Beds and bedding were valued objects and often mentioned in wills. It is sometimes argued that the second-best bed was the marital bed-the first bed being reserved for important visitors-and therefore replete with tender associations. But Thomas says the evidence doesn’t bear this out and that husbands virtually always gave the best bed to their wives or eldest sons. A second-best bed, he believes, was inescapably a demeaning bequest. It is sometimes pointed out that as a widow Anne would automatically have been entitled to one-third of Shakespeare’s estate, and therefore it wasn’t necessary for him to single her out for particular bequests. But even allowing for this, it is highly unusual for a spouse to be included so tersely as an afterthought.
A colleague of Thomas’s, Jane Cox, now retired, made a study of sixteenth-century wills and found that typically husbands said tender things about their wives-Condell, Heminges, and Augustine Phillips all did-and frequently left them some special remembrance. Shakespeare does neither, but then, as Samuel Schoenbaum notes, he offers “no endearing references to other family members either.” With respect to Anne, Thomas suggests that perhaps she was mentally incapacitated. Then again it may be that Shakespeare was simply too ill to include endearments. Thomas thinks it’s possible that Shakespeare’s signatures on the will were forged-probably not for any nefarious reason, but simply because he was too ill to wield a quill himself. If the signatures are not genuine, it would be something of a shock to the historical record, as the will contains half of Shakespeare’s six known signatures.
He left £10 to the poor of Stratford, which is sometimes suggested as being a touch niggardly, but in fact according to Thomas it was quite generous. A more usual sum for a man of his position was £2. He also left 20 shillings to a godson and small sums to various friends, including (in yet another interlineation) 26 shillings apiece to Heminges, Condell, and Richard Burbage to purchase memorial rings-a common gesture. All the rest went to his two daughters, the bulk to Susanna.
Apart from the second-best bed and the clothes he left to Joan, only two other personal possessions are mentioned-a gilt-and-silver bowl and a ceremonial sword. Judith was given the bowl. The likelihood is that it sits today unrecognized on some suburban sideboard; it was not the sort of object that gets discarded. The sword was left to a local friend, Thomas Combe; its fate is similarly unknown. It is generally assumed that Shakespeare’s interests in the Globe and Blackfriars theaters had been sold already, for there is no mention of them. The full inventory of his estate, listing his books and much else of value to history, would have been sent to London, where in all likelihood it perished in the Great Fire of 1666. No trace of it survives.
Shakespeare’s wife died in August 1623, just before the publication of the First Folio. His daughter Susanna lived on until 1649, when she died aged sixty-six. His younger daughter, Judith, lived till 1662, and died aged seventy-seven. She had three children, including a son named Shakespeare, but all predeceased her without issue. “Judith was the great lost opportunity,” says Stanley Wells. “If any of Shakespeare’s early biographers had sought her out, she could have told them all kinds of things that we would now dearly love to know. But no one, it appears, troubled to speak to her.” Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth, who equally might have shed light on many Shakespearean mysteries, lived until 1670. She married twice but had no children either, and so with her died the Shakespeare line.
Theaters boomed in the years just after Shakespeare’s death, even more so than they had in his lifetime. By 1631, seventeen of them were in operation around London. The good years didn’t last long, however. By 1642, when the Puritans shut them down, just six remained-three amphitheaters and three halls. Theaters would never again appeal to so wide a spectrum of society or be such a universal pastime.
Shakespeare’s plays might have been lost, too, had it not been for the heroic efforts of his close friends and colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell, who seven years after his death produced a folio edition of his complete works. It put into print for the first time eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays: Macbeth; The Tempest; Julius Caesar; The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Measure for Measure; The Comedy of Errors; As You Like It; The Taming of the Shrew; King John; All’s Well That Ends Well; Twelfth Night; The Winter’s Tale; Henry VI, Part 1; Henry VIII; Coriolanus; Cymbeline; Timon of Athens; and Antony and Cleopatra. Had Heminges and Condell not taken this trouble, the likelihood is that all of these plays would have been lost to us. Now that is true heroism.
Heminges and Condell were the last of the original Chamberlain’s Men. As with nearly everyone else in this story, we know only a little about them. Heminges (Kermode makes it Heminge; others use Heming or Hemings) was the company’s business manager, but also a sometime actor and, at least according to tradition, is said to have been the first Falstaff-though he is also said to have had a stutter, “an unfortunate handicap for an actor,” as Wells notes. He listed himself in his will as a “citizen and grocer of London.” A grocer in Shakespeare’s day was a trader in bulk items, not someone who sold provisions from a shop (think of gross, not groceries). In any case the designation meant only that he belonged to the grocers’ guild, not that he was actively involved in the trade. He had thirteen children, possibly fourteen, by his wife, Rebecca, widow of the actor William Knell, whose murder at Thame in 1587, it may be recalled, left a vacancy among the Queen’s Men into which some commentators have been eager to place a young William Shakespeare.
Condell (or sometimes Cundell, as on his will) was an actor, esteemed evidently for comedic roles. Like Shakespeare he invested wisely and was sufficiently wealthy to style himself “gentleman” without fear of contradiction and to own a country home in what was then the outlying village of Fulham. He left Heminges a generous £ 5 in his will-considerably more than Shakespeare left Heminges, Condell, and Burbage together in his. Condell had nine children. He and Heminges lived as neighbors in Saint Mary Aldermanbury, within the City walls, for thirty-two years.
After Shakespeare’s death they set to putting together the complete works-a matter of no small toil. They must have been influenced by the example of Ben Jonson, who in the year of Shakespeare’s death, 1616, had issued a handsome folio of his own work-a decidedly vain and daring thing to do since plays were not normally considered worthy of such grand commemoration. Jonson rather pugnaciously styled the book his “Workes,” prompting one waggish observer to wonder if he had lost the ability to distinguish between work and play.
We have no idea how long Heminges and Condell’s project took, but Shakespeare had been dead for seven years by the time the volume was ready for publication in the autumn of 1623. It was formally called Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, but has been known to the world ever since-well, nearly ever since-as the First Folio.
A folio, from the Latin folium, or “leaf,” is a book in which each sheet has been folded just once down the middle, creating two leaves or four pages. A folio page is therefore quite large-typically about fifteen inches high. A quarto book is one in which each sheet is folded twice, to create four leaves-hence “quarto”-or eight pages.
The First Folio was published by Edward Blount and the father-and-son team of William and Isaac Jaggard-a curious choice, since the senior Jaggard had earlier published the book of poems The Passionate Pilgrim, which the title page ascribed to William Shakespeare, though in fact Shakespeare’s only contribution was a pair of sonnets and three poems lifted whole from Love’s Labour’s Lost, suggesting that the entire enterprise may have been unauthorized and thus potentially irksome to Shakespeare. At all events, by the time of the First Folio, William Jaggard was so ill that he almost certainly didn’t participate in the printing.