William Shakespeare had three children and four grandchildren, and his direct line ended in 1670, when the last of them, his granddaughter Elizabeth, died without children.
His children were Susanna, born in 1583, and the twins Hamnet and Judith, born in 1585. Hamnet died at eleven. Susanna married a physician and inherited nearly everything her father owned. Judith married a Stratford wine seller about ten weeks before her father died, in circumstances that seem to have led him to rewrite his will. The two daughters had four children between them, and none of those four is known to have had children of their own. This article sets out what the records show about each of Shakespeare’s children and grandchildren, how the line came to an end, and why some people alive today can still claim a family connection to him. For the marriage that began the family, see our article on Shakespeare’s marriage and family life.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about Shakespeare’s children and descendants for quick reference.
Susanna Hall, the Elder Daughter
Susanna was baptized at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on May 26, 1583, six months after her parents’ marriage bond was drawn up. Her name was still fairly new in Stratford. It comes from the story of Susanna and the Elders in the Apocrypha, in which a virtuous wife is falsely accused and cleared, and some biographers have seen it as a pointed choice for a child conceived before the wedding. Girls could not attend Stratford’s grammar school, but Susanna could at least sign her name, and scholars generally assume she could read and write.
The first record of her as an adult is a church court entry. On May 5, 1606, she was one of twenty-one Stratford parishioners cited for failing to take communion at Easter, an offense that could suggest Catholic sympathies. The citation came in the anxious months after the Gunpowder Plot, when the authorities were unusually watchful, and the case against her was dismissed. Her name does not appear on the surviving lists of Stratford recusants from those years.
On June 5, 1607, at 24, she married John Hall, a Cambridge-educated physician of about 32 whose practice became well known across the district. Their only child, Elizabeth, was baptized on February 21, 1608. Hall kept notes on his patients, including Susanna and Elizabeth, and a selection was published in 1657 as Select Observations on English Bodies.
In 1613 a young Stratford man named John Lane claimed that Susanna had committed adultery with a haberdasher, Rafe Smith, and had caught a venereal disease from him. On July 15 she sued him for slander in the church court at Worcester. Lane failed to appear and was excommunicated. The episode is the basis of Peter Whelan’s 1996 play The Herbal Bed.
Shakespeare named John and Susanna Hall as the executors of his will and left Susanna the bulk of his estate, including New Place, his two houses on Henley Street, his land around Stratford, and the Blackfriars Gatehouse in London. Susanna lived on at New Place after her husband died in November 1635. In July 1643, during the Civil War, Queen Henrietta Maria passed through Stratford with an army, and by long tradition she stayed at New Place as Susanna’s guest. Susanna died on July 11, 1649, aged 66, and was buried in Holy Trinity Church. Her gravestone begins its verse epitaph with a tribute that ties her to her father:
Witty above her sex, but that’s not all,
Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall,
Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this
Wholly of him with whom she’s now in bliss.
Hamnet, the Only Son
Hamnet and his twin sister, Judith, were baptized together on February 2, 1585. They were probably named after Hamnet and Judith Sadler, a Stratford baker and his wife who were friends of the family. The names Hamnet and Hamlet were close enough to be interchangeable: Shakespeare’s will leaves a small sum to his old friend as “Hamlett Sadler.”
Hamnet was buried at Holy Trinity on August 11, 1596, at the age of eleven. The cause of his death is not recorded, and nothing Shakespeare wrote refers to it directly. He was Shakespeare’s only son, and his death meant that no son would inherit the Shakespeare name and property. Our article on Hamnet Shakespeare sets out what the records show and how the novel and film Hamnet have reimagined his short life.
Judith Quiney, the Younger Twin
Judith appears to have been less educated than her sister. In December 1611 she witnessed a property deed in Stratford and signed it twice with a mark instead of her name, which suggests she could not write. She was still unmarried at 31, well past the average age at which Stratford women first married.
