This chapter shows that the faculty of the will was presented as a ubiquitously dangerous facet of selfhood in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, when used to gratify selfish or sinful desires. ‘Punishing the Transgressive Will’ explains how this convention helped define how the limitations of human ambition and the boundaries of moral transgression were depicted. I do so primarily through a comparative analysis of the notorious acts of wilfulness performed in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Dr Faustus, and Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam. Enticing as it was dangerous, the capacity for the will to incite violence or disorder was commonly shown to be the primary cause of its own ruin. This literary topos is, however, importantly refuted in Cary’s play through the character of Salome. Among all of the excessively wilful characters who feature in Renaissance drama, Salome proves to be an exceptional type of Neo-Senecan villain whose will functions without limit: her will is not self-defeating, nor is she punished for exercising it. I propose that Salome’s fate can help to redefine our understanding of transgressive acts in Renaissance tragedies.

‘Testamentary Drama’ continues to assess the pitfalls associated with the expression of the will by charting the presence that last wills took both as material and virtual stage props. What I term as the testamentary tradition in English Renaissance drama – plays that address both the restorative and destructive outcomes of testamentary execution – begins with Ulpian Fulwell’s interlude Like Will to Like (first printed 1568). This play focuses on the ruinous effect that Lucifer’s fake will and testament has on the destitute and prodigal beneficiaries who are enticed (and ultimately damned) by the property offered within it. The last will, thus, functions to punish wickedness and reveal the futility of willing itself. Like Will to Like sets a precedent for the popular dramatic function of these documents: last wills typically function as vehicles for testators to impose their personal will over networks of beneficiaries; last wills were commonly used as tools of moral instruction and social control to draw attention to the fraught politics of testamentary inheritance; playwrights consistently portrayed acts of will-making to be disastrously prone to being counterfeited.

This introduction establishes the overarching claim of this book: that Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists consistently focus on the disastrous consequences of willing and will-making, while simultaneously emphasizing the vital role that wills played in defining one’s sense of identity and self-worth. English Renaissance drama can be understood, in one way, to be preoccupied with considering the influence that wills exert over human life.

Here, I provide an overview of how both the faculty of the will and the last will and testament were conceived of in the period. The will was primarily thought to be an unruly part of the soul that hinders our ability to achieve what we desire, though the performance of the will was not merely localized to the body or psyche. One way of enacting one’s will upon the world was achieved for some through the production of a last will and testament. Last wills acted as tools for testators to impose their will upon the living, dictating who will, and who will not, benefit from their death. In their immaterial and material forms, wills shaped the quality and conditions of one’s life and afterlife.

Considering the last will’s status as a memorial object and an apparatus of political control has demonstrated another way in which acts of will-making and willing were closely connected in English Renaissance plays. The manipulation of the last will formed a significant part of the way that the anxieties and injustices associated with the politics of patrilineal descent were depicted in the age’s drama. What I have shown throughout the second half of this study is that the acts of composing and administering a will and testament were commonly associated with the proliferation of discord in local communities. The friction that last wills generate is often resolved by purging what are deemed to be rebellious, immoral, or transgressive expressions of personal agency resolved by purging what are deemed to be rebellious, immoral, or transgressive expressions of personal agency. The conditions surrounding the dramatic performance of last wills conventionally draw attention to the systemic inequalities embedded in the cultural networks of early modern life, where wives, daughters, sons, and hopeful beneficiaries were routinely forced to follow the dictation of cunning men. Even when used to engender communal cohesion, dramatists repeatedly focused on the intrigue, discord, and suffering associated with the implementation of the male-authored last will and testament.

‘The Personified Will’ examines how the faculty of the will was depicted as a personified character in English Renaissance plays. The will was portrayed in a variety of benevolent and malevolent guises, yet the function of these characters has not yet been integrated into our appreciation of the era’s dramatic conventions. I argue that we may more fully appreciate the ways that dramatists queried the practical expression of individual liberty, identity, and civil harmony by attending to a historically disregarded set of Will characters (from Sebastian Westcott’s The Marriage of Wit and Science to William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night). The performance of the personified will offers important, but hitherto overlooked, evidence of how playwrights attempted to scrutinize the nature of human freedom and social concord, and the extent to which personifications of the will were used to legitimize contemporary systems of status and authority. Exploring the actions of honourable and corrupt personifications of the will provides a way to elucidate the ethical predicaments associated with will’s performance, which the second chapter of this book examines in more detail.

‘Last Wills and Remembrance’ builds on Chapter 3’s findings by examining the social authority and memorial value afforded to the last will. The dramatic potency of a last will centres on its ability to evoke the presence of an absent testator, imposing the latent will of the dead upon the living through the obligation of remembrance. This chapter focuses on Ben Jonson’s Volpone, and Thomas Middleton’s The Phoenix, and The London Prodigal (of an uncertain author) to show how consistently this memorial duty elicited a struggle between the will of the testator and their beneficiaries, and that such moments often centre on the manipulation of blank, invalid, or fake wills. I argue that the execution of last wills in these plays illuminates the pitfalls associated with the commemoration of human endeavours, the anxieties related to the endurance of familial dynasties, and the sociopolitical disparities caused by patrilineal succession. The last will, once again, acts as a means by which dramatists could scrutinize and deliberate upon the relative authority or vulnerability of the individual faculty of the will.

Mental distress was commonly portrayed as a form of liquid turbulence in early modern English literature. Biblical exegesis helped set this precedent. Take, for example, the interpretation of Abel's murder that the acclaimed evangelical preacher John King offers in his Lectures upon Jonas from 1597. King states that Cain, wracked with guilt, “ranne from place to place, not so much in his bodie, as in his minde, tossed like a wave of the sea, and finding no place for rest, because the mercy of God shone not unto him.” Portraying Cain's agitated “minde” as such neatly parallels how he is described in Genesis 4:12 as a “fugitive and a vagabounde” in possession of a “fearful conscience” that “findeth reste nowhere,” which, in turn, extends the elemental scope of Cain's punishment from the barren earth to the perpetual roiling of the mind's inner “sea.” Marine imagery helped convey the perturbation of thought that distinguishes the vulnerability of the human mind to sin, but this literary convention was not peculiar to morally didactic or theological literature. In this chapter, I contend that poets similarly portrayed the association between cognitive disorder and moral corruption through images of liquid unrest. While the study of the period's imaginative engagement with watery environments tends to concentrate on Shakespeare's oeuvre, I alternatively focus on non-canonical poets to enrich our understanding of the connections established between aquatic and mental environments in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century literary culture.