Sebastian Westcott’s moral interlude The Marriage of Wit and Science opens with its protagonist, the personification of Wit, seeking a remedy for a personal problem.Footnote 1 He explains to his mother, Nature, that he is both physically pained and mentally distraught because of his unfulfilled love for Lady Science. Wit’s potential as the embodiment of human intelligence apparently cannot be fulfilled without uniting with Science. Nature recognizes Wit’s need for a ‘perelesse brayne’ (sig. A2r) and promises to help ‘knit that knot’ between her son and Science, so that Wit may attain a true ‘love of knowledge’ or scientia (sig. A3r). To ensure that Wit achieves this goal, Nature blesses Wit with ‘all such gifts as nature can bestow … Take therewithal this childe, to wait upon thee still: / A bird of mine, some kin to thee: his name is Will’ (sig. A4r). Nature presents the faculty of will as an essential means by which an individual may acquire knowledge, and Will’s actions are shown to be fundamental to the didactic objectives of the play. Will acts as a dutiful companion by guiding Wit through a process of reformation that is necessary for his eventual union with Science, yet Wit is initially unsure of what help Will can provide as his attendant. When Will first appears, Wit asks him, ‘What service canst thou do?’ Will offers a simple but suggestive response to this question, stating that he can perform ‘All things forsooth, sir’ (sig. A4r). Wit and Will’s seemingly innocuous exchange in this little-studied text exposes two crucial issues that have still to be answered in detail: What purpose does the concept of the will serve in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English plays, and to what extent was the human will thought to be able to perform ‘all things’?
The Will in English Renaissance Drama offers a response to these important questions by exploring the prominence that the expression of the will took in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, from lesser-known sixteenth-century interludes to the now-canonical comedies and tragedies of the early seventeenth century. Examining neglected occasional entertainments like Westcott’s The Marriage of Wit and Science alongside material produced for the commercial stage is crucial if we are to develop a more nuanced picture of how Renaissance plays reflected upon and queried the societal norms of the age.Footnote 2 Audiences in London’s private and public playing spaces regularly encountered, as Jean Howard describes, ‘fictions that directly addressed the conditions of social change and dislocation occurring around them’.Footnote 3 In this period of intense demographic growth and cultural development the fact that the operation of the will dictated the nature of one’s existence remained a fixed reality of life. While the faculty of the will was largely responsible for our actions, God’s divine will determined our fate. Considering the reasons for and consequences of both human and divine willing was an understandably key concern of English playwrights, who portrayed it to be a volatile aspect of the soul associated with both self-control and self-destructive habits.
Another way in which the faculty of the will was shown to hold sway over a theatrical character’s life was through the last will and testament. Last wills, as their very names suggest, represent textual expressions of a testator’s internal will, recording an individual’s final wishes and the goods they wished to leave behind. These documents commonly allowed for dramatic testators to control the lives of their beneficiaries, bearing witness to and extending a character’s will into a future beyond their anticipated death. Both benevolent and malevolent testators used the last will and testament to impose their own will over families, friends, and foes. In sum, the expression of the faculty of the will shaped the nature of the last will and testament, which then directly influenced the wills of others. We can see this idea in action when Portia despondently remarks in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1600), ‘I may neither choose who I would nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father’.Footnote 4 Renaissance playwrights frequently depicted the last will and testament as an immensely influential document that frustrated the desires and inhibited the freedom of those caught in its wake. Producing a dramatic history of the will thus demands an assessment of the correlation that is established between willing and will-making in the period’s plays. This book elucidates the role that the performance of the will took in determining the conditions of one’s life and legacy by examining the relationship between these immaterial and material forms of will. Determining the function that the will takes as a faculty of the soul, as a personified character, and as a legal document across the extant Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic canon is key to this objective.
The broad purpose of my study is to show how deeply invested playwrights were in exploring the consequences of willing and will-making at a time where types of personal, testamentary, and divine will shaped the political and religious structure of English society. Considering what influence wills held over the imagined lives of dramatic characters allowed playwrights a compelling means by which to question why we do the things we do, and what could or should occur because of the choices we make. What I emphasize throughout this book is that the faculty of the will and the documentary will were commonly depicted as instruments of self and social regulation, and both these forms of will took a key role in determining human fate. English playwrights consistently framed the lives of their characters through a struggle to achieve one’s will, in tandem with (or despite) another’s will. I also detail how the imagined profits associated with gaining control over the internal will or a patriarch’s last will and testament made both forms of will almost irresistibly enticing sites of temptation. These types of wills frequently functioned to expose the tragic limitations that were thought to govern human ambition, as well as the inequitable systems of power that ordered society. The expression of the will (as the motive faculty and as a legal document) helped reveal the limits of an individual’s ability to resist the detrimental lure of their own desires, the political authority of patriarchs, and the supposed will of God. Pure or unimpeded self-determination was a remote fantasy for many Renaissance writers. The hierarchies of political authority and frameworks of moral justice that structured many plays, be they classical or Christian, suggest that there was always predominant will that took precedence over all others. One will to rule them all, so to speak.
The overarching claim of this book is that dramatists consistently focus on the disastrous consequences of willing and will-making, while simultaneously emphasizing the vital role that wills played in defining one’s sense of identity and self-worth. English Renaissance drama is preoccupied with reflecting on the influence that wills exert over human life. My primary aim is to show that a double bind typifies the theatrical portrayal of the will both as a text and as an internal faculty of the soul. Wills took an essential part in determining the course and quality of one’s life, but a multitude of personal grievances and social inequalities stemmed from their enactment. I chart the presence of this duality through the work of Elizabeth Cary, Ulpian Fulwell, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare, and beyond, to show how consistently wills (both material and immaterial) governed the fundamental principles of an individual’s existence, posthumous legacy, and afterlife. I demonstrate that personal, moral, and social stability was customarily achieved in the period’s plays through the control or condemnation of the will.
The story I tell in this book does not, however, ignore the secular and religious benefits associated with the expression of the will as a personal faculty, a personified character, and an authoritative text. A secondary aim of this book is to establish how wills could perform good ‘service’ for the individual and society in English Renaissance plays, within and without conventional boundaries of theology and morality.Footnote 5 As I show in relation to the actions of Will in The Marriage of Wit and Science and elsewhere, the notoriously fallible faculty of the will could be relied upon to benefit the human subject. Moreover, where acts of unrestrained willing were commonly punished in the period’s imaginative literature, some plays explored the idea that following the transgressive impulses of the will could lead to liberty rather than destruction. Wills could be good, do good, and even help achieve the relative good for malevolent individuals.