On February 10, 1616, she married Thomas Quiney, a 27-year-old vintner. He was a son of Richard Quiney, the Stratford alderman whose 1598 letter asking Shakespeare for help with a loan of £30 is the only known letter addressed to him. The wedding fell in the season around Lent, when marriage required a special license from the Bishop of Worcester, and the couple did not have one. Quiney failed to answer the charge before the church court, and he was excommunicated in March, probably along with Judith.
Worse followed. A Stratford woman named Margaret Wheeler died in childbirth, and she and her baby were buried on March 15, 1616. On March 26, Quiney confessed in the Stratford church court that he was the father. He was sentenced to public penance, though most of the sentence was commuted to a payment of five shillings to the poor.
Shakespeare signed the revised version of his will on March 25, the day before the hearing. In the first bequest, the words “sonne in L[aw]” were struck out and Judith’s name put in their place. She was left £100 as her marriage portion and £50 more if she gave up her claim to a cottage on Chapel Lane. A further £150 was to be held for her, and she was to receive only the interest, if she or any child of hers was alive three years later. Her husband could touch that money only if he settled land of equal value on her. She was also left her father’s “broad silver gilt bole.” Many biographers read these clauses as a father protecting his daughter from her husband, though that reading rests on the timing rather than on anything the will says.
The couple’s later years left a thin trail. In 1616 Quiney moved his business to a house at the corner of High Street and Bridge Street known as the Cage, and in 1633, after he had tried to sell its lease, family members took it into trust for Judith and the children. Judith outlived her sister and all three of her sons. She was buried at Holy Trinity on February 9, 1662, at the age of 77, and the exact place of her grave is unknown.
Shakespeare’s Grandchildren
Shakespeare had four grandchildren, and he lived to know only one of them. Elizabeth Hall, Susanna’s daughter, was eight when he died, and his will calls her “my Neece,” a word that in his day could mean a granddaughter. He left her “All my Plate,” his silver, except the bowl that went to Judith.
Judith’s three sons were all born after his death. The first, baptized on November 23, 1616, seven months after Shakespeare died, was named Shakespeare Quiney. He was buried on May 8, 1617, aged six months. His brothers Richard and Thomas, baptized in 1618 and 1620, both died as young men in early 1639 and were buried within nine days of each other. The cause of their deaths is not recorded. With their deaths, Judith’s branch of the family ended.
Elizabeth Hall, Lady Bernard
Elizabeth married Thomas Nash, a Stratford landowner, on April 22, 1626, and after her father’s death the couple lived with Susanna at New Place. Nash, a committed Royalist, died on April 4, 1647. His will tried to leave New Place to his cousin Edward Nash, although the house belonged to Susanna, and mother and daughter successfully defended their title in court.
On June 5, 1649, Elizabeth married John Bernard of Abington, near Northampton, a widower with children of his own. Five weeks later Susanna died, and Elizabeth inherited the Shakespeare property. The couple later moved to Abington, and Bernard was knighted in 1661, after the Restoration, which made his wife Lady Bernard. Elizabeth was buried in the parish church there on February 17, 1670. She had no known children from either marriage, and with her death Shakespeare’s direct line came to an end.
How the Direct Line Ended
Seen as a sequence of dates, the end of the line took just over half a century. Hamnet died in 1596, and his father in 1616. Judith’s first son died in 1617, and her two surviving sons in 1639. Susanna died in 1649, Judith in 1662, and Elizabeth, the last of them, in 1670. When the Quiney sons died, Susanna and her family made legal arrangements to settle the property on their own branch, but Elizabeth had no heirs to receive it.
Her will dispersed what was left. New Place passed out of the family and was eventually demolished in the eighteenth century. The two Henley Street houses, including the one where Shakespeare was born, went to her Hart cousins, the grandsons of Shakespeare’s sister Joan. For the will that set all of this in motion, see our article on Shakespeare’s later life and death, and for the full sequence of dates, the Shakespeare timeline.
Does Shakespeare Have Living Descendants?
No one alive today is known to descend from Shakespeare himself. The family connection that does survive runs through his younger sister, Joan, who was baptized on April 15, 1569, and was the only one of his siblings to outlive him. She married William Hart, a hatter, who was buried on April 17, 1616, a week before Shakespeare died.
