Of their two daughters, Susanna, the elder, was now thirty, and had been married for six years to Dr. John Hall, a respected physician at Stratford. Judith, the younger daughter, was twenty-eight and unmarried.
The Halls, with their little five-year-old daughter, lived in a picturesque house in Old Stratford, at that time surrounded by woods. Mrs. Shakespeare and Judith lived at New Place, and the spirit prevailing in both establishments was not the spirit of Shakespeare.
Not only the town of Stratford, but his own home and family were desperately pious and puritanical. That power which had been most inimical to him in London, which had dishonoured his profession, and with which he had been at war during all the years of his dramatic activity; that very power against which he had striven, sometimes by open attack, more often by cautious insinuation, had triumphed in his native town behind his back and taken complete possession of his only home.
The closing of the theatre, which did not occur in London until the Puritans had completely gained the upper hand many years later, had already been anticipated in Stratford. The performance of those plays at which Shakespeare in his youth had made acquaintance with the men, his future brother professionals, with whom he sought refuge in London, was strictly forbidden. So long ago as 1602 the town council had carried a resolution that no performance of play or interlude should be permitted in the Guildhall, that long, low building with its eight small-paned windows. It was the only place in Stratford suitable for such a purpose, and was connected with many of Shakespeare's memories. Directly above the long narrow hall, on the first floor, was the school which he had attended daily as a child. Into the hall itself he had awesomely penetrated the day the glories of a theatre were first displayed before his childish eyes. And now eleven years had passed since that wise Council had decreed that any alderman or citizen giving his consent to the representation of plays in this building should be fined ten shillings for every infringement of the prohibition. This not proving a sufficient deterrent, the fine was raised in 1612 from ten shillings to the extravagant sum of £10, equivalent to about £50 in our day. Fifty pounds for allowing a play to be performed in the only hall in the town suitable for the purpose! This was rank fanaticism!
Moreover, it was a fanaticism which had found its way into his own home. That strong tendency to Puritanism which was so marked among his descendants until the race died out, had already developed in his family. His wife was extremely religious, as is often the case with women whose youthful conduct has not been too circumspect. When she captured her boy husband of eighteen, her blood was as warm as his, but now she was vastly his superior in matters of religion. Neither could he look for any real intellectual companionship from his daughters. Susanna was pious, her husband still more so. Judith was as ignorant as a child. Thus he must pay the penalty of his long absence from home and his utter neglect of the education of his girls.
It was to no happy harmony of thought and feeling, therefore, that the poet could look forward as he rode away from his dramatic fairyland to the simplicities of domestic life. The only attractions existing for him there were his position as a gentleman, the satisfaction of no longer being obliged to act and write for money, and the pleasure of living on and roaming about his own property. The very fact that he did go back to Stratford with the little there was to attract him there proves how slight a hold London had taken upon him, and with what a feeling of loneliness, and (now that the bitterness was past) with what indifference, he bade farewell to the metropolis, its inhabitants and its pleasures.
It was the quietude of Stratford which attracted him, its leisure, the emptiness of its dirty streets, its remoteness, from the busy world. What he really longed for was Nature, the Nature with which he had lived in such intimate companionship in his early youth, which he had missed so terribly while writing As You Like It and its fellow-plays, and from which he had so long been separated.
Far more than human beings was it the gardens which he had bought and planted there which drew him back to his native town—the gardens and trees on which he looked from his windows at New Place.