Friday, March 19, 2004
The National Archives in the UK has a new, or a newly updated (I'm honestly not sure which it is) website, DocumentsOnline, where a whole bunch of public records are available for download in .pdf format.
Among the more exciting of these, and likely the document that will make the website famous, is Will Shakespeare's will, which you can download for free. A more exciting document for me, personally, is John Donne's will, which you cannot download for free. In fact, it'll cost you 3 pounds to download that baby.
I don't know what's so exciting about being able to read the wills of such famous dead people, except with Donne, for example, where scholarly inquiry makes me wonder what a man so conscious of his impending death would actually write as his last testament.
Even so. It would be mildly creepy if I had a fetish for poking my nose into my neighbor's wills, or even, to put this whole thing in a different perspective, in the wills of today's celebrities who have passed on. I get the feeling that so much of it isn't my business.
Maybe that's why we want to read these ancient wills to begin with. Back to Shakespeare's. Why does his wife get only his second best bed?
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