromeo’s possessions, with Charles Borromeo apparently appending his own name in the same blank spaces in which we find John Shakespeare’s name in the remarkably similar sounding document. And it is dated “December 1560” and bound in Charles Borromeo’s personal copy of the Book of Hours. How does this not demolish the whole of Professor Steggle’s case? It should be conceded that Professor Steggle declares that he would argue that “the date, and the implication that it is Borromeo’s personal copy, are both spurious” but he doesn’t argue it, in the sense that he offers no argument.

Playing devil’s advocate and assuming, for the sake of an argument that’s not been made, that the dating of the earlier “spiritual testament” and its ownership by St. Charles Borromeo are indeed “spurious” and of doubtful authenticity, it is also intriguing that Professor Steggle refrains from mentioning another reference to a “testament”, dating from 1581 and linking the “testament” to the Jesuit mission to England. In a letter from William Allen, the rector of the English College in Rheims, to Father Alphonsus Agazzari, rector of the English College in Rome, on June 23, 1581, Allen wrote that “Father Robert [Persons] wants three or four thousand or more of the Testaments, for many persons desire to have them.…”⁸

It has been suggested that the “Testaments” requested by Father Persons were copies of the New Testament in the Rheims translation. This is not possible. First, the translation of the Vulgate New Testament into English would not be completed until March of the following year, and would not, presumably, have been published until a month or two later. The title page reads: “printed at Rhemes by John Fogny, 1582”. Second, “three or four thousand or more” of such a costly and bulky volume would have created a major logistical problem for the Jesuit mission. How would one smuggle thousands of copies of an expensive 800-page quarto volume past the wary port officers at the English ports? And, assuming that one managed to smuggle the shipment into England, how would one transport such a bulky cargo around the country? In the very same letter in which Allen wrote of Persons’ desire for the “Testaments”, he reported that “the persecution still rages with the same fury, the Catholics being haled away to prison and otherwise vexed, and the Fathers of the Society being most diligently looked for”. Is it likely that fugitive priests, traveling incognito from one secret Catholic household to another, would be able to transport such a heavy cargo with them? Surely it is much more likely that the “Testaments” being requested were the “Borromeo Testaments” which, when printed, would be a booklet of not more than six pages. Irrespective of whether St. Charles Borromeo was the actual author of the testament, it seems inescapable that the testament that John Shakespeare signed was indeed a version of the text brought over by the first Jesuit missionaries in 1580 and 1581.

William Allen’s letter may also explain why John Shakespeare’s spiritual will is handwritten and not printed. It is clear from Father Allen’s letter that Father Persons had exhausted his original supplies of the printed version, hence the desire for several thousand more, and it is equally clear that demand was outstripping supply, “for many persons desire to have them”. It seems reasonable to assume that John Shakespeare was one of these “many persons” and that he had signed a hand-copied version in the absence of supplies of the printed originals.

The evidence that John Shakespeare was a defiant Catholic, in the midst of widespread anti-Catholic persecution by the Elizabethan state, is strengthened by the fact that he would be fined for being a Catholic recusant in 1592. In the presence of such evidence, honest scholars should be exploring the importance of William Shakespeare’s Catholic upbringing to his life and exploring the ways that this informed his work.

The trouble is that honest scholarship is in short supply in these meretricious times. This is not to impugn Professor Steggle’s honesty nor his scholarship. His presentation of much of the historical background is praiseworthy and his incisive presentation of the evidence for the authenticity of the Shakespeare testament is exemplary. What is not so praiseworthy is the farcical virtue signaling with which he chooses to conclude his argument. We will let it speak for itself:

 [A]t the risk of making an obvious point, there is a strikingly gendered element to the story I have told here. Despite being the sister of the most famous writer in Western history, Joan Shakespeare Hart is almost  unknown; she is truly the “Shakespeare’s sister” of Virginia Woolf ’s famous essay of 1925, a figure so trapped by gender conventions that it seems there is no chance of finding anything she wrote or created. And yet perhaps there is a profoundly personal statement of her religious faith that had already been in the public domain for over a hundred years at the point that Woolf wrote her essay. If the current essay is correct in its assertion, then it is ironic, and sadly appropriate for Woolf ’s thesis, that Joan’s spiritual testament has for all these years been wrongly assigned to her father.

If Professor Steggle is correct in his assertion, which he isn’t, he has only shown that Shakespeare’s sister was as devoutly and defiantly Catholic as her father and her niece Susanna (William’s daughter), both of whom were fined for their Catholic recusancy. One suspects that Virginia Woolf would not be amused. One suspects, in fact, that she would react in the same primly puritanical way in which she had responded to news that T. S. Eliot had become a Catholic. “I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot,” she wrote to a friend on February 11, 1928, “who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem to be more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.”9

Although in prim Victorian fashion, Virginia Woolf would not be amused, the rest of us can at least find amusement and a reason to smile, and perhaps even an opportunity to laugh, at the way in which modern scholarship ends in such engendered farce. It’s the triumph of bathos. A corpse would seem more credible…. We might even succumb to letting Eliot have the last word, or the last laugh, at the expense of today’s hollow men:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

(Editor’s note: This essay was published originally at The Imaginative Conservative and appears here with kind permission.)

Endnotes:

¹ The evidence for the genuine nature of the spiritual will is utterly convincing but a full examination of all the facts is beyond the scope of this essay. Those wishing to pursue the matter further are referred to John Henry de Groot’s masterful treatment of the whole issue in his scholarly magnum opus, The Shakespeares and “The Old Faith” (1946, republished 1995).

² G.B. Harrison, “The National Background” in H. Granville-Barker (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; cited in Mutschmann and Wentersdorf, Shakespeare and Catholicism. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1952, p. 73

³ John Henry de Groot, The Shakespeares and “The Old Faith”, Fraser, Michigan, Real-View Books edn., 1995, p. 110

⁴ Ibid., p. 65

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Richard Simpson, Edmund Campion: A Biography, Edinburgh, Williams and Norgate, 1867, pp. 111-12; cited in de Groot, op. cit., p. 86

⁷ de Groot, op. cit., p. 86

⁸ Ibid., pp. 87-8

⁹ Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity 1920-1990, London: SCM Press, 1991 (chapter 12); quoted in Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, London: HarperCollins, 1996, p. 25.