Tracing the constructive and destructive influence that wills were thought to have allows this book to offer a fresh perspective on the status that the faculty and testamentary will took as established cultural phenomena in English Renaissance drama. I begin by assessing the role the faculty of the will took as a benevolent personified character in early Elizabethan plays, before moving on to examine the morally subversive potential ascribed to the will in later theatrical entertainments. The two chapters that form the first half of this book establish the dramatic history of the will, the literary conventions associated with its enactment, and what we may learn from the conflicts associated with its performance. The findings from this section feed into the latter half of this study, which elucidates how (through Tudor interludes to Jacobean comedies) last wills and testaments primarily functioned as tools of social regulation whereby testators may enforce their will over the wills of the living. I focus on the interpersonal conflicts that arise through the creation and execution of last wills, and show how dramatists used these documents to interrogate the hierarchy of wills that govern the world. These four main chapters support my main argument, concerning the essential role that the expression of the will took in defining the conditions of one’s life and death in English Renaissance plays.
First, I think it would be fruitful to outline how my investigation develops upon work already produced on this topic. To do so, we must address the presence of the most dominant will in the contemporary scholarly and literary landscape: Shakespeare.
Fill It Full with Wills!
‘Will’, taken from the Old English willa, is a densely polysemic word. In early modern England, this word was closely associated with ‘notions of erotic appetite, sexual and procreative organs, aggression … wish, whim, inclination, volition, conscious intention, purpose, and bequest or testament co-exist at varying levels of potentiality’, as David Willbern summarizes.Footnote 6 The will, as a part of the individual that directs voluntary action, influenced how one’s general intentions, sexual appetite, and posthumous desires were popularly conceived. It was, in other words, popularly thought of as the root of our actions and intentions.Footnote 7 Willbern’s mention of ‘bequest or testament’ also acts as a useful reminder of the close association between the internal power of the will and the last will and testament in this period. Take, for instance, Henry Swinburne’s landmark legal treatise of 1591, A Briefe Treatise of Testaments and Last Willes, where he states that ‘A testament is a just sentence of our will; touching that we would have done after our death’.Footnote 8 Last wills were understood to be texts that recorded and preserved the personal will of their testators. Swinburne’s text shows one important way in which these two varieties of will were deeply intertwined as cultural phenomena. The expression of one’s internal will lay at the foundation at what the testamentary will was meant to achieve.
Accounting for the qualities and purpose of the faculty of the will was a crucial concern for early modern writers because, as Kathryn Schwarz notes, it was perceived as ‘a momentous faculty, encompassing the possibility of salvation, the possession of autonomy, the acceptance or disavowal of accountability for civil and religious predicaments’.Footnote 9 For Joel Altman, the ‘refractory’ quality of the fallen will (being simultaneously drawn towards earthly and divine love) acted as a ‘governing force’ in the soul and, thereby, directly informed how selfhood was conceived of in the period.Footnote 10 Such studies have established the role that willing, will-making, and will-power took in influencing the construction and dissolution of agency, identity, and sexual desire in Shakespeare’s oeuvre.Footnote 11 I am particularly indebted to Schwarz’s analysis of the role that the will takes in both constituting and dismantling the notion of human subjectivity in Shakespeare’s work, and how literary acts of ‘feminine will’ help expose the logic of patriarchal, ‘heterosocial’ order in early modern society.Footnote 12 It is hopefully easy to see how forms of will could touch upon many, if not ‘all things’ (to echo Will from TMWS), yet a conspicuous gap remains in contemporary scholarship.Footnote 13 There have been few attempts to chart the influence that the faculty or testamentary will took as dramatic phenomena beyond Shakespeare.
We are ‘rich in Will’ in one respect, and analyses of Shakespeare’s sonnets 135 and 136 have been especially productive in demonstrating the place that the will takes as a constituent principle of identity in early modern writing.Footnote 14 Readers of these poems are presented with ‘Will in overplus’ (135.2), due to Shakespeare’s exploitation of the multivalent signification of ‘will’ as common noun, proper noun, and verb. These two sonnets are stuffed ‘full with wills’ (136.6). Here, as Bradin Cormack remarks, the polysemic puns on will conflate the speaker (Will) with ‘the mistress’s capacity for choice (will), even as that faculty collapses into the sexual subject’s (Will’s) appetite (will) for the sexual object (will)’.Footnote 15 The close association constructed between these interrelated kinds of will helps convey the speaker’s diffuse sense of self, as well as their desperate attempt to rationalize an imagined union with their beloved. The fluid boundaries between subject and object portrayed in these sonnets do not communicate ‘a mutuality attained, a satisfying recompense for loss, or a queer dispersal of personhood’, but rather ‘register the effort required to overcome … separation, autonomy, and difference’ in Valerie Traub’s terms.Footnote 16 The speaker’s desire to have their ‘one will’ (135.12) become part of their addressee’s ‘one Will’ (135.14) shows that this unfulfilled fantasy of coexistent identity is crucially delimited by the suggestive master signifier of Shakespeare’s name. Our own scholarly attention likewise has been bound up in the works of one Will.
Despite the ‘endless reiteration of difference’ that Shakespeare’s wills signify in the Sonnets, critics have still to address the prevalence that forms of willing take in the period beyond Will’s monolithic will.Footnote 17 My work is deeply indebted to the pioneering work produced on the place that wills take as disruptive forces and sites of political contestation in Shakespeare’s plays, as famously seen in the ‘double knavery’ of Iago’s will in Othello, and in Mark Antony’s famous manipulation of Caesar’s last will in Act Three Scene Two of Julius Caesar.Footnote 18 The dramatic history of wills that I offer in this book considers Shakespeare’s plays without centring his work. The attempt to gain control over the textual and internal faculty of the will was an integral part of early modern life for many people, and this book establishes how these types of wills were central to how personal agency, morality, and salvation were conceived of by an array of English Renaissance dramatists. Instead of being placed front and centre, Shakespeare’s portrayal of testamentary dilemmas and malevolent acts of willing are integrated into a broader picture of the era’s dramatic conventions.
