The Private Life of William Shakespeare by Lena Cowen Orlin

Author:Lena Cowen Orlin [Cowen Orlin, Lena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192661418
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2021-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

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.

Then, Passenger, ha’st ne’er a tear,

To weep with her that wept with all

That wept, yet set her self to cheer

Them up with comforts cordial.

Her love shall live, her mercy spread,

When thou ha’st ne’er a tear to shed.

Susanna’s is another clever inscription, juggling correspondences in ways reminiscent of the Shakespeare epitaph and outperforming it poetically. Its author throws up a second ball (‘Wise to salvation’) while the first is still in the air (‘Witty above her sex’), before bringing them both home by linking wit to Susanna’s father and piety to her husband. An auxiliary act of compositional dexterity introduces the spin of an allusion to 2 Timothy 3: 15: ‘And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus’. All this is achieved with two sets of rhyming couplets, AA BB, each of the four pentameter lines created with an initial trochee followed by four iambs. The next six lines, which turn from the portrait of Susanna to direct address of her mourners, resolve into regular iambic tetrameters and the rhyme scheme CA CA DD. Knowing that the inscription is a recreation, we might also speculate that Dugdale made a copying error, and that a witty movement from ‘waste ne’er a tear’, in line 5, to ‘ha’st ne’er a tear’, in line 10, has been suppressed.

With the biblical quotation recalling Susanna Hall’s childhood, the inscription roots Susanna in her natal family as much as in her married one. There is no reason for her epitaph to have followed the model of Anne Shakespeare’s in representing a daughter’s grief, but it is unusual for not even mentioning that Susanna had a daughter. Absent as she seems to be from the Shakespeare monuments, Elizabeth Hall is also unlikely to have been responsible for the vocative of respite that exists across the broad chronology of the family’s memorials: ‘Stay, passenger’, for Shakespeare in 1616; siste viator (Stay, traveller), for Nash in 1647; and ‘Then, Passenger’, for Susanna Hall in 1649. These passengers and travellers are not exhorted, as is conventional in sepulchral inscriptions elsewhere, to contemplate their own deaths. ‘O mortal man, foresee thy fatal fall . . . Like as you are I lived lately here / Like as I am you shortly shall appear’, reads a tomb chest painted to show a Wiltshire woman in a shroud, a full-body memento mori with no name or death date given.41 The Shakespeare family inscriptions are silent not only on this subject but also on the usual funereal themes of siring descendants and giving charitably. Instead, they are all celebrations of lives lived well and, in Shakespeare’s own case, famously.

The notion that Judith Quiney was the black sheep of the daughters has militated against any consideration that she may have been the keeper of the family flame.

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