Shakespeare's Family: New Discoveries

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Shakespeare's Family: New Discoveries"

Not Just the Tudors
Host: Professor Suzannah Lipscomb
Guest: Dr. Matthew Steggall, Professor of English at the University of Bristol
Release Date: June 23, 2025

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Introduction: Unveiling Hidden Narratives in Shakespeare's Life

In this enlightening episode of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb delves into groundbreaking discoveries that shed new light on the women in William Shakespeare's life. Joined by Dr. Matthew Steggall, a renowned English literature scholar, the discussion uncovers previously overlooked documents that challenge traditional narratives about Shakespeare's family dynamics and personal life.

Discovery of Letter Fragments Addressed to "Mrs. Shakespeare"

Dr. Steggall recounts the intriguing discovery of two fragments of a letter addressed to "Good Mrs. Shakespeare," unearthed by scholar F.C. Morgan in 1978. These fragments were found while Morgan was cataloging a collection of 17th-century theological books at the Hereford Cathedral Library.

Dr. Matthew Steggall [05:53]: "So you often get bookbinders would use waste paper while they were binding books… in this case, what he saw were two fragments of a letter addressed to Good Mrs. Shakespeare."

The letter discusses a financial dispute concerning a fatherless apprentice named John Butts, highlighting Mrs. Shakespeare's role in managing funds intended for the child's support. This suggests that "Mrs. Shakespeare," presumed to be Anne Hathaway, possessed significant financial agency—a revelation that contradicts the long-held belief in the marginalization of Shakespeare's wife.

Dr. Matthew Steggall [08:10]: "Good Mrs. Shakespeare, I beseech you to consider if the business was left in trust to your husband…"

Reinterpretation of the Controversial Spiritual Testament

The episode further explores the contentious Spiritual Testament, a document historically attributed to Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare. Dr. Steggall presents compelling evidence that challenges this attribution, proposing instead that the testament may have been authored by Joan Shakespeare, William's sister.

Dr. Matthew Steggall [28:12]: "The key here is that you can find early versions of the Testament in other languages… attributing it to someone else entirely."

The Testament portrays Shakespeare's father as a devout Catholic, a portrayal that sparked debates about the family's religious affiliations during the Elizabethan era. However, discrepancies in the document's timeline and handwriting suggest a misattribution, potentially shifting the narrative to Joan Shakespeare's secret Catholic sympathies.

Implications for Shakespeare's Biography and Marriage

These discoveries provide a more nuanced understanding of Shakespeare's life in London, filling geographical and relational gaps. The presence of Anne Hathaway in London, as inferred from the letter fragments, counters the prevailing narrative of a distant and estranged marriage. This proximity hints at a more collaborative and engaged partnership between Shakespeare and his wife.

Dr. Matthew Steggall [14:27]: "There are big geographical gaps in terms of where Shakespeare is known to have lived… This is Trinity Gleane in London that's being talked about."

Rewriting Women’s Roles in Shakespeare's Life

The conversation emphasizes the importance of recognizing the agency of the women surrounding Shakespeare. From Anne Hathaway's potential involvement in financial matters to Joan Shakespeare's possible covert Catholic activities, these findings challenge the traditional exclusion of women from historical narratives and underscore their significant, albeit often hidden, roles.

Professor Suzannah Lipscomb [16:04]: "So it's a different sort of engagement with Catholicism."

The Role of Modern Research Tools in Historical Discoveries

Dr. Steggall highlights how contemporary technologies and digital databases have revolutionized historical research, enabling scholars to uncover and analyze documents that were previously inaccessible or overlooked. This digital shift facilitates a more comprehensive and inclusive understanding of historical figures and their personal lives.

Dr. Matthew Steggall [41:39]: "A common theme across in particular the two things we've talked about… with the new generation of tools with big data."

Conclusion: A Transformative Era for Historical Scholarship

The episode concludes with an optimistic outlook on the future of historical research. The integration of digital tools and interdisciplinary approaches promises to unearth more hidden narratives, particularly those of women in history, thereby enriching our understanding of iconic figures like William Shakespeare.

Professor Suzannah Lipscomb [42:43]: "We're so lucky…"

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Notable Quotes

• Dr. Matthew Steggall [08:10]: "Good Mrs. Shakespeare, I beseech you to consider if the business was left in trust to your husband…"
• Dr. Matthew Steggall [28:12]: "The key here is that you can find early versions of the Testament in other languages… attributing it to someone else entirely."
• Dr. Matthew Steggall [41:39]: "A common theme across in particular the two things we've talked about… with the new generation of tools with big data."
• Professor Suzannah Lipscomb [42:43]: "We're so lucky…"

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Implications for Future Research

Dr. Steggall expresses excitement about the potential for future discoveries as digital resources become more integrated into historical research. This paradigm shift not only broadens the scope of accessible information but also democratizes the process of uncovering and interpreting historical data.