My exploration of how plays think through the cultural and dramatic significance of the will chimes with Frank Whigham’s Seizures of the Will but diverges from the emphasis he places on erotic willing in significant ways. Whigham contends that the domination or ‘seizure’ of lovers’ wills shapes the politics of interpersonal desire, as well as conveying the ‘systematic challenges or transformations of deployments of gender, kinship, and service relations’ at work in a variety of non-Shakespearean plays.Footnote 19 While Whigham identifies that ‘historicist analysis must engage the conscious and concrete utility of the category of the will for early modern England’, he focuses on the social and erotic taboos associated with the faculty of the will in non-Shakespearean plays, without attending to the category of the testamentary will.Footnote 20 My study does not ignore the erotic politics of willing, though it does also seek to establish the important role that wills and testaments played in defining the capacity for ‘self-definition and self-determination’ as documents that facilitate the transferral of property.Footnote 21
Wills and testaments have formed a rich site of interpretation in the reappraisal of England’s economic and social landscape, from garnering new insights into the spiritual and physical labour of women’s lives, to understanding the significance that livestock took in the domestic world of England’s rural population.Footnote 22 These documents record how goods (from cutlery to cows) were posthumously distributed among families and broader social networks, while offering crucial insights into collective and individual attitudes towards death and personal piety during the religious turbulence of pre- and post-Reformation England.Footnote 23 A similar level of interest in the role that last wills took as part of the performative and intellectual apparatus of English Renaissance plays has yet to flourish in literary studies.
Last wills, as Michelle Dowd notes, provided ‘a valuable index of the personal and affective contingences that regularly modify patrilineal inheritance’ and were a ‘vital part of wealth and property distribution through the period’.Footnote 24 Dowd’s impressive The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage does not focus on how plays use last wills to deliberate on contemporary fears associated with the socioeconomics of inheritance practices. Luke Wilson’s insightful Theaters of Intention similarly recognizes the importance of the ‘elastic’ concept of the will in early modern culture, but focuses principally on ‘the language of intention’ in the two disciplines of ‘the theater and the law’ without addressing the function that last wills took as legal documents in dramatic culture.Footnote 25 Despite the recent interest in the dramatic depiction of inheritance law, few critics have offered pointed, extended analyses of wills and will-making.Footnote 26
Of the many recent analyses of early modern legal culture and literature, Gary Watt’s Shakespeare’s Acts of Will does the most to recover the dramatic history of the last will’s presence on stage by focusing on the work of Shakespeare. Watt convincingly determines how ‘Shakespeare appreciated the drama inherent in the performance of a last will and the drama of legal testamentary language’, and that the use of last wills in Shakespeare’s plays illuminates how ‘the arts of rhetoric … informed legal practice and theatrical practice in Elizabethan England’.Footnote 27 Like Watt, I am interested in the performance of last wills and testaments in Renaissance drama, though I do not concentrate on exploring the correlation between the professionalization of the law and the presence of legal thought in English literature. My investigation does, nevertheless, build upon observations made by Lorna Hutson, Holger Syme, and many others to determine the representational and legal authority afforded to the last will and testament as a dramatic device.Footnote 28 In doing so, I offer further consideration of the trend that Katherine Maus briefly touches upon, wherein English Renaissance playwrights ‘rarely if ever depict the instrumental … drafting of wills’.Footnote 29 What I show is that dramatists seem less interested in engaging with the intricacies of early modern property law than they are with the way that wills and testaments act as sites of authority from which testators may influence the lives of their beneficiaries. My book elucidates how last wills functioned as catalysts of interpersonal discord in the drama of the age, due to the array of familial obligations associated with their creation and enactment. I attend to the role that last wills take as tokens of former human presence that both signify and enforce the will of their testator.
Accounting for the part that last wills play in realizing the present and posthumous will of dramatic testators necessitates an engagement with their status as memorial objects. Clothing, commonplace texts, emblem books, funeral monuments, paintings, and wax tablets have been recognized as prominent elements of the memory arts that informed early modern theatrical practice.Footnote 30 We have, nevertheless, still to address how figurations of the will preserved, perverted, or extinguished forms of memory. If the ‘materials of theatre’ truly do constitute ‘the materials of memory’, then it would be apt to pay closer attention to ways in which the will and testament acts as a mnemonic device.Footnote 31 A unique, but important, part of the theatre’s language of memory is displayed in the function that the will and testament takes as a vehicle of remembrance, whose influence over systems of kinship and individual autonomy was represented in concurrence with its vulnerability to duplication, exploitation, erasure, and misinterpretation. Investigating this aspect of the will’s performance offers a new way of understanding the important role that wills take as memorial objects and instruments of sociopolitical regulation in English Renaissance drama.
In sum, The Will in English Renaissance Drama charts the dramatic presence the will takes as a faculty of the soul, a personified character, and a document. It establishes the rich and diverse theatrical history of the will through four main chapters, each of which supports the book’s core argument by explaining the relative influence that forms of the will took in shaping an individual’s relationship to the past, the present, and future. Wills, in sum, were thought to influence almost ‘all things’ throughout the age.Footnote 32 Since the conceptualization of the will as an internal faculty directly affected the way that personified and documentary types of will were presented in theatrical entertainments, it is necessary to take some time explaining how the faculty of the will was defined as a mutable part of the soul.
What Was the Will?
