In the old town of Stratford, Hall's Croft is an elegant Jacobean house that was the home of Shakespeare's eldest daughter, Susanna, and her husband, the physician John Hall. It offers a rare window on medicine and the well-off domestic life of early-seventeenth-century England.
The house of Susanna and Dr Hall
Built around 1613, the house was lived in by Susanna Hall (née Shakespeare) and her husband, Dr John Hall, a renowned physician of Stratford, married in 1607. The couple lived here until early 1616, shortly before the death of William Shakespeare (April 1616) — Susanna was his favourite daughter and his principal heir. The house, spacious and well furnished, bears witness to the ease of this family of the provincial upper bourgeoisie, in the wake of the fortune of the playwright become a gentleman.
A plunge into Jacobean medicine
The major interest of Hall's Croft lies in the profession of its master. John Hall was a physician renowned well beyond Stratford; he recorded his clinical cases in notebooks, published after his death under the title Select Observations on English Bodies — a precious source on the medical practice of the time, its plant-based remedies, its diagnoses and its treatments. The house presents an exhibition on this medicine, as well as a walled garden of medicinal plants, recalling that Renaissance therapeutics rested largely on botanical knowledge. To see: the collection of sixteenth-seventeenth-century paintings and furniture, the exhibition on Dr Hall's medical practice, the walled garden of medicinal plants.
Did you know?
Shakespeare's son-in-law left us a documentary treasure: Dr John Hall scrupulously noted his patient cases — their ailments, his remedies, the results — in notebooks published after his death. From them we learn how people were treated in Shakespeare's England: plant decoctions, bloodlettings, diets. It is one of the rare direct testimonies of Jacobean medicine, written by a man who personally knew the greatest poet of his time.
Notes
Hall's Croft lies in the Old Town of Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire; a site of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, open to the public. Hours to check.
Quiz
- Who lived at Hall's Croft?
- Susanna (Shakespeare's daughter) and Dr John Hall
- William Shakespeare himself
- Anne Hathaway
- What was John Hall's profession?
- Physician
- Actor
- Printer
- What did Dr Hall leave us?
- Published notebooks of medical cases
- Plays
- A map of the world