Dr. Matthew Steggall [42:00]: "Hopefully there will be others in the same categories…"

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Further Exploration: Susanna Shakespeare's Role

In a brief segment towards the end, Dr. Steggall touches upon recent scholarly work examining Susanna Shakespeare, William's daughter. She is credited with producing poems linked to Shakespeare's tomb and his memorial plaque, suggesting her active role in preserving her father's legacy.

Dr. Matthew Steggall [38:46]: "So Susanna is Shakespeare's daughter… she's Shakespeare's heir, and she is at least partly responsible for the erection of Shakespeare's tomb…"

This exploration into Susanna's contributions further underscores the episode's theme of elevating the often-overlooked voices of women in historical narratives.

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Not Just the Tudors continues to shed light on the intricate and multifaceted lives of historical figures by uncovering the untold stories of those around them. This episode marks a significant step in recontextualizing Shakespeare's personal life, emphasizing the indispensable roles played by the women in his world.

Transcript

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tutors from History. Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from and Berlin to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. In 1925, Virginia Woolf wrote of a woman whose artistic and intellectual ability, equal in all ways to her famously celebrated brother, would always be overlooked in his favor. It was a statement that suggested, with limited exceptions, a woman's name would never have equal opportunity to write itself into history. She called her Shakespeare's sister. For the women of Shakespeare's life, his wife Anne, his sister Joan, his daughters Judith and Susanna, it would appear to be an inevitable and unshakable truth. But what if, like so many women before, evidence of their lives had simply been overlooked, even replaced? What if we could find them once more and insert them back into the story? Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Matthew Stegel, professor of English at the University of Bristol, who has recently published Remarkable Discoveries into the Forgotten Shakespeare Women, co editor of the lost plays database. Dr. Steggall's previous books include Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres and Digital Humanities and the Lost Drama of Early Modern England. Using a combination of new technologies and comparative data sets, his work offers startling new revelations in the biography of William Shakespeare, challenging much of what we think we know about the women in Shakespeare's life. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and you're listening to Not Just the Tudors from history hit. Dr. Steggle. Welcome to the podcast.

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

Thank you.

I'm delighted to be here.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

It is absolutely thrilling to be talking about your discoveries and we're going to go through it in a kind of forensic detail because I think listeners are going to be fascinated. So perhaps we could start by talking about the letter and fragments addressed to Mrs. Shakespeare. How was it found originally?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

So this was discovered in 1978 by.

A scholar named F.C. morgan, who was cataloguing some books at Hereford Cathedral Library.

This was a collection of books that.

Had been in the possession of a.

Local grammar school, Lady Hawkins School.

They'd put this collection of rather boring theological books that they'd had since the 17th century, and they'd been at the.

School and they'd not had much attention.

From anyone, and they had donated them.

To Hereford Cathedral library in the 70s. FC Morgan was cataloguing them and he noticed, stuck in the binding waste of.

One of these books, two little fragments of a contemporary letter.

So you often get.

Bookbinders would use waste paper while they were binding books Paper's quite expensive, so you often get bits of medieval manuscript or of earlier printed book, or, as in this case, some contemporary document caught in the binding. It's like a little miniature time capsule almost of what was around in the binder's shop. And in this case, what he saw were two fragments of a letter addressed to Good Mrs. Shakespeare.

And Morgan instantly suspected that something was.

Up, but he couldn't, in 1978, make much of it, partly because it was.

Still bound in the books.

There wasn't really very much of it visible.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And given the thrilling possibility of a connection to William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, why has it remained overlooked for so long, do you think?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

Morgan did write it up, but in a very dry and understated and British manner. So the note was out there, but.

Nobody really paid it much attention.

And until 2016, when the Cathedral Library.

Disbound the two fragments so that you could read the whole text, there wasn't.

Really much to go at.

And really, even in 2016, there probably weren't the databases and the tools available to enable you really to make much further progress on it. So it's been waiting for its moment.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And how did you come to investigate the document?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

I'm writing a biography of William Shakespeare, which is taking a while because I.

Keep finding these really interesting things and I try to write footnotes on them and the footnotes grow out of control.

And in this particular case, I came.

Across a reference to this document which.

I'd never heard of, and I emailed the Cathedral Library and said, do you still have this? And they said, yes, here are some pictures of it. And Ellipsett thought, oh, you could do.

Stuff with that, with the new tools.

