‘The reading of the will’: making inheritance law visual

Wills have lent themselves to more performative possibilities than any other legal document. They have been engraved, painted, written about and sung. Yet within legal scholarship these representations have been overlooked. Interpreting the Reading of the Will widely, this article demonstrates the tenacity of the will on artistic imagination and, at the same time, its starkly shifting functions and audiences. Adopting a chronological approach, it examines church monuments from the sixteenth century, nineteenth-century ‘realist’ paintings and novels, twentieth-century crime fiction, comic operas and figurative domestic porcelain, and more recent gritty and glamorous TV soaps and contemporary performance art. Aided by scholarship across a wide range of disciplines, it argues that this diverse work mirrors and illuminates historical, political and sociological debates about the public and private nature of inheritance. In a hyper-visual world, it makes a case for taking artistic endeavours seriously within legal scholarship and pedagogy.