The terms will and willing have proved vital in the historical attempt to define the nature of action, freedom, and divine providence. One key feature of debates on these topics is the notion that the will exists as ‘a drive that expresses itself in human action’ and that such a ‘drive’ may play a key part in determining our existence.Footnote 33 Brad Inwood proposes that the theorization of this ‘drive’ (from the Pre-Socratics onwards) has been shaped by two broad categories of definition: first, that the will signifies a discrete faculty of the mind or soul, which we have knowledge of and are able to exercise; second, that the will signifies the collective operation of a number of pre-existing powers or abilities (a blend of rationality, desire, choice, wishing, and the working of the intellect or reason) which seem to suggest the presence of something called ‘will’.Footnote 34 Inwood describes this first definition as traditional will (the discrete will), and the second as summary will (the composite will).Footnote 35
The genesis of the so-called ‘traditional’ theory of the will is conventionally associated with St. Augustine, who synthesizes a variety of classical Greek and Roman notions of choice, desire, and intention into a concept of will (voluntas) that acts as the source of deliberative action.Footnote 36 Albrecht Dihle describes Augustine as having ‘invented’ this notion of will, providing in it a new ‘philosophical description of what the Biblical tradition taught about man’s fall, salvation, and moral conduct’.Footnote 37 We can see an example of this contribution when Augustine addresses what it means to live a commendable life in chapter 6, Book 14 of The City of God. After deliberating upon those who fail to live by the spirit of God and how the soul may lead an individual into sinful action, Augustine reflects on the quality of the will (‘De qualitate voluntatis humanae’) and the influence it takes in determining one’s mental and emotional temperament.Footnote 38 Augustine states that if the will is perverse or incorrect (‘si perversa est’), then one’s thoughts will consequently be perverse; likewise, if the will is correct or just (‘si autem recta est’), then one’s thoughts will be praiseworthy.Footnote 39 He then concludes that the will directly informs all of the mind’s dispositions (‘affectiones animi’): ‘Voluntas est quippe in omnibus, immo omnes nihil aliud quam voluntates sunt’, which Philip Levine translates as ‘The will is indeed involved in them all, or rather, they are all no more than acts of will’.Footnote 40
Augustine’s conception of the will as a discrete, though operationally erratic and often self-defeating, power of the soul diverged in a new and important manner from classical theories of action.Footnote 41 Richard Sorabji explains that Augustine’s use of voluntas to denote an internal capacity that directs the actions we take is distinct from concepts derived from more ancient sources, such as: Aristotle’s notion of boulêsis (a rational desire of wishing, separate from but still controlled by our reason); Plato’s idea of thumos (desire for honour) as a type of internal inclination that does not oppose reason; the presentation of thelêma (intention or determined desire) to distinguish between man’s and God’s actions in the New Testament; Epictetus’s theory of prohairesis (deliberative choice) as a fundamental part of all forms of action; and Seneca’s use of voluntas (choice) to define an instinct that reason allows through its assent.Footnote 42 These latter concepts would be more closely associated with Inwood’s notion of the summary or composite will, since they are theories of voluntary action that are not solely reliant upon or defined by the function of a distinct internal faculty. Early modern writers engage with many of these pre-Augustinian theories of action, but discussions on the nature of decision-making usually take as foundational the idea that the will is a discrete part of the mind or soul.Footnote 43 Augustine’s notion of will as voluntas indelibly influences how the will and action is conceived hereafter; Renaissance discussions of the will have, by their very nature, Augustinian roots.Footnote 44
One genre where we may see the trace of this intellectual heritage is in the period’s language manuals, alvearies, and dictionaries. For instance, Thomas Elyot’s renowned Latin to English Dictionary of 1538 translates voluntas as ‘will’ (or ‘wylle’ in his 1542 Bibliotheca Eliotae).Footnote 45 John Baret’s later sixteenth-century lexicon gives its readers a more expansive range of definitions for this term: ‘Will, the: affection: minde. Voluntas’, as does Thomas Cooper’s entry for voluntas in Thesaurus Linguae Romanae & Britannicae: ‘will: affection: minde’.Footnote 46 The close correlation established between the will, mind, and affections here is indicative of the vocabulary used by many writers to think through how and why human individuals are moved to action.Footnote 47 Juan Luis Vives’s philosophical compendium An Introduction to Wisdome (1544) offers a fitting example of this circumstance, when he discusses the volatility of the will and the danger it poses to internal order:
wyll, is voide of reason, brute, fiers, cruell, more lyke a beaste, than a man, wherin dwelleth these motions whiche be named either affections, or perturbations … This is called the inferiour and viler parte, whereby we littell or nothinge, doo differ from beastes, at the leaste, we goo farre from god.Footnote 48
The will is said to be ‘viler’ than and ‘inferiour’ to the intellect, but despite being ‘brute’ and ‘voide of reason’ the will still held immense influence over our actions. Our ‘Wyt’ may teach ‘man’s wil what good is to be folowed’, yet the will ‘is of so great power that there is nothynge in the mynde’ that is not ‘forced to obey wyl, if she stand at strife, and wyl yield no part of her right to her adversarie’ (sig. C3r–v). A disobedient will may make us a ‘slave to the fonde affections’ and serve the ‘vyle carkeys’ of the body (sig. C3r). Since the will can overrule wit’s authority and throw ‘the order of nature’ (sig. C3r) into disarray, it must receive proper instruction from the wit. Our actions may take us ‘farre from god’ if this operational harmony is not achieved. Considering how the will should ideally function thus reveals the disparity between humanity and divinity, and the ease with which vile impulses may control us.
The operation of the will determines what we do and who we are. For this reason, theories of will played a fundamental part of the attempt by many early modern thinkers to understand the volatile nature of postlapsarian action and identity.Footnote 49 From Erasmus and Luther’s notorious print debate on the freedom of the will through the late 1520s, to the Synod of Dort’s posthumous condemnation of Jacob Arminius’s views on our relative ability to resist the grace of God in 1618, defining the nature of the human will helped mark intellectual and doctrinal boundaries across sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe.Footnote 50 It is hard to understate the influence that such debates concerning the relative freedom of the will to shape our life and afterlife had upon the early modern world. It is for this reason that Risto Saarinen proposes that ‘freedom of choice became one of the great discussion topics of the Reformation’, and Timothy Rosendale asserts that ‘the question of agency is the master issue of the Reformation’.Footnote 51 Formal deliberations on what we have the power to achieve, and the extent to which our choices are determined by personal circumstance and divine providence, were widespread in Elizabethan and Jacobean writing. A consideration of our ability to comply or resist the authority of God’s own will underpinned almost every literary discussion of human action. Rosendale rightly notes that ‘the agential subject that we consider so indispensable to humanity emerges … in the context of an inescapably powerful transcendent agent and causal system’, though few early modern writers ‘fully embrace the robust kind of determinism that denies that humans possess any meaningful agency whatsoever’.Footnote 52 Nevertheless, when considering our ability to be saved, a largely Calvinist interpretation of the will predominated. A ‘broad consensus that humans could not will their own salvation’ seemed to prevail, as Adrian Streete duly remarks – such a view ‘had been a pillar of Church orthodoxy in England since the 1570s at least’.Footnote 53
It is also important to recognize that this Calvinist interpretation of the will’s limited authority to shape our fate did not go uncontested. Anti-Calvinist ideas concerning human liberty were adopted by English writers, even before Arminius’s views on the fallen will’s ‘limited cooperation in salvation’ percolated through early seventeenth-century Europe.Footnote 54 Nicholas Tyacke has established that ‘the makings of a future Arminian party’ were already ‘discernible’ by the Hampton Court conference of 1604, even if Calvinist views concerning divine election and the irresistibility of God’s grace enjoyed ‘greater favour’ in James I’s reign than they had under Elizabeth I.Footnote 55 Peter Lake has demonstrated in a similar vein that ‘despite Calvinist predominance, there were anti-Calvinists in the Elizabethan and Jacobean church’: prominent Church of England ministers such as ‘[Richard] Hooker, [Samuel] Harsnet, and [Humphrey] Leech all challenged or appeared to challenge Calvinist orthodoxy under Elizabeth or James’.Footnote 56 Doctrinal divergence created a plurality of interpretations over the nature and function of human will which filtered through the period’s literature. What remained consistent was the presentation of the will as an imperfect faculty, being limited in its scope to direct us towards the good or salvation.