That we have now that probably you couldn't do before.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Yes, it is thrilling, isn't it? We'll talk a bit about this a bit later, about how research is changing. But first of all, what can you tell me about the contents of these fragments?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

What the binder has used are two fragments from a letter. So you've got the top of the letter and you've got a strip from further down the page.

So you don't have lots of information like the name of the sender.

You have enough that you can tell the backstory of what's going on.

I could read the letter, for instance.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Let's do that. That'd be wonderful.

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

Yeah.

So the text of the letter, what's.

Left of it, goes.

Good.

Mrs. Shakespeare, I beseech you to consider.

If the business was left in trust to your husband, by Mrs. Butts for the children. And now there is one of the portions left in your hand for one John Butts, the poor fatherless child. And that portion is all he hath to help himself withal when he hath served his time. And therefore I hope you will have a better conscience then to pay your husband's debts or convert it to your.

And then the letter breaks off.

There's a bit missing there. But if you look at the back hinge, there's a bit from further along where the writer is now talking about accusations and there's some writing about enter into a bond to pay back the overplus for the other's behalf. And so we did when you dwelt in Trinity Lane. So that's what you've got to work on, really. You've got a couple of fragments from this letter. It's a dispute about who should pay.

The money to a young apprentice boy.

Who'S lost his father. Trustees have been looking after his money.

The question is who is due to.

Pay the money now that he's nearly.

Due to finish his apprenticeship.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Would this have been a relatively common situation for the time?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

Yes, because life expectancy is so short.

Quite a lot of children lost their.

Parents before they came of age. And there's a fairly well established thing if the parent in particular, if the father had enough money, he would set.

The money aside in the hands of.

A trustee to be paid to the child when they got married, if it was a daughter or when they finished an apprenticeship. Typically, if it was a son, you wouldn't leave the money in the wife's.

Hands as a rule, because then it.

Might be owned by anyone who remarried her. So that was quite a well established mechanism.

It looks like in this case something's gone wrong and there's a fight about.

Who actually owes the money.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And have you been able to locate the apprentice mentioned?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

Yes, because it gives a name.

You're looking for a fatherless apprentice called John Butts. In the period, there's a strong candidate.

Who finishes his apprenticeship at about the same date that the book in which.

It'S bound is printed, which is the year 1608.

So it's the kind of moment at.

Which a contemporary letter that's passed its sell by date might well be used in binding a book. So for those reasons, the John Butts in the letter is fatherless and apprentice is nearly finishing an apprenticeship. The John Butts in these contemporary records is fatherless in finishing an apprenticeship. So that would be the argument for identifying the two.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Okay. Great. So you're giving us a bit of a date there as well, in terms of the letter. And how have you connected the letter to London?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

That reference to Trinity Lane is the.

Obvious point of leverage.

There are, I reckon, eight or nine places called Trinity Lane up and down.

The country, but are referred to in.

Documents from early modern England.

But as soon as you start making a list of them, the vast majority of the documents are about the one in London which is much the wealthiest and most important.

And there are some other reasons to.

Make you think of London.

Noticeably, that London is the one place.

On the list that has people called Shakespeare in it.

And some other things tend to point the same direction. This is Trinity Gleane in London that's being talked about. And if you buy that, then suddenly you've got a really specific geographical location. You can see Trinity Lane on maps. You can do the kind of history.

Of that particular area in great detail. So one of the weird things about.

Finding that out is that suddenly it.

Makes one part of the letter very specific.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Where exactly was Trinity Lane?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

It's in central London. It's just behind Queen Hythe Dock, which was one of the main transport hubs on the Thames.

If you go to Shakespeare's Globe on.

The south bank and stand there waiting.

For a boat, you can still see Queen Hive.

It's a kind of indentation in the.

Thames about opposite that boat stop marked.

With a beach of mud and stones.

And in Shakespeare's day, it was a major transport hub and Trinity Lanes ran out the back of it and ran into the square there.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Now, what we of course want to know are, are there any Shakespeares living on Trinity Lane? Do we know of how many Shakespeares were in London during this period?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

Yeah, the parish records for the parish.

That included Trinity Lane parish called Trinity. The less the parish registers survive, and they don't contain anybody called Shakespeare or anything like it, but lots of people live in London without ever troubling the parish registers. William Shakespeare himself is a good example. He was in London for 20 years. He's never been found in a parish register. So parish registers aren't perfect.

And actually, because people have been looking literally for centuries in records of all.

Sorts in London in that period for anyone called Shakespeare.

We've actually got quite a good handle.

On people called Shakespeare in London in that period.

There are like three or four other.

Married couples, but all the others are.

Really one parish people.

They get married in a parish, they're.

Then pinned to that parish by a.

