The bedroom was the domestic space that was associated with the most intimate and carnal kinds of knowledge. At the same time, it hovered between public and private: even among the wealthiest, bedrooms were likely to be shared with children, servants, and visitors. These close quarters could result in more intimate knowledge of strange bedfellows than might be desired. Andrew Barclay vividly describes the early modern traveller’s experience of trying to sleep in a bedroom packed with strangers: ‘Never be they still till middle of the night, / And then some brawleth, and for their beds fight’. Beds themselves were valuable pieces of furniture – in his will, Shakespeare famously left his ‘second-best bed’, along with its hangings, to his wife Anne. The bedroom, with its multiple and sometimes contrary associations, could be a space of both concealment and revelation, pleasure and possession, tenderness and control.