Shakespeare's family

by C. C. Stopes

"Thou, my mother, gave me life, thy breast and milk; alas! for such great bounty to me I shall give thee a tomb. How much rather I would entreat the good angel to move the stone, so that thy figure might come forth, as did the body of Christ; but my prayers avail nothing. Come quickly, O Christ; so that my mother, closed in the tomb, may rise again and seek the stars."[184]

Of Anne Shakespeare's children we have already spoken. Susannah was born May 26, 1583, Hamnet and Judith, February 2, 1584-85. Hamnet—surely the model of Shakespeare's sweet boys—had died on August 11, 1596. So the name Shakespeare had glorified was doomed to die with himself, and was not to be borne by lesser men. His property the poet could and did devise.

Much discussion has taken place concerning the poet's views of his younger daughter and her marriage. I do not think these views at all supported by his will. Three hundred pounds was a very large portion indeed at the time. It was demised to her doubtless before her marriage, but it was not altered in relation to her after her marriage. It would be hard indeed to believe that such a ceremony, even without a license, could be performed in the gossipy town of Stratford without the news of it somehow reaching the father's ears, if there had been any attempt really to deceive. There is no reason to imagine Shakespeare disapproved of the alliance. The young man came of an old Stratford family. It is possible, however, that the poet foresaw a certain degree of instability of character in the youth, and therefore wished to make his will act as a marriage settlement that would secure his daughter from starvation. The second half of his bequest might only be touched by her husband, if he had settled on her land of equal value. This Thomas Quiney does not seem to have done.

Richard Quiney had died 1601-2, and his widow Elizabeth kept a tavern, in which she was probably at one time assisted by her younger son Thomas. In December, 1611, she conveyed a house to William Mountford for £131, and Judith Shakespeare was a subscribing witness. But neither she nor her future mother-in-law signed their names, nor even the customary cross, but a strangely-penned device of their own. Thomas Quiney lived in a small house in the High Street until after his marriage. It was probably his wife's money that enabled him to lease the larger house on the other side, called "The Cage," and to start therein business as a vintner.

At first he was successful. He was made a burgess in 1617, and was Chamberlain from 1621 to 1623. His accounts for the latter year are headed by a French proverb, as to the happiness of those who become wise through the experience of others, that might have had an opposite meaning to his contemporaries. It shows us that he could not only read and write English, but at least a little French. By 1630 he was involved in lawsuits, left the town council, and tried to dispose of the lease of his house. In 1633 Dr. Hall and Thomas Nash acted as trustees for his estate. His fortunes seemed to have become worse and worse. In 1652 he went to the Metropolis, where his elder brother Richard was a thriving grocer in Bucklersbury, in company with Roger Sadler. Richard, in August, 1655,[185] made a will, in which he left, besides handsome provision for his children—Richard, Adrian, Thomas, William and Sarah—his brother Thomas £12 a year for life, and £5 for the expenses of his funeral, out of his messuages at Shottery. The Quiney coat of arms is entered among those of the London burgesses at Guildhall,[186] "Mr. Quiney of ye Red Lyon in Bucklersbury."

The family of Thomas Quiney and his wife Judith was not a large one. In the year that the poet died they christened their eldest son, "Shaksper, filius Thomas Quyny gent.," November 23, 1616. But the child died in a few months. On May 8, 1617, was buried "Shakespere, filius Thomas Quyny, gent."

On February 9, 1617-18, "Richard filius Thomas Quinee" was baptized, and on January 23, 1619-20, "Thomas, filius Thomas Queeny." These lads may have followed to the grave their grandmother, Mrs. Shakespeare, and their uncle, Dr. Hall; and they may have been present at the marriage of their cousin, Mrs. Elizabeth Hall, to Mr. Thomas Nash. But they died within a month of each other, probably of some infectious fever, the younger first—"Thomas filius Thomæ Quiney, Jan. 28th, 1638-9"; "Richardus filius Tho. Quiney, Feb. 26th, 1638-9." There were no other children, and no prospect of more, and these early deaths affected the devolution of the poet's property, as may hereafter be seen.

Unfortunately, we know nothing concerning Dr. John Hall before his marriage to the poet's elder daughter Susanna on June 5, 1607, he being then thirty-two and she twenty-five. He cannot have been the son of Dr. John Hall, of Maidstone, Kent, whose translation of Lanfranc's "Chirurgerie," with portrait of the translator, appeared in 1565. He would have been an eminently suitable father, distinguished alike in his art and his character, author of "The Court of Virtue," and many metrical Bible translations; but he died in 1566, and the Stratford Dr. John Hall was born in 1575. Halliwell-Phillipps[187] suggests that he may have been connected with the Halls of Acton, Middlesex, because he left his only daughter his "house and meadow at Acton." A John Hall was married in that parish, it is true, on September 19, 1574,[188] to Margaret Archer. But he had a daughter Elizabeth christened on June 5, 1575, about the very date at which the Stratford "John" must have been born. Any connection, therefore, must have been further off than filial, and the name is too common to be easily followed.

There were Halls in Worcester,[189] in Rowington, and in Coventry, and it may be remembered that a John Hall supplanted Richard Shakespeare as Bailiff of the Priory of Wroxall during the last year of its existence. There was a Richard Hall of Stratford in the list of the gentry 12 Henry VI., 1433. There was also a Richard Hall, gentleman,[190] of Idlicote, in the sixteenth century, who seems to have moved about a good deal, as there is a record of "Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Hall, Generosus, bapt. February 14th, 1560," at Idlicote, and of "Maria filia Richardi Hall, Generosus, March 17th, 1561," in Stratford. I have not traced any of the name of John christened in Idlicote or elsewhere at the date.