Series of baptisms of their Children and.

Other sorts of records, and they die in that parish.

So those people are definitely living in one place, whereas Mr. Shakespeare in the letter seems to be living or has.

Lived in Trinity Lane. So you're looking at someone who's moved around London a bit in their lifetime.

And William Shakespeare is the one contemporary Shakespeare in London who meets that description.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

That's thrilling because, I mean, suddenly, as you say, the Paris registers aren't giving us everything we want to know because they're only pinpointing certain moments. But in this instance, they do pin down and hold all the other potential Shakespeares in London and leave only William Shakespeare floating around.

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

That's exactly it, yeah.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So how does the letter fill in a gap? If we're right in supposing this might be that all the evidence is leading up to the time, the place, the. The person of William Shakespeare himself, How does it start to fill in the gap of what is known about his life in London?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

There are big geographical gaps in terms.

Of where Shakespeare is known to have lived. So he. He's known to have lived in St.

Helens, Bishopsgate on the north side of the city.

Early in his career.

He worked in Shoreditch in the early.

Years, that was where his theater was. Then he disappears for a bit. He turns up in Silver street near Cripplegate, for.

For a couple of years where he's.

Lodging with a French Huguenot family called the Mountjoys. That bit's quite well documented because there is a lawsuit which features him, but he's involved in.

So you can get him then. And then he disappears again. There are a couple of big gaps. So one geographical gap that he fills.

In is it seems to put him.

In this very central location, quite an.

Upmarket location, quite a desirable address really, at some point, maybe sort of 1599-1603.ish was a possibility. So it's helpful for his kind of geography.

And also the really interesting thing, that Mrs. Shakespeare seems to be living there as well.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Yes. Because historically the narrative has been separation. The successful William in London, his wife remains in the countryside. The letter seems to undermine that idea.

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

It does. And if you're told an 18th century.

Scholar, that Anne was living with William.

In London, they'd have gone, oh, yeah.

That'S fine, that's what we expect at the time, actually thought that.

But then about 200 years ago, this narrative starts up. But it's an unhappy marriage, it's a.

Bit of a shotgun marriage that he leaves town as soon as he can.

But goes to London to Get away from her. And that's been a dominant narrative, really, ever since, and people have recently started.

To chip away at it. Germain Grier wrote a very interesting book arguing that maybe Anne wasn't this kind of illiterate, uncultured peasant that we thought, there's some fabulous work being done by Kytherin Shiel just at the moment on Anne. There is a sense that the needle is moving.

And certainly for a country gentlewoman in her class, they always want to come up to London.

They want to come up to London because it's where the fun is.

So you'd expect, in the abstract, Anne to be in London, possibly even quite a bit. It's just that up till now, there hasn't been a piece of paper that.

Seems to record that fact.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Yes, this is fascinating. So what insight do you think this can give us into the nature of the partnership between the couple?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

The letter writer seems to think that Anne has independent access to money, that.

They can get Anne to pay them in some way. That phrase about pay your husband's debts or convert it to your own, presumably to your own account somehow.

So they seem to think that Anne has some financial agency in her own.

Right and can help them out with their Tolkien.

There's some writing on the back of the letter which might be a reply.

Saying, basically, do Inquirer go away, which.

Might perhaps be declining to help. Which would be really interesting because, again.

It would imply active involvement by an. So there's definitely. I quite like the idea that it shows them working together, involving each other's.

Social networks and financial.

The Ferrers.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

I mean, that writing on the back is potentially very important indeed. I'd love to know a bit more about that, because. Am I right and thinking that would be the only evidence we have of Anne's character and thoughts.

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

Absolutely.

We have hundreds of thousands of words from her husband.

There is nothing recorded that could be said to be words by Anne Hathaway, if the thing on the back is.

In some sense from her, maybe mediated through a secretary or some sort of a male relative, who can tell, because.

Literacy is very hard to assess in the period. But if it is from her, then it would be the first words of hers ever recorded, as it were.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And I suppose what's also fascinating is that this is a period in which married women generally don't make it into the sources in their own words because they're kind of covered legally by their husband. So it's quite rare in terms of the sort of evidence it provides of women's agency Full stop.

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

If it's her, it's always. It's the exceptional cases, as you say.

The problem is that they're just not there. And particularly non aristocratic women just aren't there in the archives. It's a real problem. So it is the chance survivals, it's.

The funny bits and pieces that might.

Perhaps give you your best chance of accessing something that isn't in the more conventional records yet.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Okay, so where does this leave us? Because if any of us sort of picture Shakespeare at work in London, we tend to sort of conjure up Joseph Fiennes in his garret in Shakespeare in Love, unencumbered by a wife. How much trust do you think we can put in this document for giving us insight into the nature of Shakespeare's life in London and into the nature of his marriage? And what does it tell us as.

