About the Project

What is the project?

We are collating the first ever full case study of Susanna Hall (1583-1649), William and Anne Shakespeare's eldest daughter) and her home, Hall's Croft, owned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, who are the organisational partner for the project.

The project challenges how early modern women have been historicised and mediated in the construction of literary and cultural heritage, both local and global, via a case study of Susanna Hall (née Shakespeare) and her home in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Who was Susanna Shakespeare Hall?

Susanna was born in Stratford-upon-Avon to parents Anne and William Shakespeare in 1583 lived to 66 years of age. She married renowned local physician John Hall in 1607, gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1608. She suffered the major scandal of a public accusation of adultery in 1613, countered by a slander case she brought, together with her husband. She outlived John to manage a household, negotiate the sale of her Hall's manuscripts and probably took over aspects of his medical work in the form of healing and acting as a 'wisewoman'.

We do not have any confirmed, extant portrait of Susanna Hall to hint at her physical appearance. However, we can learn a little about her possible character and personality by reading her intriguing epitaph.

What and Where is Hall’s Croft?

What has widely been known as Susanna's house, Hall's Croft, was open to the public from 1951-2020 and had risen to attracting 85,000 visitors each year.

The Halls lived in Old Town in Stratford-upon-Avon and we believe the house now known as Hall’s Croft was highly likely to have been their home, where they lived with their young daughter from 1613 to 1616, when Susanna inherited the much larger New Place from her father.

Find out more about Hall’s Croft.

Who are we?

The project is led by Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson (University of Brighton) as Principal Investigator, with Roz Sklar (University of Brighton) as Research Officer and in collaboration with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

How have we carried out the research?

Via new research based on a range of evidence, including cases of women’s health drawn from the first complete modern English translation (Wells & Edmondson, 2020) of John Hall's Casebooks, the project contextualises Susanna within her home town, Stratford-upon-Avon, in her own time.

The project re-examines Susanna's contribution, both as a 'real' and as an imagined woman, to private and public life and to textual and material history. It investigates Hall's Croft's case to interrogate the gendered nature of cultural memory and heritage and their relationship with individual and group memory, locally, nationally and globally.

Our academic contexts

This project presents new ways to present heritage narratives of early modern women (or, more accurately, their truncation or omission) and the construction of literary cultural heritage, specifically early modern women in the Shakespeare narrative and heritage spaces.

The intersections of women's history at Hall's Croft and the construction of Susanna Hall are paradigmatic of a wider need for the re-mediation of women's narratives in heritage presentation. This project presents new research and examines how archive sources have been utilised in past narratives to construct and represent Susanna and Hall's Croft.

The project reveals the importance of the site as a space to explore early modern women's health and wellbeing, literacy and resource management practices as well as questioning the dominance of father and husband in our cultural memory of Susanna.

The big picture

Examining female agency, power and identity in constructing discourses and narratives of memory and heritage, the project uses Susanna's life, reputation - and subsequent historicisation, fictionalisation and mediation - both to scrutinise and to intervene in how sites and narratives construct cultural memory. The project utilises innovative digital humanities technologies to create outputs that encourage autonomy in how we experience heritage narratives, both in academic and leisure contexts, lifting the lid on how academic research informs heritage presentations and inviting users to play an active part in constructing shared heritage narratives.

Rectifying Susanna's sidelined position in cultural memory is both practically vital in increasing understanding of women's history and heritage and powerfully symbolic in building an inclusive, transparent future for heritage presentation and academic research. 'Susanna Hall and Hall's Croft: Gender, Cultural Memory, Heritage' aimed to make an urgent intervention in how we experience literary and cultural heritage, both local and global.

What next?

Have a look at the project outputs on the project home page, publications and future plans and events.

If you’d like to hear more about the project and some of its outcomes, listen here to Ailsa and Roz’s research conversation, hosted by Dr Paul Edmondson, Head of Research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust:

Project funded by AHRC (part of UKRI)