John Shakespeare’s “Spiritual Testament” Is Not John Shakespeare’s

Extract

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.¹ 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; and second, that its most likely creator is arguably Joan Shakespeare Hart (1569–1646), Shakespeare’s sister.

I. The Document

The existence of the “Spiritual Testament” was first recorded on June 14, 1784, when John Jordan (1746–1809) of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote a letter to the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine.² Jordan, an impoverished wheelwright whose formal schooling had not gone beyond the age of ten, seems an unlikely correspondent for that magazine, but he harbored literary ambitions: he wrote poetry and local history, though he is chiefly remembered for the unverified tales about Shakespeare he related to visiting tourists, and for occasional amateurish acts of Shakespeare falsification. Jordan’s claims, in this letter and in subsequent statements, were that on April 29, 1757, a man named Joseph Moseley had been retiling the roof of the former Shakespeare property on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon—then in the ownership of the Hart family, descendants of Shakespeare’s sister Joan Hart—and that he had found, between the rafters and the tiling, an incomplete manuscript document.³ Moseley had kept it, showing it to some of his neighbors as a curiosity, and had recently given it to Jordan, in whose possession it now remained, available for inspection by any gentleman who wished to visit. Jordan hoped to publish a transcription of the document in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The editors declined to publish the transcription, thinking (according to Jordan) that the document was spurious.