Although few Elizabethan and Jacobean plays openly repudiate the authority of divine providence or present the will as operating outside God’s influence, some playfully engage with the idea that the true nature of our willing may ultimately be inscrutable. Take, for instance, John Marston’s play What You Will (1607), when the self-knowingly erudite Lampatho wryly reflects on his own experience as a ‘scholler’ who, when looking for ‘the soule of man’ over ‘seaven use-full springs’, learned only ‘to doubt’.Footnote 57 Lampatho recounts that after pouring over ‘the old print of titled words’ from famed classical and Christian sources, he found himself ‘staggered’ by ‘whether’t had free will / Or no’ (sig. D2r). As Lampatho wracked his brains, his ‘spaniel slept’ and ‘at length he wak’d and yawn’d, and by yon sky, / For aught I know he knew as much as I’ (sig. D2r). This experience is instructive insofar as it leads Lampatho to a state of pseudo-Socratic ignorance (‘I know, I know naught’, sig. D2v), while also humorously paralleling his grasp of divine providence with that of a dog.Footnote 58 Even if both man and beast remain ignorant of the true nature of free will, only Lampatho remains concerned about ‘what course’ he should ‘persew’ in life (sig. D2v).
What is key to understanding the will’s received relationship to ‘the determinative divine operation of grace’ in the context of church doctrine is, as Richard Muller explains, that humans ‘act freely according to their nature’, but they ‘must be redeemed’ by the grace of God if the will is to choose the good.Footnote 59 Article Ten of the Church of England’s revised Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1571) provides a neat demonstration of this theological stance. We are told that the ‘condition of man after the fall of Adam’ means that ‘we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christe preventyng us, that we may have a good wyll’.Footnote 60 Both good will and good works stem from God’s grace, not human endeavour, since we are so tainted by the ‘fall’. While we possess a ‘libertie of will in humane actions and in civil duties’, as the renowned Reformed theologian William Perkins states in his posthumously published Treatise of Man’s Imaginations (1607), such deeds proceed ‘from a corrupt fountaine’.Footnote 61 All that we do flows from a tainted source. If the ‘libertie’ of our will is defined by this ‘corrupt’ origin, it is hard to picture how we could possess the ability to freely choose what we want or will. The will, in this respect, was thought to be restricted in its operational scope to human and ‘civil’ matters; it was free to act only according to our fallen state.Footnote 62 Since we do not possess the power to change this quality of our will, we cannot will otherwise. In this strain of thought, only grace and ‘the blessing of God’ may ‘cleanse the heart from evil thoughts, to restraine the will and affections from wicked delights’.Footnote 63 As the Church of England vicar John White would claim in The Way to the True Church (1608), it is only in ‘the smallest things’ that ‘our libertie is greatest, yet the will of God going before, determineth ours, that we can will no more than God pleaseth’.Footnote 64 The will, as determined by God, can only affect ‘humane actions tending to societie, and the outward gouernment of mans life’.Footnote 65 This is what White calls ‘naturall freewill, that he can voluntarily follow what his vnderstanding sheweth him, and apply himself thereunto by chusing or refusing’ (sig. T2v). We possess a freedom to choose, insofar as these choices pertain to civil matters: ‘but in spiritual things concerning the salvation of our soules, the case is otherwise’ (sig. T3r).
Reflecting on the relative capacity that the will had to either hinder or facilitate proper conduct was extremely common, not just in moral or theological tracts. Roger Ascham gives a succinct account of the importance of self-discipline in his seminal 1570 educational treatise The Scholemaster, where he argues that prospective students must strive for a purity of body and mind to ‘serve learning’ properly by ‘goodness of witte’ and a ‘readiness of will’.Footnote 66 Proper education is only possible once the mind and the will have been engaged, though the will is once again identified as the prime point of vulnerability in the human individual:
There be in man two special thinges: mans will, mans mynde. Where will inclineth to goodness, the mynde is bent to troth: where will is carried from goodness to vanitie, the mynde is sone drawne from troth to false opinion. And so, the readiest way to entangle the mynde with false doctrine, is first to induce the will to wanton living.
Where the will goes, the mind will follow, either to ‘goodness’ or ‘false doctrine’. This relationship is one that affords the ‘will’ a pivotal role in creating ‘troth’ or ‘false opinion’ in the ‘mynde’. No good may be produced when the ‘will is carried from goodness to vanitie’. If the will attends to the pleasures of the body, its actions would breed ‘wanton living’ and entangle the mind in false doctrine. One’s physical and mental states were incredibly vulnerable to the bifurcated, mutable potential of the will. As Andrew Escobedo notes, ‘our will gives us agency, but it remains unpredictable, inconsistently linked to our other faculties, regularly in need of discipline’.Footnote 68 Educating the will in the ways of truth and nobleness was presented as an unending task, and was not solely limited to young men whose wills, in Ascham’s view, were especially susceptible to ‘the subtle and secrete Papistes at home’ and ‘bawdie bookes … translated out of the Italian tongue’ (sig. I2r). One must ‘therefore suffer not vaine bookes to breede vanitie in mens willes, if you would have Goddes trothe take roote in mens myndes’ (sig. I4r). The fear that Ascham displays over the corruption of young men by the teachings of papists may seem peculiarly specific but it also serves to illustrate a broader approach that moral writers took to this topic. One lesson is simply not enough for the will – constant vigilance is needed to limit the threat of its wayward potential.
An attitude that was shared among early modern writers, in the midst of the ongoing debate concerning the relative efficacy and liberty of the will to direct the individual towards good action, was that the individual should strive to ‘follow the will of God, which is so good, so holy, so perfect’.Footnote 69 Acknowledging the sovereign good of God’s will should remind the individual of the subordinate place that their will takes in a universal hierarchy of willing. The immensely influential Reformed thinker and biblical translator William Tyndale states the case in plain terms in his famed exegesis on the Book of Matthew: ‘He that is willing to obey the will of God, understandeth the doctrine of Christ … To obey the will of God, is to seeke the glory of God’.Footnote 70 This sentiment is echoed in the later sermons of the Reformed preacher Henry Smith, where he pronounces that the ‘children of God’ are ‘distinguished in will … the faithfull labour to bring their will to Gods will, like Christ, which sayd; Not as I will, but as thou wilt’.Footnote 71 English devotional tracts regularly emphasized that one should obey the will of God in accordance with the precedent set by Christ, when he faced the inevitability of his death in the garden of Gethsemane. Take, for example, the stance that the Church of England clergyman Christopher Sutton adopts on this issue in his instructional manual Disce Vivere (‘how to live’): ‘He [Christ] subjected his will to the will of his father, saying, Situ vis, If thou wilt: which doth teach us to commend ourselves, & all our petitions, wholy to the will of God’.Footnote 72 We must all continue to be students of Christ and submit ourselves to the will of God, despite knowing that the unreliable and often incorrigible impulses facilitated by the will make this goal difficult to achieve. The reason or the intellect should, in this regard, guide the will towards the good.
