In her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf asked her reader to conduct a thought experiment: 

Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister …

Woolf explores the subtly cumulative ways in which, in early modern England and by extension in her own time,a figure like Shakespeare’s sister would be shut out, not just from education and self-improvement, but also from other social freedoms and, therefore, from writing: ‘Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or set fire to them.’ Woolf’s imaginary heroine, desperate to express herself, dies in misery. Her grave is unmarked.

In fact – and as Woolf well knew – William Shakespeare did have a sister. Joan Shakespeare was baptised on 15 April 1569 in Stratford-upon-Avon. Very little is known of her except that, around 1600, she married a man named William Hart, a hatmaker who is mainly recorded for racking up small debts in Stratford around the time of their marriage. The Harts baptised four children, though two of them died in childhood, and lived together in a one-up, one-down cottage which formed the western end of the building now known as ‘Shakespeare’s Birthplace’ in Henley Street. After the death of their father, John, in 1601, William Shakespeare was not only her more famous brother, dividing his time between Stratford and London, but also her landlord. As a mere wife, she is never recorded even signing a document, so it is hard to assess if she was literate. Then, in 1616, an epidemic, perhaps typhus, passed through Stratford. Joan’s husband and brother died within a week of each other.

In his will Shakespeare left the Harts’ cottage to his own daughter, Susanna, but secured Joan’s right to live there for the rest of her life. He also bequeathed her £20 and all his wearing apparel, which seems quite a personal gift. It recalls Twelfth Night, where the bereaved sister dresses up in clothes that look like her brother’s, or King John, where the power of clothes to preserve a memory of a person is vividly evoked: ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child … / Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.’ Allegedly there were still fragments of his clothing in the house a century later when Joan’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren used them for dressing up.

The rest of Joan’s life is almost unrecorded. For the next 30 years she remained in the cottage as a widow, living so long that she saw Civil War soldiers billeted in the inn next door. The real Shakespeare’s sister seems even less knowable than Woolf’s version.

And yet it might be that there is an unrecognised piece of writing belonging to Joan and, even stranger, one which has been in the public domain for almost 200 years. Around 1770 a man retiling the roof of Shakespeare’s Birthplace found a manuscript document tucked in the rafters. It was a spiritual testament, in which the writer declared that they were a Catholic and that they intended to die, when the time came, a good Catholic death. What is more, the writer claimed as their personal saint St Winifred, a seventh-century Welsh princess who had survived being beheaded by a disgruntled suitor and was, as a result, the patron saint of having had enough of men.

What the bricklayer found passed through various hands in Stratford before it was seen in 1790 by the greatest Shakespeare expert of the age, Edmond Malone. ‘The five leaves which were sent to me’, Malone wrote, ‘were very small, tacked together by a thread: the size the eighth part of a sheet, and the upper part of the last page but one, almost illegible.’ The transcription was a struggle, even for the experienced Malone, but the testator’s name was written in the document 12 times over, and Malone read it each time as ‘John Shakespeare’.

There followed 200 years of bitter argument because, if Malone was correct, this identified Shakespeare’s father as an almost suicidally zealous Catholic in the era of the Elizabethan persecutions, indeed almost a Catholic secret agent. In recent years some Shakespeare scholars have accepted its authenticity, while others think it must have been some sort of 18th-century forgery. But if it was a forgery it was a very odd one – extremely devious and over-engineered, and without obvious gain for its maker. The document itself, unfortunately, disappeared after it left Malone’s hands and has never been seen since.

Yet the text cannot have been John Shakespeare’s. As has been known for years, the testament is based on an English translation, surviving in print editions from 1635 and 1638, of an Italian formulary – a set form of words – which was previously believed to date to the 16th century. In fact, no examples can be found from before 1613, well after John Shakespeare’s lifetime. The spiritual testament cannot have belonged to him. Furthermore, transcribers of early modern documents frequently mistake the name ‘Joan’ for the similar and far more common ‘John’. We can conclude, then, that the testament probably dates from the 1630s, when English translations of the formulary were circulating – and that it belongs to Joan.

In that case, it would be Joan – whether by herself or through an assistant – who writes, in a passage directly translated from the Italian formulary: 

I, [Joan] Shakespeare, do here protest that I do render infinite thanks to his divine majesty … he might most justly have taken me out of this life when I least thought of it, yea even then when I was plunged in the dirty puddle of my sins. 

In the spiritual testament, Joan emerges as a committed and well-informed Catholic, expressing her spiritual life at a time when Catholics, though less fiercely suppressed than in the Elizabethan era, were still a persecuted minority. But it is also true that Joan Shakespeare Hart resembles the ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ of Woolf’s essay: someone so erased by gender conventions as to be nearly invisible. If she is the author, then it seems like a sad confirmation of Woolf’s thesis that Joan’s statement of faith has for all these years been wrongly assigned to her father.

Matthew Steggle is Professor of Early Modern English Literature at the University of Bristol and the author of William Shakespeare and the Early Modern (Reaktion, forthcoming 2025).