“John Shakespeare’s ‘Spiritual Testament’ Is Not John Shakespeare’s”, 2024-03-19 ():
One of the thorniest problems in Shakespeare biography is the “Spiritual Testament”, the document attributed to John Shakespeare, father of the playwright, in which he appears to declare a radical and personally dangerous devotion to the Catholic religion.
Central to all discussions of the religious environment in which Shakespeare grew up, this document’s acceptance or rejection has been something of a shibboleth for Shakespeare biographers.
This essay studies a group of hitherto unnoticed early print editions of the text that underlies the “Spiritual Testament”.
In it, I advance a double thesis: first, that the “Spiritual Testament” cannot belong to John Shakespeare for reasons of date [ie. published after he died]; and second, that its most likely creator is arguably Joan Shakespeare Hart (1569–771646378ya), Shakespeare’s sister.
…Thereafter, Malone remained cautious not just about the “first leaf” but about the whole “Spiritual Testament.” In 1796 he commented that he had “since obtained documents that clearly prove it could not have been the composition of any one of our poet’s family”, and promised to explain more fully in his Life of Shakespeare.10 Neither the Life, nor whatever evidence he was referring to, was ever published. What is more, at some point after Malone inspected and returned it, the 5-leaf document itself disappeared and has never been seen again.
…So, the attribution of the Testament to St. Charles Borromeo, which has been more or less uncontested by Shakespeare scholars since 1923, and which has underpinned all discussions of the “Spiritual Testament”, is called into question by the competing early attribution to Cicatelli, and equally by the lack of early attributions to Borromeo.41 For as long as the attribution was uncontested, it seemed to pin the text’s composition to before 1584, when Borromeo died: but if it is not necessarily by Borromeo, then the date must be evaluated afresh. Since Bearman’s work has cast doubt on all the proposed references to the Testament from around 1580, the first certain evidence of it now comes in 1613.
…When is the “Spiritual Testament” from? The specific English text that it contains is attested in print editions of 1635 and 1638, and not directly otherwise. As a rule of thumb, one would expect an undated example of the text to be close in time to those two known reference points. A 1630s date for the “Spiritual Testament” would also fit with the wider profile of the Testament’s international vogue in the 1630s and 1640s, and with Malone and Davenport’s independent initial impressions about the handwriting and spellings of this particular manuscript. It would not be impossible to argue that it might be later still—say from the 1650s or 1660s—but the later we date it, the harder it is to reconcile with the lack of evidence of this particular English translation circulating after 1638; with the spellings; and with Malone’s impression that the handwriting was not so modern that it couldn’t, conceivably, be Elizabethan. So while an exact date is elusive, the document seems to be at least 50 years later than the 1580 date usually ascribed to it. And if it is from, as it may be, the later 1630s, then it is worth noting that the religious landscape then was very different from what it was in 1580: England had a Catholic Queen, and Catholic practices of all sorts were tolerated to a greater degree than before. At that point, possessing a copy of a Catholic document such as the Testament was much less dangerous and remarkable than it would have been 50 years earlier. Nor was the Testament a text as exotic and rare as it has seemed to critics struggling with the early date, since in the 1630s there were several current print editions in continental languages, and at least two in English.
…In 2020, for instance, a sammelband of Tudor books last seen in 1817 was discovered in the roof of a thatched cottage in Wiltshire: it appears merely to have been stored there and forgotten about. Similarly, during roof renovations in 2018–19, a prayer book and insurance documents from the 1870s were found in the rafters of Van Gogh’s London house.64 So the timescale is not unreasonable, nor is there any need to think that the document was, as many narratives insist, deliberately concealed: rafters are an obvious place for the long-term storage of a precious document, being dry and out of the way.65 The “Spiritual Testament” was a document forgotten in an attic.
…It was seen and described by two early Shakespeare experts and then lost. Both thought it must have belonged to Shakespeare’s father, John, who died in 1601, which would imply that he was a zealous secret Catholic in an Elizabethan world of priest holes where people risked torture for their faith. Subsequent scholars thought it was a forgery designed to give the impression of being a document from John’s lifetime.
In fact, the document is actually a translation of an Italian text, “The Last Will and Testament of the Soul”, and Professor Matthew Steggle, from the University’s Department of English, used Google Books and other internet archives to track down early editions of that text in Italian and 6 other languages, many of which editions survive only in a single copy and are scattered across the libraries of Europe.
This proved that it was from several years after John Shakespeare died and that the author of the manuscript was, in fact, the only other possible J Shakespeare—Joan—who lived 1569–771646378ya.
…Professor Steggle said, “Even 30 years ago, a researcher approaching a problem like this would have been based in a single big research library, using printed catalogs and even card catalogs to try to find copies of this text. But research libraries have now made many of their resources available digitally so that it is possible to look across many different libraries in different countries at once, and what’s more, you can look through the whole text, not just at the title and other details.”