There were several ways of explaining how the will assented or dissented from the guidance of the intellect, wit, or reason. For the most part, the ‘powers of contrariety and contradiction’ attributed to the ‘fallen will’ meant that it was commonly regarded as unable ‘to choose the good as willed by God’.Footnote 73 Even Richard Hooker, who notably assigns the will a certain amount of liberty to ‘bend our soules to the having or doing of that which they see to be good’ in his Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (1593), still emphasizes that the ‘object of will is that good which reason doth lead us to seek … reason is the director of mans will by discovering in action what is good’.Footnote 74 Hooker’s reflection on human action discloses another recurrent problem concerning the inherent ability of the will to ignore reason: ‘Reason therfore may rightly discerne the thing which is good, & yet the will of man not incline it selfe therunto, is oft as the prejudice of sensible experience doth oversway’ (sig. F1r).Footnote 75 The pleasures of sense experience draw us from God’s goodness, illustrating the dual capacity of the will to subvert as well as conform to the good.Footnote 76 Just as the soul is divided in its powers, the will itself is divided in its own operation, being able to ignore or deviate from the influence of ‘reason’. What further complicated this situation was that the will could also be distempered by the influence of the passions.
Thomas Wright’s renowned The Passions of the Mind in General (1604) cogently demonstrates how the will’s place as a rogue element in the soul could be exacerbated because of its vulnerability to the lure of earthly pleasures. Wright opens the expanded second edition of his treatise by stating that every text should aim for some kind of ‘good’, whether it is to ‘instruct the wit with doctrine’ or ‘move the will to virtue’, and that his own goal is ‘the chief object that all the ancient philosophers aimed at … nosce teipsum, know thy self’.Footnote 77 To understand the self, for Wright, we must define the passions’ relationship to the will. This is particularly important since ‘the passions likewise augment or diminish the deformity of actuall sinnes, they blinde reason, they seduce the will, and therefore are speciall causes of sinne’ (sig. B1v). Wright further suggests that ‘brideling’ the ‘continual incursions’ made upon ‘the chiefest castell of his soule … the very witte and will’ can lead a ‘Christian’ to ‘enableth himselfe better to the service of God’ (sig. B3r). Here, Wright conceives of the soul as a unified and structurally sound edifice (this ‘castell’); however, the characteristics that Wright ascribes to the will serve to undermine the integrity of the soul’s constitution. In a later chapter, entitled ‘How Passions Seduce the Will’, Wright takes a familiar stance regarding the authority that the intellect, reason, or wit should hold over the will, when he remarks that ‘the will, which of its selfe, beeing blinde, and without knowledge, followeth that the wit representeth, propoundeth, and approveth as good’ (sig. E5r). The focus of the will is split between two contrary inclinations – ‘the one to follow reason, the other to content the senses’ (sig. E5v). Reason or wit should temper the errancy of the will and its susceptibility to the stirring of the passions.
Although Wright associates the will with an inherent unruliness, his treatise also presents the will as holding a great deal of responsibility to ensure the proper operation of the soul. Wright describes the will as the ‘governesse of the soule’ who, ‘being afrayde to displease sense’ ‘neglecteth the care she ought to have over it’ (sig. E5v).Footnote 78 The will has a tremendous influence upon shaping our actions and identity, though its capacity to rule effectively is undermined by its own shortcomings. Wright emphasizes that it may receive ‘some little bribe of pleasure’ from the passions which would undermine the legitimacy of its governance (sig. E5v). Wright then likens the will to an ‘uncareful magistrate’ whose weakness is exposed when it neglects the good of the commonwealth to ‘avoyde some particular men’s displeasure’ (sig. E5v). As a work whose expansion was in part ‘occasioned by the death of Queene Elizabeth’ (sig. A1r), it may be that Wright is drawing a parallel between the powerful but ‘uncareful’ female will and the late queen. In any case, appeasing these petitions leads to a state of internal turbulence, where the ‘passions make the soule to swell with pride and pleasure’ and ‘never let the soule be in quietness’ (sig. E6r). The will should govern and equally be governed to protect the soul from the molestation of inordinate passions, but contrary to the metaphor of the castle which Wright uses at the beginning of his investigation, the will lacks the defences to fully resist the negative influence of the passions. Wright’s own explanation of the vulnerability of the will and the threat it poses to internal order renders true internal harmony, by the scope of his own definitions, as an almost unfeasible prospect.
The received interpretation of the will as a distinct, mutable faculty of the soul in need of constant discipline informed how many early modern thinkers understood the nature of personal agency, morality, and salvation. This faculty was a central feature of the human subject’s postlapsarian identity. Its function, to echo Will in The Marriage of Wit and Science, seemed to touch upon ‘all things’, from defining the conditions of a person’s life, their relationship to God, and, as shown in Henry Swinburne’s influential A Briefe Treatise of Testaments and Last Willes, their posthumous legacy.Footnote 79 In his popular legal manual, Swinburne reminds the reader that the will and testament represents a textual reflection of our internal will and that, for this reason, ‘it is written, that the will or meaning of the testator is the Queene or Empresse of the testament … because the will dooth rule and governe the testament’.Footnote 80 Swinburne, unlike Wright, venerates the sovereign control that the feminized will may possess. He, furthermore, states that ‘the will therefore and meaning of the testator, ought before all things to bee sought for diligently’, and that ‘the testator ought to enjoy all liberty, and freedom in the making of his will’ (sig. C5v).Footnote 81 A last will and testament should act as a site to retain its testator’s true ‘will’ or ‘meaning’ that has been articulated in full liberty before their demise. Freedom of expression is essential for the proper transposition of a testator’s internal will. This account of the authority that the faculty of the will holds over the nature of this legal document stands in contrast to the orthodox reception of the will as a debased and constrained facet of human subjectivity, though Swinburne is more concerned with civil than ontological matters. His work nevertheless demonstrates how crucial forms of wills and willing were to the qualities and conditions of one’s life and death in the period. My investigation into the place that both immaterial and material wills take in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama shows why, to echo Swinburne, the ‘meaning’ of the will should be ‘sought for diligently’.
