This edition constitutes a new 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 participate 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 are newly discovered, and many of the rest printed for the first time from the original wills, this preserving the vacillations and abandoned intentions of the testators.