Shakespeare's will

[a] The document has been studied for details of his personal life, for his opinions, and for his attitudes towards his two daughters, Susanna and Judith, and their respective husbands, John Hall and Thomas Quiney.

I William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwickshire gent., in perfect health & memory God be praised, do make & ordain this my last will & testament in manner & form following.

That is to say first, I commend my Soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping & assuredly believing through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour to be made partaker of life everlasting.

[5] To his daughter Judith he bequeathed £100 (equivalent to £20,000 in 2023)[6] "in discharge of her marriage porcion"; another £50 if she was to relinquish the Chapel Lane cottage; and, if she or any of her children were still alive at the end of three years following the date of the will, a further £150, of which she was to receive the interest but not the principal.

It is an interlinear addition that was written with such a shaky hand, on a line that weaves up and down, and so scribbled that it took a century for scholars to finally decipher the words.

Germaine Greer suggests that the bequests were the result of agreements made at the time of Susanna's marriage to Dr Hall: that she (and thus her husband) inherited the bulk of Shakespeare's estate.

[10] John Heminges, Henry Condell and Richard Burbage were Shakespeare's colleagues, fellow actors, and founding shareholders of the Globe Theatre.

[11] Stanley Wells and others have wondered if that bequest represented a kind of pact for the three men to create and publish an edition of Shakespeare's collected plays.