Last wills were crucial in defining the political and religious climate of early modern England. The Acts of Succession (1533–43/44), which eventually gave Henry VIII power ‘to assign the crown by letters patent or his last will’, circumvented the traditional rules concerning the transference of royal power and fuelled the dynastic crisis that followed Edward VI’s death.Footnote 82 Before Henry VIII’s supremacy, ‘medieval common law made little provision for the settlement of landed property, and none for the device of real estate by will’ outside the principles of patrimony.Footnote 83 Henry VIII even passed the Statute of Uses in 1536 to stop landowners distributing their freehold property to feoffees, subjecting them to ‘all the liabilities and disabilities of legal ownership; and worst of all, it took away from them the power of devising their lands’.Footnote 84 The implications of this statute were not popular. In 1540 the implementation of the Statute of Wills allowed the ‘testation of real property under common law’: from thereon in ‘[a]ll freehold land and two-thirds of land held by knight-service could be willed away … [o]ther property could be freely bequeathed according to the will of its owner’.Footnote 85 This did not mean that every landholder had absolute freedom to devise their whole estate by will. Many people were still restricted in practical terms by other practices such as entailment, whereby the inheritance of land was forcibly limited to descent through one’s immediate family. As John Baker writes, The Statute of Wills ‘was not intended to enable wills to be made by tenants in tail, or by those who lacked testamentary capacity’; it did, nonetheless, introduce ‘for the first time a general power to devise the legal estate in land’.Footnote 86 Many individuals now had the opportunity to transfer land and property outside the boundaries of their immediate family through a will and testament, ‘something previously denied by the common law’.Footnote 87
The Bill Concerning the Explanation of Wills (1542–43) built upon these measures by reinforcing the flexibility that ‘the kinges obedient and loving subjects’ had to convey land because of ‘the kynges sayde gracious and liberall disposition’.Footnote 88 As it states, ‘all and singular person and persons, having any manours, landes, tenementes, or hereditamentes, of the estate of inheritance, shuld have ful and free liberty power and auctority, to give, will, dispose, or assigne, as well by his last wil & testament in writing or otherwyse’ (sig. B3v). This bill reaffirmed the rights that testators had to devise their real estate through ‘free liberty’ and authority at their own ‘free wyll and pleasure’ (sig. B4r). Fixed property contained in and bequeathed through last wills could be transferred to any ‘person or persons’ according to an individual’s desire. Prior to these acts, ‘no land at all was devisable as such’.Footnote 89 In practical terms, the system of primogeniture was still generally ‘the prime factor affecting all families which owned property’, determining ‘the behaviour and character of both parents and children’.Footnote 90 Primogeniture was not ‘universally practiced’, but ‘the cultural ideology that sustained it’ privileged male succession and ‘supported the patrilineal transmission of land and goods through the generations’.Footnote 91 Despite the strong cultural inhibition against alienating land outside of the family, the legal reform enforced through these statutes directly influenced both the means by which land was transferred and one’s relationship to the land.
Where individuals created last wills to secure an ‘individualized inheritance strategy … for the avoidance of family discord’ in the period, English Renaissance plays repeatedly show that familial strife is cultivated through the creation and execution of wills and testaments.Footnote 92 Many dramatists engage with the notable public anxiety associated with the ‘substantial freedom’ that people had ‘to arrange their estate and family matters as they chose’ – real people’s wills, as Eileen Spring has shown, were controlled by ‘the whims and passions of all sorts’.Footnote 93 Renaissance plays also consistently demonstrate how the demands of a testator, as well as the materials dispersed through testamentary administration, preserve the memory and influence of the departed. The use of wills as dramatic devices allows for the absent or the deceased to take presence on stage. What I show is that this capacity to perpetuate the memory of the departed, and to transmit instruction and property through their legal authority, differentiates wills from the broad spectrum of monumental materials that evoked the presence of the dead on stage, like funerary monuments, tomb effigies, headstone epitaphs, and statues.Footnote 94 The will and testament’s distinctive memorial significance and authoritative license as a legal document is crucially dependent upon a dual procedure of textual transposition (by scribal dictation) and mediation (in its posthumous administration by an executor).Footnote 95 It is through these collaborative processes that the last will and testament influenced both the lives and wills of the living. Playwrights treated last wills as agents and objects of change that directly inhibited the liberties of those caught in their wake.
A Wilful Composition
This book establishes the place that acts of will-making and willing took in English Renaissance dramatic culture through four key chapters. It begins by examining the influence the will exerts upon civil and moral order in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays when it is portrayed as a dramatic character. This opening chapter, ‘The Personified Will’, provides the first extended critical analysis of the will’s dramatic personification.Footnote 96 Here, I argue that we may more fully appreciate the ways that Renaissance dramatists queried the practical expression of individual liberty, identity, and civil harmony by attending to a historically disregarded set of Will characters. The performance of the personified will offers important, but hitherto overlooked, evidence of how playwrights attempted to scrutinize the nature of human freedom and social concord, and the extent to which personifications of the will were used to legitimize contemporary systems of status and authority.
‘The Personified Will’ begins by addressing the role that youthful Will characters take in banishing sin and supporting social harmony in Sebastian Westcott’s The Marriage of Wit and Science (1570) and Robert Wilson’s The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1590). I consider the extent to which these page boys demonstrate self-discipline to show how personifications of the will – when placed in positions of subordination and integrated into networks of authority that they seemingly have little means to control – work towards the good, while demonstrating an independent ability to perform rational deeds. This chapter then moves on to explore the mischievous potential of the will as presented through Ill-Will of the anonymous interlude Wealth and Health (1565). Of all the personified versions of the will, Ill-Will comes closest to representing the wicked aspects of the will common to early modern thinking, even if he ultimately fails to realize his malevolent plans. The neutralization of Ill-Will’s self-proclaimed evil nature illuminates a broader convention of Renaissance drama: the true corrupt capacity of the will is not realized in its personified form and is almost always curtailed. Exploring the actions of honourable and corrupt personifications of the will provides a way to elucidate the inequalities and ethical predicaments associated with will’s performance, which the second chapter of this book examines in more detail.
