Shakespeare’s Forged Will, 1790–1931

This essay describes a now-lost forged document which took the form of an explicitly Catholic rewriting of William Shakespeare’s will. First recorded in 1820, it was for some decades the version of the will actually seen by visitors to Stratford-upon-Avon. It featured at the edge of many nineteenth-century arguments about Shakespeare and Catholicism, in Britain and around Europe, before being “rediscovered” in 1901, at which point it made headlines worldwide. Thereafter, though, it was quickly and completely forgotten. Partially transcribed by three early viewers, this forged document is a fascinating case study in Shakespearean appropriation, as its long and hitherto unexplored life connects the Stratford activities of John Jordan, forger-poet, and Mary Hornby, curator of Shakespeare’s relics; the Protestant “cult of Shakespeare” in Victorian Britain, and its continental equivalent, the project to naturalize him as a Catholic European; and the global newsworthiness of Shakespeare in the media ecosystem of the early twentieth century. Its creation, and its afterlife, can be thought of, the essay will argue, as Shakespeare fandom.