Shakespeare's Will (play)

Shakespeare's Will is a play by Canadian writer Vern Thiessen. It was commissioned by Geoffrey Brumlik, then Artistic Director of the River City Shakespeare Festival in Edmonton as a performance vehicle for Jan Alexandra Smith and premiered at the Citadel Theatre in February 2005. It has been regularly revived and was performed at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 2011.Shakespeare's Will was published in 2002 by Playwrights Canada Press.

The American premiere of Shakespeare's Will was produced at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills, California. The production starred Jeanmarie Simpson, was produced by Leonard Nimoy and directed by Susan Bay. Nimoy said he agreed to produce the show because 'It’s a very beautiful piece, very beautifully written, very moving, and funny." The production led to a long-term creative collaboration between Nimoy and Thiessen which later included a specially commissioned play.

Shakespeare's Will is a one-woman monodrama that focuses on Anne Hathaway on the day of her husband William Shakespeare's funeral. Its form has been described as a "poetic monologue that is fragmentary, and richly allusive." The audience shares details of her historically-unknown personal life, a mixture of general information about the lives of women in Elizabethan England, fictional dramatic twists, and twenty-first century interpretations.

The drama focuses on the will handed to William Shakespeare’s widow Anne as she leaves his funeral. She is surprised by its existence and that his sister Joan should give it to her with a noticeably odd smile. Joan promises to visit in an hour.

Anne resists reading the will, remembering instead the passion and the vows she shared with her husband, Catholic in public but 'their own kind of marriage' in private. These unusual vows accommodated their desires as individuals, but left Anne alone in Stratford to raise their three children. She relives the decision points where Bill’s London life became a separate existence. When plague sweeps the country, she must find a way to protect the children without news or support from William and relates her decision to take them to the seashore, far from disease and death. Her flight repeats her own childhood journey, when her father brought her and her siblings to the sea and away from the plague which killed her mother.

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