It’s very comfortable here in New Place, where I’ve been living since John died in1601, and my daughter-in-law Anne is a wonderful housekeeper. That’s just as well since dear William has to spend so much time in London. We all look forward to Lent, when he regularly rides home, meeting up with old friends and neighbours, and checking up on his business interests. But he comes up at other times, too. Mind you he does spend a good deal of time in his study, with his books around him – thinking up his next play, I suppose. He was always a great reader and he used to love it when I told him old tales that I’d heard from my mother and grandmother. And he did very well at school. I would send him off every morning well scrubbed and with his satchel over his shoulder.

I was really pleased when William got us the coat of arms. Mind you we ought to have had it twenty years before, when we first tried. William had a bit of a struggle with the College of Heralds because of his being a player, as they call it. But he’s doing well. He has a good job with the Lord Chamberlain’s company of players, and works really hard, they tell me, acting and helping to run the company as well as writing plays for them – and he makes a decent amount of money out of it. ‘Not without right’ our motto says. Indeed not, after all I’ve done for this town since moving in from the country and setting up home here in Henley Street. It’s not everyone who rises from being apprenticed to a glover to becoming an alderman, and eventually the town’s bailiff, not to say representing its interests in London. And that without a grammar school education.

Of course I was captivated by him – who wasn’t? He spoke beautifully – it was like listening to music on occasion – and he loved reading poems aloud to me. He jumbled up several sonnets which were addressed to me in his collection of 1609, and one of them – Sonnet 145 – puns on my family’s name. I had said I hated him, for getting me pregnant, but no one could hate Will for very long. I liked to pull his leg about how he lived up to his name in more ways than one. Strong-willed, passionate, always after his own way (which he usually got). Like the purchase of New Place. He really pushed for that, and how proud I was moving into the largest house in the borough and becoming mistress of it. I knew there were probably mistresses in London. Tom Green, his distant cousin, who liked lodging with us, told me about his lawyer friend at the Middle Temple, John Manningham, nicknaming him William the Conqueror. But I turned a blind eye, because he had conquered me. As the children got older, I used to go down to London from time to time to see him and his latest play at the Globe.

Was I my father’s favourite? That’s a windy question, and I should blow you away with it! And it’s not fair on Judith. He wrote plays for both of us, you know. He deliberately changed Juliet’s age from the original story so that she was the same age as me – and she is the very pattern of love; and Judith was Viola, reunited with our poor Hamnet at the end of What You Will. But there were always books and papers around us, and he let us read whatever we wanted to. When he came home he used to allow us to engrave things on the windows. The panes in my bedroom were covered with the names of actors, fragments of his verse, Juliet’s speeches – even some Latin. And he taught us both how to play chess. Here I can boast. I had a much better head for it than Judith, and I could even beat our mother when I set my mind to it, which is saying something! John Hall came into my life when I was twenty-four. He was thirty-one. Devoted every moment to medicine he had, and, looking back, I think I was a bit star-struck by his learning and his, well, goodness. We loved; we laughed – I more than he perhaps – and we raised our daughter, Elizabeth. I’m not going to go into all that nasty business with John Lane and all he said about me. Suffice to say, my husband and father stood by me and all ended well.

It’s not easy being a twin, Judith tends to get all the attention, because she’s a girl, and very pretty, whereas I’m sickly-looking and often ill in bed, and can’t go to school or play with the neighbours’ children in the way she does. And Daddy’s so often away from home that I miss him dreadfully. Mummy is terribly busy with the cooking and the housekeeping and the animals, and making sure the servants are working properly. I like to watch Grandpa making gloves and sometimes he takes me to Shottery to see the farm animals, which I like very much. I can’t go to the Petty School where my sisters learn their letters and to do sewing and that sort of thing.

It’s thirty years since the two Williams in my life died. I know you want to know more about William the First – my elder brother. What is there to say? People are still talking about him in Stratford-upon-Avon, even after all these years. I keep those two big editions of his plays in my late husband’s dresser in my little cottage. I browse through them from time to time and marvel at where all his knowledge came from. But I have vivid memories of him retiring into his closet at New Place of an evening and not wanting to be disturbed. But, oh, he was always a kind brother to me. I did my stint looking after our ma when she lay a-dying, mind, but what else is a daughter for? I’d nursed my poor husband (my other William) well enough. We named our first after my mother, but our young Mary died the year before mother. She was only four, poor lass. Then Thomas – a good strapping lad (takes after his father he does), and looks out for his old mum now – and then there was Michael (after the archangel), who God took from us when he was only ten. My late husband wasn’t, as they say, very good at credit, so times could be tough, but my William the first liked to help us out.

I was the youngest by quite a long way: there are six years between me and Richard and sixteen years between Will and me. He and Anne were more like my uncle and aunt while I was growing up in Henley Street. He was always open with me in a way that he wasn’t with the others – perhaps because of the age gap. I’d see him lose his temper occasionally, even cry sometimes. An abiding memory is him opening a parcel he’d carried back from London and showing us his name in print on that poem about Venus and Adonis. I was thirteen, and I’d just been reading the story in Ovid at the grammar school, and then there was my big brother’s version - so much more detail than in the Latin original! And humour. I used to like memorizing Will’s jokes and sayings to try out on my friends. My only one up on him (so far!) is that I actually managed to complete my apprenticeship as a glover. But our father died shortly afterwards, and then Will suggested that I join him in London for a while. I made good friends among the actors, and I used to kip with Will in his lodgings with the Mountjoys, or sometimes with our brother Gilbert over in the St Bride’s parish. He is the one who helps Will out the most.