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

To how much you can trust the document?

It's obviously hard to tell. And it's not really for me to say. I'm the guy proposing. It's for other scholars to make up their mind on that.

What it seems to paint a picture.

Of is a Shakespeare who's not the kind of Joseph finds in the garret completely independent of worldly cares, but somebody who's living in.

Yeah, quite a tiny address in central.

London, whose wife is present at least some of the time. Whose writing, as I say, the dates.

We got for it, 1599-1603, are things.

Like Hamlet and Twelfth Night and plays like that. These are being written while he's also engaged with other responsibilities as well, like managing this trusteeship.

So it makes him more situated in.

The city in particular.

It puts him almost within sound of the boats coming and going at Queenhithe.

Dock in central London, which I do find quite an evocative idea.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Yes, that is wonderful. But this isn't the only document that you have brought to light. Can we think about this other contentious document connected to Shakespeare, the spiritual Testament, usually attributed to his father John? What can you tell me about the history of this document?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

This was my point of entry, really. I found the Mrs. Shakespeare letter while trying to shore up the findings on the spiritual testament thing. So these are two interconnected things, both of which are linked partly by the fact you're using databases in the approach, but also by the fact that they take seriously the idea that Shakespeare's women might have some agency, you know, might actually be involved in things.

So the story of this document is that in the late 18th century, a bricklayer was working on the roof of the old Shakespeare family house in Henley.

Street in Stratford on Avon, which is now the Shakespeare birthplace, but was at.

The time still being lived in by.

The Hart family, who were the descendants of Shakespeare's sister Jane, who had lived there ever since about 1601, when famously, Shakespeare in his will gives Joan a life tenancy of the cottage on the.

End of the house. And since then, the rest of the.

House had been acquired by the Hart family. So a bricklayer was working on this roof and he found a small document.

In the rafters which he kept as a souvenir.

It was five pages long, quite closely written, and it appeared to be a.

Spiritual testament in which the writer declared that they were a Catholic, that their patron saint was Saint Winifred, and that they intended to die when the time came, a good Catholic death.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And why does the legitimacy of this document continue to be debated?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

There are some unfortunate things about it. It's missing its first page and it also is lost. So it was seen by two Shakespeare.

Experts, one of them the greatest Shakespeare scholar of his day, the other a.

Known make of Shakespeare forgery. So its early history is a little bit muddy. And then it disappeared. So we've only got these descriptions to go at. Furthermore, both of the people who actually described it said that it had the.

Name John Shakespeare written in it 12 times over.

And that would seem to paint it as a document to do with Shakespeare's father John.

And given the time at which John lived, it would paint him as a very radical Catholic secret agent almost at.

The height of the Elizabethan persecutions.

It would seem to paint a picture.

Of Shakespeare's upbringing as really radically Catholic.

And for that reason it was quite controversial.

It formed a cornerstone for a long.

Time of arguments about Shakespeare and Catholicism. And other Shakespeare scholars thought it must be a forgery because the story that it appeared to tell was so outrageous.

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

If one were to go as far as to forge a document connected to William Shakespeare, wouldn't it make more sense to ascribe it to the writer himself?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

It would.

That would be much more marketable.

And if I were a forger at the time, you might have been wanted.

To make him Protestant, Robin Catholic, because.

That would have assured the document had much more contemporary eclat and value.

The other factor here is that the.

Forger, or the guy who saw it who is a forger was John Jordan, who bless him, was totally incompetent, was a forger. He was a very bad forger. So if this is one of his.

It was exceptionally brilliant in a career.

In which really, yeah, otherwise he didn't forged anything very successfully at all. So it seems out of character for his forgeries.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And I suppose you've got the fact that you've got to reconcile the most celebrated Shakespeare scholar of the day seeing it and not suggesting any sign of forgery.

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

Absolutely. And the other thing is, it's just the text is too good. So for after about 150 years of.

Bitter argument about it, someone found a.

Spanish text from later in the 17th century and realized that the text in.

That Spanish document was the same as the one in the English document which.

Was found in the rafters in Henley Street. So suddenly that changed the complexion. This was a genuine Catholic devotional document of about the ripe period.

That again, if La Forger had done it, then he found a copy of it, destroyed the copy and made a version of it.

Again, it spoke to far more effort than seemed likely for Jordan, who was.

An impoverished wheelwright with no money at all. It just didn't fit.

So that was a huge filip to the apparent credibility of the document.

