Shakespeare’s forged will, 1790-1931

This essay describes a strange and genuinely forgotten appropriation of a Shakespeare work – or at least, of a Shakespeare work of a sort. It takes the form of an explicitly Catholic rewriting of William Shakespeare’s will; it was first recorded in 1820, though its origins lie thirty years earlier; and it was for some years decades the version of the will actually seen by visitors to Stratford-upon-Avon. This document went on to feature at the edge of many nineteenth-century arguments about Shakespeare and Catholicism, both in Britain and around Europe, before being “rediscovered” in 1901, at which point it made newspaper headlines around the planet. Thereafter, though, it was ignored again, so thoroughly that no Shakespeare scholar, or anyone else, seems even to have mentioned it since 1931. Partially transcribed by three early viewers, it is worth investigating, but not because it might have been genuine. It was certainly forged, in ways which will be explored in more detail in what follows, and from a purist Shakespeare biographer’s point of view it is a dead end, with nothing to say about it. On the other hand, it is a fascinating case study in Shakespearean appropriation, as its long and hitherto unexplored life runs like a thread through numerous disparate aspects of Shakespeare’s reception: the Stratford activities of John Jordan, forger-poet, and Mary Hornby, curator of Shakespeare’s relics; the Protestant “cult of Shakespeare” in Victorian Britain, and its continental rival, the attempts to naturalize him as a Catholic European; and the global newsworthiness of Shakespeare in the media ecosystem of the early twentieth century. It gives rise too, I would argue, to an unexpected and interesting early example of what would now be categorized as Shakespeare fandom.