Shakespeare’s will left Joan £20, all his clothes, and the right to live for the rest of her life in the Henley Street house where she already lived, for a rent of twelve pence a year. Each of her three sons received £5. Joan lived there until her death in 1646. Her descendants stayed on as tenants, became the owners under Elizabeth’s will, and kept the property until 1806. According to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, many descendants of Joan and William Hart are alive today, and they are Shakespeare’s nearest living relatives: descendants of his parents, John and Mary, not of the poet.
One other claim deserves mention. The poet and playwright William Davenant, born in Oxford in 1606, was said to be Shakespeare’s godson, and according to John Aubrey, Davenant would say over wine that he wrote with Shakespeare’s spirit and “seemed contented enough to be thought his Son.” The story is secondhand gossip, and it may mean no more than that Davenant saw himself as Shakespeare’s literary heir. No document supports it.
A Closer Reading: The Seven Sons in the Will
The most revealing document about Shakespeare’s children is not a baptism entry but a clause in his will. After leaving his property to Susanna for her lifetime, he passed it to her first son and that son’s male heirs, then to her second son, then to her third, and then in turn to her fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh sons. Only after seven grandsons does the will turn to Elizabeth, then to Judith, and finally to whoever the law would recognize as his heirs.
None of those seven sons existed. When Shakespeare signed the will in March 1616, Susanna was nearly 33, had been married for almost nine years, and had one child, a daughter of eight. An entail of this kind was a standard legal tool for landed families who wanted an estate to pass intact down the male line, and the Shakespeares had been a family of gentry for twenty years, since John Shakespeare was granted a coat of arms in 1596. The clause is a formula. But a formula still shows what a family lacked, and this one is built around a son who is missing. Hamnet had died in the same year as the grant of arms, and the will puts seven hypothetical grandsons in the place he would have filled.
The plan failed at every stage. Susanna had no more children. Judith’s sons, who stood further down the chain, died young. Elizabeth, the last link, had no children. Within fifty-four years, the chain of “heires males” had run out entirely.
What happened to the property shows where the family actually continued. The house where Shakespeare was born did not stay with the Halls or the Quineys. It went to the grandsons of his sister Joan, the relatives his will provided for with twenty pounds, his clothes, and five pounds apiece. The branch the will treated as an afterthought is the one that carried the family forward, and it is the reason anyone today can claim kinship with him.
One act answers the entail more directly than any document. In November 1616, seven months after her father’s death, Judith named her first son Shakespeare. Her children would carry their father’s surname, not hers, so she gave her own family name to her son as a first name. Whether she meant it as a tribute, a claim, or both, it is the clearest sign in the records of one of Shakespeare’s children trying to keep his name alive. The boy lived six months.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Shakespeare’s children and descendants, answered briefly.
How Many Children Did Shakespeare Have?
Three: Susanna, baptized in 1583, and the twins Hamnet and Judith, baptized in 1585. All three were children of his marriage to Anne Hathaway.
Does Shakespeare Have Any Living Descendants?
Not directly. His direct line ended in 1670 with the death of his granddaughter Elizabeth, who had no known children. Descendants of his sister Joan Hart are alive today, but they are his relatives, not his descendants.
Who Was Shakespeare’s Last Descendant?
Elizabeth, Lady Bernard, the daughter of Susanna and John Hall. She was baptized in 1608 and buried at Abington, Northamptonshire, on February 17, 1670.
Why Did Shakespeare Leave Almost Everything to Susanna?
His will passed the estate to Susanna and her male heirs so that it would stay together in one line. Judith received money instead, with conditions that kept it out of her husband’s hands, a choice many biographers link to Thomas Quiney’s scandal in March 1616.
What Happened to Shakespeare’s Son?
Hamnet died at the age of eleven and was buried in Stratford on August 11, 1596. The cause of his death is not recorded.
Shakespeare’s Family
Three articles about the household his children grew up in.