This story begins with a simple letter. On June 14, 1784, one John Jordan (1746–1809), a poet who collected anecdotes about William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and cared about his property, wrote a letter to the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine, a monthly magazine that It was published intermittently in London for almost 200 years.
Jordan explained that, around 1770, a man called Joseph Moseley had been repairing the roof of the house where the famous English playwright was born, located on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon (south-east of Birmingham), and that between beams and tiles he had found an incomplete manuscript.
This text became known as the Spiritual Testament, a document that was attributed to John Shakespeare, William’s father, and in which he seems to declare a radical devotion to the Catholic religion. For decades, that scroll has been used to analyze the religious environment in which one who has been recognized as the most important writer in the English language grew up.
Joseph Moseley had kept the text and had only shown it to some of his neighbors until he decided to give it to John Jordan, who hoped to publish a transcription in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The magazine’s editors, however, refused to publish it because they thought it was false.
Three centuries after those events, an academic at the University of Bristol was analyzing digital copies of an incredibly rare and obscure 17th-century Italian religious text when he discovered that the Spiritual Testament could not have been written by John Shakespeare, who died in 1601. but it actually belongs to the playwright’s unknown sister.
Professor Matthew Steggle realized that the religious treatise attributed to the father of the author of Hamlet, MacBeth or Romeo and Juliet was actually a translation of an Italian text titled The Last Will and Testament of the Soul. He then concentrated on locating the first editions of this work, many of which are scattered in libraries throughout Europe.
This demonstrated, as explained in an article published in the magazine Shakespeare Quarterly, that the original was made several years after the death of John Shakespeare, and that the author of the manuscript found in the house on Henley Street was, in fact, the only one. another possible J Shakespeare –Joan–, who lived from 1569 to 1646.
Joan was five years younger than William. She always lived in Stratford-upon-Avon and married the hatter William Hart, with whom she had four children. In the last years of the playwright’s life, his anonymous sister was the only important living relative he had left, in addition to his wife and daughters.
“Only seven texts written by Joan remain that mention her by name. And Virginia Woolf even wrote an essay, Shakespeare’s Sister, in which she addressed the issue that a figure like her could never hope to be a writer or have her writings preserved, so she has become something of a symbol. of all the lost voices of early modern women. There are hundreds of thousands of words that have survived from her brother, and so far, no description of her,” Steggle points out.
The religious treatise that Joan would have written indicates that the person who wrote it was committed to having a good Catholic death, despite being written at a time in English history when Catholicism was strongly disapproved. If it had been made by John Shakespeare, that implied that he was a secretly zealous Catholic in an Elizabethan world where people risked being tortured for their faith.
Some of the quotes from the manuscript include passages such as the following. “I, Shakespeare, protest that I will willingly accept death in whatever form it may come upon me, conforming my will to the will of God; accepting it in satisfaction for my sins and giving thanks to his divine majesty for the life that he has granted me.
Another of the passages read: “I, Shakespeare, hereby protest that I give infinite thanks to his divine majesty for all the benefits that I have received, both secret and manifest… but above all for his great expectation that I do penance, when he with all justice could have taken me out of this life when I least expected it, and even then, when I was sunk in the dirty puddle of my sins.”
A third point read: “I, Shakespeare, do protest that I am willing, yes, I infinitely desire and humbly long, that from this my last will and testament, the glorious and ever Virgin Mary, mother of God, refuge and advocate of sinners, whom I especially honor above all other saints, be the chief executor along with these other saints my patrons, Saint Winifred, whom I invoke and beseech to be present at the hour of my death so that she and they may comfort me with their “desired presence and longing for the sweet Jesus who will receive my soul in peace.”
Saint Winifred, considered a patron saint in this passage, was a 7th-century Welsh princess who, according to legend, miraculously survived her own beheading at the hands of a disgruntled suitor. According to experts, this story, which is about repelling unwanted sexual advances from men, was particularly revered by women, and would be another sign that the document belongs to Joan.
“Thirty years ago, a researcher addressing a problem of this type would barely have been able to rely on a single large library. But now many of the resources are available digitally, so it is possible to consult many different libraries in different countries at the same time and, more importantly, you can consult the full text, not just the title and a few other details,” concludes Matthew Steggle.
