Mistress Susannah Hall.
The poet’s elder daughter, Mrs. Susanna Hall, resided at New Place till her death. Her sister Judith alienated to her the Chapel Place tenement before 1633, but that, with the interest in the Stratford tithes, she soon disposed of. Her husband, Dr. John Hall, died on November 25, 1635. In 1642 James Cooke, a surgeon in attendance on some Royalist troops stationed at Stratford, visited Mrs. Hall and examined manuscripts in her possession, but they were apparently of her husband’s, not of her father’s, composition. [281] From July 11 to 13, 1643, Queen Henrietta Maria, while journeying from Newark to Oxford, was billeted on Mrs. Hall at New Place for three days, and was visited there by Prince Rupert. Mrs. Hall was buried beside her husband in Stratford Churchyard on July 11, 1649, and a rhyming inscription, describing her as ‘witty above her sex,’ was engraved on her tombstone. The whole inscription ran: ‘Heere lyeth ye body of Svsanna, wife to John Hall, Gent. ye davghter of William Shakespeare, Gent. She deceased ye 11th of Jvly, A.D. 1649, aged 66.
‘Witty above her sexe, but that’s not all,
Wise to Salvation was good Mistress Hall,
Something of Shakespere was in that, but this
Wholy of him with whom she’s now in blisse.
Then, passenger, ha’st ne’re a teare,
To weepe with her that wept with all?
That wept, yet set herselfe to chere
Them up with comforts cordiall.
Her Love shall live, her mercy spread,
When thou hast ne’re a teare to shed.’