Next of kin
In the four centuries since William Shakespeare shuffled off his mortal coil (to use one of his own phrases), no part of his literary remains have been left un-ransacked. Even something as dry as the bard’s last will and testament has worried generations of Shakespeare scholars, not least for one line added in as an apparent afterthought: “I give unto my wife my second-best bed with the furniture.”
? Biographers have long sought some plausible way in which that line is a calculated insult to Anne Shakespeare Hathaway. Surely, they argued, the great man must have provided for her in some other way. Perhaps we’re missing context. Perhaps it’s one of those couples’ jokes outsiders simply can’t understand? Or
