The Will of Will

In a previous post, Literary Manuscripts in the Digital Age, I referred to the will of William Shakespeare. A transcription of the will, published in Charles Williams’s abridgment of Edmund Chambers’s A Short Life of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1933), is available here.

The editor’s notes provide some information about the record itself as well as a glimpse of the process of editing historical manuscripts. For an interesting recent article on this latter topic, see Megan Marshal, “The Impossible Art of Deciphering Manuscripts,” Slate, February 8, 2008, available from: http://www.slate.com/id/2183903.

Image: Detail from Shakespeare’s funerary monument, Holy Trinity Church, Stratford Upon Avon, England, available from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:ShakespeareMonument_cropped.jpg.