and the spirit in which (as they announce in the first folio) they approached the task of collecting his works after his death, corroborate the description of him as a sympathetic friend. The later traditions brought together by Aubrey depict him as ‘very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit,’ and there is much in other early references to suggest a genial, if not a convivial, temperament, with a turn for good-humoured satire. Pope had just warrant for his surmise that Shakespeare
For gain not glory winged his roving flight,
And grew immortal in his own despite.
With his literary power and sociability there clearly went the shrewd capacity of a man of business. His literary attainments and successes were chiefly valued as serving the prosaic end of providing permanently for himself and his children. His highest ambition was to restore among his fellow-townsmen the family repute which his father's misfortunes had imperilled. Ideals so homely are reckoned rare among poets, but Chaucer and Sir Walter Scott, among writers of exalted genius, vie with Shakespeare in the sobriety of their personal aims and the sanity of their mental attitude towards life's ordinary incidents.
The survivors.
Shakespeare's widow died on 6 Aug. 1623, at the age of sixty-seven, and was buried near her husband inside the chancel two days later. Some affectionately phrased Latin elegiacs—doubtless from Dr. Hall's pen—were inscribed on a brass plate fastened to the stone above her grave. The younger daughter, Judith, resided with her husband, Thomas Quiney, at The Cage, a house which he leased in Bridge Street from 1616 till 1652. There he carried on the trade of a vintner, and took part in municipal affairs, acting as a councillor from 1617 and as chamberlain in 1621–2 and 1622–3, but after 1630 his affairs grew embarrassed, and he left Stratford late in 1652 for London, where he seems to have died a few months later. Of his three sons by Judith, the eldest, Shakespeare (bapt. 23 Nov. 1616), was buried in Stratford churchyard on 8 May 1617; Richard (bapt. 9 Feb. 1617–8) was buried on 28 Jan. 1638–9; and Thomas (bapt. 23 Jan. 1619–20) was buried on 26 Feb. 1638–9. Judith survived her husband, sons, and sister, dying at Stratford on 9 Feb. 1661–1662, in her seventy-seventh year.
The elder daughter, Susannah 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 John Hall died on 25 Nov. 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 (cf. Hall, Select Observations, ed. Cooke, 1657). From 11 to 13 July 1643 Queen Henrietta Maria, while journeying from Newark, was billeted on Mrs. Hall at New Place for three days. She was buried beside her husband in Stratford churchyard on 11 July 1649, and a rhyming inscription, describing her as ‘witty above her sex,’ was engraved on her tombstone.
The last descendant.
Mrs. Hall's only child, Elizabeth, was the last surviving descendant of the poet. In April 1626 she married her first husband, Thomas Nash of Stratford (b 1593), who studied at Lincoln's Inn, was a man of property, and, dying childless at New Place on 4 April 1647, was buried in Stratford church next day. Mrs. Nash married at Billesley, a village four miles from Stratford, on 5 June 1649, a widower, John Bernard or Barnard of Abington, Northamptonshire, who was knighted by Charles II in 1661. About the same date she seems to have abandoned New Place for her husband's residence at Abington. Dying without issue, she was buried there on 17 Feb. 1669–70. Her husband survived her four years, and was buried beside her (Baker, Northamptonshire, i. 10; New Shaksp. Soc. Trans. 1880–5, pt. ii. pp. 13†–15†). Lady Barnard inherited under the poet's will (on her mother's death in 1649) the land near Stratford, New Place, the house at Blackfriars, and (on the death of the poet's sister Joan in 1646) the houses in Henley Street, while her father left her in 1635 a house at Acton with a meadow. She sold the Blackfriars house, and apparently the Stratford land, before 1667. By her will, dated January 1669–70, and proved in the following March, she left small bequests to the daughters of Thomas Hathaway, of the family of her grandmother, the poet's wife. The houses in Henley Street passed to her cousin, Thomas Hart, the grandson of the poet's sister Joan, and they remained in the possession of Thomas's direct descendants till 1806 (the male line expired on the death of John Hart in 1800). By her will Lady Barnard ordered New Place to be sold, and it was purchased on 18 May 1675 by Sir Edward Walker, through whose daughter Barbara, wife of Sir John Clopton, it reverted to the Clopton family. Sir John rebuilt it in 1702. On the death of his son Hugh in 1752 it was bought by the Rev. Francis Gastrell (d. 1768), who demolished