Chapter 2, ‘Punishing the Transgressive Will’, conveys how the wayward potential of the faculty of the will was used to define the limitations of human ambition and the boundaries of moral transgression in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. This form of will was presented as a ubiquitously dangerous facet of selfhood when characters attempted to harness it to gratify excessively selfish desires. Enticing as it was dangerous, the capacity for the will to incite violence or disorder was commonly shown to be the primary cause of its own ruin. I argue that the detrimental consequences associated with the performance of the will conform to one primary mode of operation – the backward-turn of palintropos, deriving from the Ancient Greek palin (back or over again) and tropos (mode, turn, manner, or way). The performative logic of the postlapsarian will is revealed in the purpose it serves as both the main instrument for, and main threat to, the achievement of one’s wishes. As I suggest, the will rarely contravenes its prescribed function to work in a self-defeating, backward-turning manner.
I open this chapter by determining the palintropic trajectory and testamentary inflection of the notorious acts of wilfulness performed by the eponymous characters of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great: I and II (1590) and Doctor Faustus (1604). I use Marlowe’s plays to distinguish the limitations placed upon acts of extreme willing in the period, in addition to the dramatic conventions associated with its suppression. ‘Punishing the Transgressive Will’ then proceeds to consider the presentation of Salome’s will in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), where Salome successfully exercises the disturbing potential of the will for personal benefit without incurring a form of divine or earthly punishment – a fate that is not accounted for in most early modern writing. Kathryn Schwarz’s work has shown that women’s wills were associated with a type of irascible individualism in Shakespeare’s plays, uncovering the ‘central paradox’ of the will’s role as a ‘double agent’ of the self (in its role as both ‘instrument and actor’ of ‘disciplinary and disruptive energies’).Footnote 97 I outline how this dynamic is refuted in Cary’s play through Salome’s exceptional status as a woman whose will functions without a limit. I propose that Salome’s fate can help to redefine our understanding of transgressive acts in Renaissance plays. What makes for a truly transgressive will is when its potential for excess operates without repercussion. Salome, in this light, is exceptional because she uses her will as a personal law to successfully resist and denounce patriarchal rule. This reading of Cary’s play consequently provides a new way to view the dangers associated with the will in tragic drama.
Chapter 3, ‘Testamentary Drama’, builds on the points raised about testamentary willing in Dr Faustus and Tamburlaine the Great, and the performance of the will as a personal law in Tragedy of Mariam in Chapter 2, by illuminating the primary function that wills and testaments held as dramatic devices to express the will of their testators. By establishing the historical presence that last wills took both as material and virtual stage props, this chapter articulates how important acts of will-making were to the era’s theatrical practice.Footnote 98 ‘Testamentary Drama’ notes that the first use of the will and testament as a key plot device in the Elizabethan dramatic tradition is found in Ulpian Fulwell’s interlude Like Will to Like (1568). This play sets a number of precedents for the popular dramatic function of these documents through the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: last wills typically function as vehicles for testators to impose their personal will over networks of beneficiaries; last wills act as tools of moral instruction and social control whose use draws attention to the fraught politics of testamentary inheritance; playwrights consistently portrayed wills and testaments to be disastrously prone to being counterfeited. What I term as the testamentary tradition in English Renaissance drama – plays that explore both the restorative and destructive outcomes of testamentary execution – begins with Fulwell’s play. Like Will to Like focuses on the ruinous effect that Lucifer’s fake will and testament has on the destitute and prodigal beneficiaries who are enticed and ultimately damned by the property offered within it. The last will in this play thus allows Lucifer to enforce his devilish will upon the world. In achieving his will through his fake will and testament, Lucifer’s actions expose the lack of control that its intended beneficiaries have over their own lives. The last will acts as a means to punish wickedness and reveal the futility of willing itself.
Chapter 4 further develops the dramatic history of the last will by exploring the place wills took as commemorative devices by which duplicitous father figures could manipulate intra- and extra-familial networks. I consider the social authority and memorial value afforded to the last will, tracing new connections between concepts of memory and willing that were advanced in early modern literary culture.Footnote 99 These documents, as used in the period’s plays, exhibit a unique ability to preserve the memory of the departed and to transmit instruction into the world through their legal authority. Through this focus, I establish how the last will’s status as a storehouse for the ‘last minde and will’ of a testator reveals the document’s broader social function: to be both dominant over and dependent upon the wills of others.Footnote 100 Last wills may enable the dead to posthumously enforce their personal will, but playwrights persistently show that the wills of others may subvert the aims of a testator’s will and testament. The dramatic potency of a last will centres on its ability to evoke the presence of an absent testator, imposing the latent will of the dead upon the living through the obligation of remembrance. I explain that Renaissance plays consistently emphasize how this memorial duty elicited a struggle between the will of the testator and their beneficiaries, and that such moments often centre on the creation (and manipulation) of blank, invalid, or fake wills. The last will, again, acts as a means by which dramatists could scrutinize the relative authority of the individual faculty of the will to alter one’s fate.
Attending to the patterns of deceit associated with the use of counterfeit and legitimate wills in The London Prodigal (1605), Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1607), and Thomas Middleton’s The Phoenix (1607) will give readers a new insight into how testamentary plays were typified by a concern over the potentially disruptive financial and memorial value attributed to personal legacies. The execution of last wills in these plays illuminates the pitfalls associated with the commemoration of human endeavours, the anxieties related to the endurance of familial dynasties, and the sociopolitical disparities caused by patrilineal succession. Dramatic last wills commonly expose the vulnerability of dynasties to male vice at the same time as they uphold the legitimacy of patriarchal authority. In contrast, the conflict associated with last wills is often conveyed to be temporary – testamentary plays usually ratify the logic of lineal history through a chain of succession that works to re-establish patriarchal authority. Where this chapter emphasizes how dramatic last wills acted as tools for testators to shape the future, my conclusion reflects on what new pathways of inquiry may be opened by focusing on the performance of the will through literary history. Ultimately, my hope is that this book will provide a platform from which further work may be performed to develop our appreciation of the crucial role that concepts of will took in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, for our knowledge of will-making and will-power is not quite ‘large and spacious’ enough.Footnote 101
With these goals in mind, I begin by exploring the presence and status that the will took as a personified character in Elizabethan theatre. The will was portrayed in a variety of benevolent and malevolent guises in English plays, yet the function of these characters has still to be integrated into our appreciation of the era’s dramatic conventions. ‘The Personified Will’ rectifies this gap in knowledge. Scrutinizing the roles played by virtuous and corrupt figures of the will supports this book’s broader goal of establishing the key part that wills were thought to play in determining the course and quality of one’s life and fate in Renaissance culture.
