All the men of the Shakespeare family died, and most of them died young. Shakespeare himself was only what I consider middle-aged when he breathed his last, in 1616, at 52 -- a late-summer chicken if not a spring one. By then he'd lost his father, his younger brother, and his only son. Neither of his two male grandsons, yet to be born, would see a twenty-fifth year. As for the women, Shakespeare's wife Anne and his elder daughter Susanna both died at age 66, in 1623 and 1649 respectively. Yet there was one Shakespeare child who lived on, from the Elizabethan Age through the Stuart era to the time of Cromwell and the Interregnum, through plagues and witchcraft trials, through the premature deaths of her children and the turmoils and upheavals of the English Civil War, into the first years of the Restoration.
This was Shakespeare's youngest daughter, Judith, who died in 1662 at the age of 77.
You may recall Judith. If you read my 2003 novel My Father Had a Daughter, you know her fictionalized tale -- her grief for a lost twin and her teenage rebellion against her Midlands country life, her flight south to Elizabethan London, the ambitious subterfuge by which she maneuvers her way onto the Globe playhouse stage. This was a Judith imagined and predicated on the slim details of her life conveyed through civil records concerning the Shakespeares. That tale ended with the death of Shakespeare, and Judith's marriage, in 1616.
But Judith didn't. As noted, she lived on, a witness to such staggering transformations both in personal and public life that they call for a continuation of her story.
So I wrote one.
The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter: The Continuing Adventures of Judith Shakespeare will be released in book and audio form on February 4, 2025. Too late for Christmas, but in plenty of time for summer reading! If you liked Judith as a young woman, see what you think of her crusty 61-year-old self. Her herbalist skills have grown, and her contempt for pointless social rules hasn't changed, but now that England has turned upside-down, she's a battlefield surgeon with a whole war-torn realm to ride around in. Which she does, all in search of a thing -- perhaps a person -- she long ago lost.
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