And a lot of Shakespeare biographies still go heavily on this idea that the spiritual testament indicates that Shakespeare's father was a really radical Catholic.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Okay, so who do you think the actual author of the testament was and why?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

Okay, the key here is that you.

Can find early versions of the Testament in other languages. There are a number of Italian versions.

Notions of the Testament which are earlier than the ones that are known about before the early ones ascribe it to.

An early 17th century writer called Santio Ciccitelli.

That matters because up till now the later versions tend to move over to attributing it to a well known saint, the Cardinal Borromeo, in that way that.

All witticisms get ascribed to Oscar Wilde.

So devotional texts tend to get ascribed to more and more famous people as they go on.

Well, while we thought it was by Borromeo, it made a lot of sense.

To see it as a text from the 1580s. Actually, the fact that it starts off being attributed to someone else entirely and only later gets attached to Borromeo affects.

Your sense of the date of it. So it's actually too late to be.

From John Shakespeare's lifetime. That's the key is whatever it is, it can't be signed by John Shakespeare because at the point he's supposed to have signed it, it's likely author is only nine years old. So that's the killer thing there. It can't be by John Shakespeare because it's from after John Shakespeare's lifetime.

Then that leaves you back with the.

Problem of who did sign it, because obviously it can't be John. That's the first thing is it categorically can't be.

Could it be somebody else signed it and John Jordan scraped out their name.

And wrote in John Shakespeare 12 times.

Over in such a good way that.

The great Shakespeare expert of the day couldn't detect it? That's possible, but unlikely. My suggestion is that, in fact, what both Jordan and the expert Malone did is they misread the name Joan Shakespeare as John Shakespeare. This is something that happens quite a lot, actually. You can find it in quite a.

Few transcriptions of parish registers. People are expecting to see John because.

It'S such a common word. Occasionally they will see a Joan and they will just misread it as John, even when the context indicates that they really ought not to. The suggestion in my article is that's what's happened on this occasion, because it's.

The only way of squaring the circle.

How can you have this incredibly authentic.

Looking document with the name in that it has?

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And I suppose rather than this being some elaborate scheme, this could just be confirmation bias. Men are expecting to see a man.

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

Exactly right.

Exactly right.

It comes from that place of. Certainly by the time Edmund Malone, the great Shakespeare expert, got to see it, he'd already been told it was about John Shakespeare. He knew there was a John Shakespeare.

Who'D lived in the house.

His absolute expectation was that he would see the words John Shakespeare.

We know from Malone's own account that the handwriting was really difficult.

It was very small, it was rather scrawny. So it's a mistake that would be all too easy to make. Yeah.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Yes. And we can't look at the original of this one, but if you've got experience with 16th, 17th century documents, you know how tricky they can be to read, so it seems entirely plausible. So if we imagine that the author was Joan Shakespeare, what do we know about her and how does that knowledge alter the importance of this spiritual testament?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

Very little is known about Joan Shakespeare directly. She was Shakespeare's younger sister, about five years younger than him.

She lived, as far as is known.

In Stratford on Avon all her life. She married a local hat maker who never amounted to anything. They were always very short of money. She outlived him and indeed her brother.

By about 30 years, living quietly in.

The house in the cottage which is now part of the Shakespeare birthplace.

You might be able to say more interesting things about her if you go.

And look closely at the records.

There's a point where she and her husband are had up before the church.

Court in Stratford Avon.

It's not clear what it's about, but.

Certainly recusancy, Catholic sympathies is a distinct possibility there.

And they are hat makers, which means they're in the trade of hatting and haberdashery. Quite interestingly, there's a bit of an overlap between hatting and haberdashery and book selling. So you'd often find books on a.

Haberdasher'S stall at the time.

So you might be able to paint.

Some stuff there about Joan being involved in those kinds of businesses, which, again, would really strike against this dominant narrative that, as you referred to, Virginia Woolf critiques this idea that the women are.

Necessarily invisible and without agency and illiterate and irrelevant.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And I suppose we can think about both the internal evidence of the letter and where it was found in terms of connecting it to Joan as well. The saint who's mentioned and the location in the roof of the Hart's house on Henley Street.

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

That's right. The saint ought to have been a giveaway, actually.

But something was wrong, and it's very interesting.

The Jesuit scholar who saw it in the early 20th century was.

He recognized that Saint Winifred, who is.

The patron saint of women, particularly associated with childbirth.

He recognized that seemed an absolute giveaway.

The testator, the person who wrote the document, was a woman. But then he got distracted from that line of thought before closing it out. So that seems a strong clue that the original writer was a woman.

And as I say, it was found.

In the roof of the cottage where she had lived for at least 30 years. So she's. She's the kind of person who would.

Cause it to be in that place.

