Ever since William Shakespeare bequeathed his ‘second best bed’ to his wife Anne, the barely-veiled snub has been viewed as one of history’s greatest slights. But a new study suggests that the playwright was more thoughtful than his will implies. Using x-ray and infra-red technology, scientists at the National Archives and British Library, have studied the paper and ink of Shakespeare’s will to determine when it was written. They found that the ‘second-best bed’ clause was inserted around March 1616, just a month before Shakespeare’s death, when it is likely he knew his days were numbered. Scholars suggest that the fact he added in the addition so late proved that he truly loved his wife and was anxious to see she would be provided for after his death. His ‘best’ bed would have stayed with the house, which was inherited by his daughter Susanna. Dr Amanda Bevan, Legal Records Specialist at The National Archives, said: "Some people think the corrections and additions were mistakes or afterthoughts but as we can now date some of these to March 1616 it makes these last minute gifts more poignant.
“He may have known he was dying in March and added these personal items for family and friends to what had been up until that point a very business-like document. “The second best bed was certainly not a slight on Anne as the best bed would have stayed with his house.” Conservators spent found months removing the heavy paper backing on which the will had been mounted to return the document’s appearance closer to its original state. Experts at the British Library then carried out multi-spectral imaging of the will, exposing the manuscript to ultraviolet, visible and infrared rays to pick up images not visible to the human eye. The results indicate that page two was drafted at a different time to pages one and three disproving the theory the will was written in one sitting. Dr Katy Mair, Early Modern Records Specialist at The National Archives, said: “It appears he was concerned about his financial legacy and that of his family throughout his life, as shown by the redrafting of his will.
“Shakespeare was a savvy businessman as well as a successful playwright and initial findings from this new research will continue to help shape our understanding of the man.” Dr Cordelia Rogerson, Head of Conservation at the British Library said: "Multi-spectral imaging is a powerful technique we use in the British Library conservation centre to apply to manuscripts revealing erased text, under drawings and subtle differences in material composition, as was the case with Shakespeare's will. “It is a non-destructive technique that captures data across the electromagnetic spectrum. Not limited to the visible frequency, it works from ultraviolet to infrared wavelengths meaning the final composite image can capture details not visible to the naked eye. An entire object or just selected parts can be imaged. "We cannot always predict what will be discovered but Shakespeare's will is an excellent example of the possibilities of multi spectral imaging allowing new interpretations and understanding of how a manuscript was created."
This April marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and the will is currently on display at By me William Shakespeare: A life in writing, at Somerset House.Britain’s most famous playwright William Shakespeare left his wife their 'second best bed' in his will. The Bard’s 1616 will also reveals how he left £150 to each of his daughters, more than £380,000 today. The playwright’s final wishes for the elaborately decorated four-poster are among the publication of the most comprehensive collection of probate records spanning nearly five centuries of history. The wills of Jane Austen and Sir Francis Drake, are also being published online for the first time. It is the most comprehensive collection of its kind, covering 1384 to 1858, details assets, occupation and the standard of living of the dead. Pride and Prejudice author Austen left most of her £800 (now about £60,000) assets to her sister Cassandra. She also bequeathed £50 to brother Henry and another £50 to a former family nurse.
Miriam Silverman of Ancestry.co.uk, which is publishing the collection, said: "These probate records provide fascinating insight into the final fortunes of some of our nation's most famous names, right down to who should get their bed. "They are an incredibly valuable family history resource, covering a period in history from which few official documents remain." The records reveal that Drake had a social conscience and cared about the less fortunate. Having plundered Spanish naval vessels and earned a fortune during his adventures in the Americas, he left £40 to the “poore people” of the town and parish of Plymouth in 1596 – the equivalent of £150,000 today. Politician William Pitt the Elder, who died in 1778, left £3,500 to his eldest son William, but only half that, the equivalent of about £1 million, to son James. German composer George Frideric Handel died in 1759 and left £600, around £90,000 today, for a monument of himself in Westminster Abbey. In 1626 scientist and author Sir Francis Bacon willed the bulk of his estate to his staff.
