This edition, now available in paperback, constitutes an archive of source materials in the field of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. It is a collection of over one hundred wills left by those who participated in the life of the theatre – from actors and dramatists to carpenters and costumiers. The wills not only offer vital historical evidence but are also important human documents, testaments to the social, financial, religious and sentimental lives of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.

Of the wills reprinted here, one third were newly discovered, and many of the rest printed for the first time from the original wills, thus preserving the vacillations and abandoned intentions of the testators.