Contested Will Read Online Free Page A

or remained undiscovered.
    The first document with Shakespeare’s handwriting or signature on it – his will – wasn’t recovered until over a century after his death, in 1737. Sixteen years later a young lawyer named Albany Wallis, rummaging through the title deeds of the Fetherstonhaugh family in Surrey, stumbled upon a second document signed by Shakespeare, a mortgage deed for a London property in Blackfriars that the playwright had purchased in 1613. The rare find was given as a gift to David Garrick – star of the eighteenth-century stage and organiser of the first Shakespeare festival – and was subsequently published by the leading Shakespeare scholar and biographer of the day, Edmond Malone. Malone’s own efforts to locate Shakespeare’s papers were tireless – and disappointing. His greatest find, made in 1793 (though it remained unpublished until 1821), was the undelivered letter mentioned earlier, addressed to Shakespeare by his Stratford neighbour Richard Quiney.
    A neighbour’s request for a substantial loan, a shrewd real-estate investment and a will in which Shakespeare left his wife a ‘second best bed’ were not what admirers in search of clues that explained Shakespeare’s genius had hoped to find. What little else turned up didn’t help much either, suggesting that the Shakespeares secretly clung to a suspect faith and were, moreover, social climbers. Shakespeare’s father’s perhaps spurious Catholic ‘Testament of Faith’ was found hidden in the rafters of the family home on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1757, though mysteriously lost soon after a transcript was made. And the Shakespeares’ request in 1596 for a grant of a coat of arms –bestowing on the Stratford glover and his actor son the status of gentlemen – surfaced in 1778, and was published that year by George Steevens in his edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Contemporaries still had high hopes that ‘a rich assemblage of Shakespeare papers would start forth from some ancient repository, to solve all our doubts’. For his part, a frustrated Edmond Malone blamed gentry too lazy to examine their family papers: ‘Much information might be procured illustrative of the history of this extraordinary man, if persons possessed of ancient papers would take the trouble to examine them, or permit others to peruse them.’
    Some feared that Shakespeare’s papers had been, or might yet be, carelessly destroyed. The collector and engraver Samuel Ireland, touring through Stratford-upon-Avon in 1794 while at work on his Picturesque Views on the Upper, or Warwickshire Avon , was urged by a Stratford local to search Clopton House, a mile from town, where the Shakespeare family papers might have been moved. Ireland and his teenage son, William-Henry, who had accompanied him, made their way to Clopton House, and in response to their queries were told by the farmer who lived there, a man named Williams,
    By God I wish you had arrived a little sooner. Why it isn’t a fortnight since I destroyed several baskets-full of letters and papers; … as to Shakespeare, why there were many bundles with his name wrote upon them. Why it was in this very fireplace I made a roaring bonfire of them.
    Mrs Williams was called in and confirmed the report, admonishing her husband: ‘I told you not to burn the papers, as they might be of consequence.’ All that Edmond Malone could do when he heard this dispiriting news was complain to the couple’s landlord. The unlucky Samuel and William-Henry Ireland went back to London.
    They didn’t return empty-handed, having purchased an oak chair at Anne Hathaway’s cottage. It was said to be the very chair in which Shakespeare had wooed Anne, and it’s now in the possession of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Samuel Irelandadded it to his growing collection of English heirlooms that included the cloak