And the instructions that come with the full version of the document do say you should read it out. They have this idea that it should be a performance, that you carry it around with you a bit like a passport, so that if you die unexpectedly.

It'S there and it records your intention.

That you die a good Catholic death, even if death surprises you. But there's also a thing in the rubric about once in a while, you're supposed to read it out to your.

Friends as a reassertion that your faith.

Is Catholic and you want to die a Catholic. And if you can't read it out yourself, it is a knowledge route. You're supposed to get someone else to read it out for you.

And it's really interesting because it's written in the first person. It's like a Little performance, you say.

I, as it may be, John or Joan Shakespeare, intend to die a good Catholic death. I renounce the devil.

I intend to be helped in my.

Death by Saint Winifred.

You narrate the story of your own death. So it is like a little mini performance if you perform it, or if.

You get somebody else to read it out on your behalf while you're there listening.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Yes. And I suppose it doesn't also necessarily tell us whether she was literate or not, because someone could have written it for her.

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

I think it's absolutely an illustration of what Virginia Woolf says in that fabulous essay that you mentioned at the start.

And I think there's a sort of.

Irony in the idea that in 1925.

Virginia Woolf is writing about how unknowable Shakespeare's sister is.

Virginia Woolf will have known about this document. She'll have thought it was a document of Shakespeare's dad, because it had been in the public domain for more than a century at the time she wrote. And so, yes, there were potentially Joan's words in the public domain not recognised.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And I wonder if perhaps it was considered more valuable to have an. An attribution to John Shakespeare rather than Joan as well. But where does it leave us? What can we read into it? Because this has been used, as you've suggested, to indicate William Shakespeare's father's Catholic faith. If it's actually his sister who's demonstrating evidence of Roman Catholic piety, what can we deduce from that?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

So there's a whole debate about Shakespeare.

And Catholicism and how Shakespeare engages with.

Catholicism, which has long been structured around.

This idea of Shakespeare's Hamlet and his difficult relationship with his father and all that Catholic guilt and things for which the Spiritual Testament has often been seen as a sort of central witness.

If it's his sister, then Shakespeare's still engaged with Catholicism, you might think, but it might invite you to think about that Catholicism a bit differently in terms of women and women's spaces and women's.

Networks, really, rather than these very manly, masculine Hamlet and Hamlet's father terms.

So it's a different sort of engagement with Catholicism.

And also, if the document is German, from sort of 1620s, 1630s, the later period of Joan's life.

So it speaks to a more of.

An accommodation between Protestantism and Catholicism rather than the burning at the stake of the Elizabethan period.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

That's interesting.

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Well, one last thing, rather briefly, but you have also considered another woman in Shakespeare's life, his daughter Susanna. How has she been linked to the monument built to her father in Holy Trinity Church?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

Okay, I'm just a spectator on this.

One, really, but to some extent the.

Work on Susanna as a producer of.

Poems, which has come out in recent years by a couple of scholars, is.

Changing our sense of Susannah as somebody.

Involved in poetry and writing potentially.

So Susanna is Shakespeare's daughter, she's Shakespeare's.

Heir, and she is at least partly.

Responsible for the erection of Shakespeare's tomb.

In 1616, which has a Latin poem.

On and then when her mother dies in 1623, she is surely involved in the memorial plaque for her, which again.

Has a Latin poem on and then.

When her own husband dies again, another two emanament, another poem. So there are these texts for which she's a patron, perhaps some sort of producing agent. And that's particularly striking because the one to her mother, for instance, is written in the first person from a daughterly perspective. So in recent years, people have started to ask, is there a sense in which Susanna is a sort of creator of these poems? And of course, the weird thing that these poems have in common is that they're written not on paper but on stone. So are these the ones that happen to survive because they're on the right.

Medium in that context where most bits of paper from the period are thrown away, or they end up stuffed and forgotten in an attic, or they end up used as wastepaper to bind a book? So in a sense, are those poems associated with Susannah that happen to be.

On stone merely the surviving bits of a larger cultural life for Susanna? So there is a sense in which.

You could maybe even think about her as a creator, as a writer.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And are they any good? Matt?

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

It depends on your taste in Latin epitaphs, really. And I want to give a cross.

Reference here to the work of Katherine Scheil, who is doing wonderful things on.

In particular the epitaph to Anne Hathaway. And I don't want to steal Catherine Choell's thunder because she's working on some fabulous new discoveries to do with that. But yeah, they're interesting. They are inventive by the standards of Latin elegy. And yeah, they're creating.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

How exciting. Well, we've been talking through these documents and thinking about how one uncovers voices of women in Shakespeare's life. And one thing that is striking is how systematically they seem to have been ignored. So you've done incredible work here and other scholars are too, putting them back into his story. And I guess I wanted to ask you about how we go about doing that more and also about the role of these new methods of research, the possibility of using electronic resources that helps us revisit old documents with fresh insights.