His servant Robert Halpeny was bequeathed the equivalent of £800,000 on top of provisions for hay, firewood and timber, while worker Stephen Paise received what would now be £700,000 and a bed. The records may have additional notes on the deceased person’s occupation, property and overall standard of living. The original data is held at The National Archives and some of the earliest wills in the collection are for boys as young as 14 and girls from 12. This changed in 1837 when the judiciary decided that both genders must be over 21 to have a will approved.William Shakespeare had many titles. He was a playwright, a poet, an actor, a businessman; he was a husband, a father and a grandfather. He was also, controversially, the owner of at least two beds. Which is where things get juicy. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in 1582. she was 26 and pregnant. There are few records of their married life, save for a few public documents related to their marriage and their three children.
Shakespeare spent most of his life in London while Hathaway remained in their hometown of Stratford-on-Avon, and some scholars believe the Bard had an unhappy marriage — even that he slept around. Aside from speculative readings of his literary work, one lone scrap of historical evidence raises these questions: his will. In that document, Shakespeare left the majority of his estate to his oldest daughter, Susanna, and her male heirs. To Hathaway, referred to only as “my wife,” he left a single item, “the second-best bed.” What exactly is the second-best bed? Well, in the simplest of terms, it’s the second-best bed. Presumably there was another bed in the house that was better; presumably there were other beds that were worse. Charles Knight’s 1865 biography of Shakespeare took this line — again, the will’s only reference to Hathaway — as proof the marriage was an unhappy one. “The dates of the births of his children,” Knight wrote, “compared with that of his removal from Stratford, the total omission of his wife's name in the first draft of his will, and the bitter sarcasm of the bequest by which he remembers her afterwards, all prove beyond a doubt both his separation from the lady early in life, and his unfriendly feeling towards her at the close of it.”
As with anything to do with Shakespeare, it’s usually irresponsible to make any conclusion “beyond a doubt.” Given the absence of documentary evidence, Knight’s take is a blatant projection of his own biases — a fine enough literary interpretation, sure, but a terrible historical one. Lena Cowen Orlin, a Professor of English at Georgetown University and Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America, argues that such emotional readings of the bequest are usually unfounded. “Biographies of Shakespeare are written by literary scholars who have, to one degree or another, taken the poems and plays as autobiographical,” Orlin told Van Winkle’s. “For example, when one piece of documentary evidence surfaced centuries ago indicating that Anne Hathaway was eight years older than her husband, Thomas Quincy then went to Twelfth Night and saw Orsino’s line that a man should have a younger wife — and assumed that reflected Shakespeare’s autobiographical regret about his marriage.”
Like an English major cherry-picking passages to support a thesis, scholars like Knight overlook the overwhelming complexity of Shakespeare’s work. “When you read the plays or the poems, you can prove whatever you want,” Orlin said. “Shakespeare was in the business of creating characters and creating imaginative lives for all those characters. I think that to assume he saw himself in Orsino, as opposed to any other character, is indefensible.” Orlin, who became interested in Shakespeare’s will while she was poring through thousands of Tudor wills for another project, feels that it is similarly misguided to impute too much meaning into the second-best bed. The fact is, beds — best or worst — played a key role in the Tudor household. “They’re probably the most important piece of furniture,” she said. “They’re more expensive than tables and chairs, they’re big, they have a lot of wood. And this is before banks, so people didn’t have a lot of places to put cash.
Where their discretionary wealth tended to be was in stocks of linens, and it was beds that had linens.” Naturally it was important for a prosperous man like Shakespeare to carefully assign property to his heirs. But the language of wills, Orlin cautioned, is dispassionate rather than loaded with subtext. “When I was reading a lot of wills from the period,” she said, “I came across so many references to beds that were the ‘second-best’ or the ‘next-best’ or the ‘fourth-best’ or the ‘worst’ that I realized it was a really common language… it’s just a way of identifying a bed. If you have two beds, one’s the best bed; then you call the other the second-best or the worst, depending on how fond you are of superlatives.” What, then, to make of the will’s apparent indifference toward Hathaway? As Knight points out, Shakespeare mentions her only once, and not even by name; was he intentionally cutting her out of his estate? Orlin explained that under English law, this could not possibly have been the case.