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

I think that's right.

A common theme across in particular the two things we've talked about, the Spiritual Testament and the Letter has been these.

Are long standing scholarly problems. You can find new things out about.

These particular ones with the new generation of tools with big data.

Hopefully there will be others in the same categories. And it may be that one of.

The things that you turn up is people do that more systematically on other sort of problems and loose ends is that might be a way into finding more specifically about female author documents associated with Shakespeare. So I'm quite excited to see what the next few years bring up. I think this could be a very good era for this sort of quite sort of document centered research.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Yeah, it is amazing, isn't it? Because nowadays we can get our hands on and get our heads around the sort of quantity of documents that scholars 100 years ago would never have been able to encompass in their lifetime, let alone get to the places where they were stored. And we now have them at our fingertips. We're so lucky.

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

Absolutely. It's quite dizzying. I think of Edmund Malone there. He's waiting for the post. He's brought this document from Stratford to.

London to his study.

And he sits there with that one document and transcribes it and copies it out. And now it would be the work of the moment to get it electronically. You'll be able to deal with it much more rapidly.

So there are advantages, there are new possibilities.

I think poor historians like us in that field. Yeah.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Well, thank you so much for sharing these discoveries with us. They are utterly fascinating, and it's been a real treat. Thank you.

[Dr. Matthew Steggall]

Thank you. Thank you for talking to Ian. Thanks.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

If you enjoyed this episode, you might enjoy some of our other episodes on Shakespeare. We've done a few. There's Shakespeare's daughter, Judith, with Professor Grace Tiffany.

[H]

I like the fact that we don't know very much about her or her brother or her family. I mean, we just kind of know the raw outlines of births and deaths and what their names were, and the rest is a blank slate. And that's good if you're writing fiction. And the way that I did that was imagining a connection between her and her father, wherein she had inherited her father's gift for imagination. Perhaps not quite his literary talent, but just his imaginative tendency. And I thought it'd be fun to have her just inventing all kinds of imaginative games, partly based on what they knew about what her father had written and just sort of cavorting in the Forest of Arden and her drafting her brother to play these different roles.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

There's Hamnet with the novelist Maggie o' Farrell.

[I]

What does it mean for someone to take the name of his dead son and use it for a play? And the main character and the. Of course, the ghost, not forgetting, because the ghost and the prince have the same name. What does that mean? It has to be important. You know, nobody would make that decision, likely. And of course, there is the source text, which they think was a Danish play called Amlet, which, of course, there's an echo in that name. But essentially, those names, Hamlet and Hamnet, are interchangeable in Paris records of the time, because, of course, spelling was a lot less stable in the 16th century. But what does it mean? What is the significance of the name? So I always knew that I wanted to write about it, but I did sort of veer away from it. I think I wrote three other books instead of writing Hamlet. I guess I can't do it. But I was reading at the time a lot of works of scholarship, biography, about Shakespeare. And so there was the incredible scholarship that we know about him and the facts that we know about him. And then there was this kind of fictional mind of my own coming at it from fiction. And then, of course, there's the plays. So in a sense, it was this kind of. Of tripartite triumvirate of influences at work on the book as I was beginning it.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And most recently, the Shakespeare's first playhouse with Dr. Daniel Swift.

[J]

What becomes clear very quickly is both that it's possible to make an enormous amount of money from this playhouse. London's growing population wants to be entertained. There are people willing to pay to go and see plays. And so on that level, the idea of building this playhouse is a brilliant idea. But what becomes equally clear at the same time is it's a terrible way to make money because the playhouse is constantly closed down. The city authorities dislike playhouses because they're places of idleness whenever there's an outbreak of the plague, which happens regularly, you know, we know about the famous great outbreaks, but there are, there are regular smaller outbreaks, then the playhouses are closed down. They can't play during Lent. There are all sorts of times of the year they're not allowed to play. So what always happens with the theatre, and I think is true perhaps of the entertainment industry more broadly, which is that there are periods of amazing profit making and then there are periods of debt and penury. And it's this movement between those two that seems to me to drive everyone in this story a little bit insane because they look at the playhouse and they think it could be making so much money and it never quite does. And it's the mismatch between those two things that both animates people to keep on investing money building playhouses and at the same time kind of undermines and diminishes everything they can possibly do.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit and to my producer Rob Weinberg, we are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas from subjects we can cover. So do drop us a [e-mail] and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors from History Hit.

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