My own father was more of an astrologer than a medical man – interested in alchemy, too, and the stars. I was always more excited by flesh and blood, and how to cure it. After my father died, I became good friends with one of his household servants, Matthew Morys. He followed me to Stratford – after I’d come down from Cambridge University and that spell I had travelling the continent. Morys named his two children after my good wife and me: Susanna and John. As medical as I am, I never use the title of ‘doctor’, and don’t really like to hear it used either. ‘Mr’ John Hall is good enough for me – actually I prefer just John Hall. I know my father-in-law would have been very disappointed about my turning down a knighthood a few years ago – I used to think that he was after a knighthood himself. But he was always fascinated with what I had to say about the human body, and its ‘thousand natural shocks’, as he would call them. He liked including the characters of doctors in his plays sometimes – but he was never seriously inclined to medicine.

It was a privilege to be asked to supply the wine for the Queen when she visited New Place on her way to join Prince Rupert in Oxford, even though I had to pay for it all myself. Poor lady, it was a troubled time and she needed all the comfort she could get. I think they chose me because I understand French – I learnt it when I was training to be a vintner. So I was able to talk to her personal maid about it. Pretty girl she was, too. Judith and I were living at the Cage then – it was before my brother Richard moved in. He was very good to me – I’d retired by the time he died but he kindly left me £12 a year, almost enough for my wife and me to live on, as well as £5 to bury me when I go too.

The Shakespeare families and mine go back a long way together, right back to the time of my grandfather in the 1550s, over a hundred years ago now, and if I may say so we’ve done a lot for this town between us. Master William’s father was an alderman and became bailiff, and so did my father, and I after him. Quite a line of succession. Of course Master William himself wasn’t able to take much of a part in the town’s affairs, spending as much time in London as he did, but he left a decent sum of money for the town’s poor people. He was my godfather you know, and I used to play with his granddaughter Elizabeth in the Great Garden of New Place.

One branch of my family hails from nearby Warwick, and I was brought up being told about my distant cousins, the Shakespeares, in Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just finishing my law studies at the Middle Temple when I happened to meet my cousin Shakespeare there. Our gossipy friend, John Manningham, introduced us. Shakespeare had come with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to perform Twelfth Night. I remember joking with my lawyer friends: DzYou may as well call it what you will, Willdz. So he rather adopted that as a subtitle –Twelfth Night, or What You Will.I heard through my cousin that Stratford-upon-Avon was on the look out for a good legal mind to serve on the Town Council as clerk. So, that’s where I went, and lodged at New Place from the summer of 1603. My wife, Lettice, was with me, and there was plenty of space for all of us. We had our own set of rooms – a bit like a college really, with that nice square of green in the middle. Will used to pop over with a new scene sometimes, and we’d try it out together. He used to say he liked the way I read aloud, he’d say DzNot bad – for a lawyerdz. And two of my three children were born in New Place. We named our girl Anne and our lad William. Afterwards, when we’d moved around the corner to the great house, St Mary’s, opposite the church, we had our Elizabeth; we named her after Elizabeth Hall. I liked to consult with my cousin William about almost everything – especially the financial side of things.

Isaac Jaggard has just slipped me a copy of his latest book – Master William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies! How extraordinary to think that little Will, who used to swim with me in the Avon when he wasn’t swotting away at his Latin all those years ago, should be author of the first-ever collected book of plays by an English dramatist! And what a shame he didn’t live to see it! By the time he came to London I was already out of my apprenticeship as a printer, and had married Jacqueline, my master’s widow. I was glad when Will gave me the job of publishing his first poem, Venus and Adonis, and then of printing Lucrece – runaway successes they were, too, especially Venus. When word got round about how sexy it is all the chaps at the Inns of Court were queuing up for copies, and so were their girl friends. We stayed friendly, and I gave him the run of my shop so that he could look over my latest publications. He was a great reader, always looking for stories he could use for his plays.

A playmaker and poet. When I was studying at the Middle Temple I used to see him on stage in his own plays at the Globe and the Blackfriars, and I would boast to my friends that I knew him and his family in Stratford. They owned New Place – a decent-sized house with a fine garden and orchards in the middle of town, close to the Guildhall and the school. He was good friends with my bachelor Uncle John, who left him a fiver in his will. He also left money for his really rather splendid monument - far grander than Shakespeare’s - that you can still see in the church. They had a jokey kind of relationship, there was a story about an epitaph making fun of Uncle’s money-lending. Master Shakespeare and his wife dined with us at the College from time to time, and when I was a lad I used to play with his two daughters and their brother, Hamnet, a sickly boy who died young.

Master Shakespeare was a modest man. He was already famous for having written a long and somewhat reprehensible poem about Venus and Adonis, and plays such as Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. But he took lodgings with me and my family in our house in Silver Street. Students at the Inns of Court were clamouring for his portrait to pin up in their studies - he was a good-looking fellow. He was recommended to us by our friend Richard Field – they’d been at school together. I gather he had a grand establishment in Stratford-upon-Avon: New Place – even though it was quote old when he bought it. He would go up there whenever he could, to see his wife and family and to write, especially when the playhouses closed in Lent, riding the horse that he kept in our stables not far from here. But the travelling took at least two days, more usually three, both ways, so it was quite a journey.

Well we certainly had similar backgrounds. His father made gloves and mine was a brick-layer, neither could afford to send us to university. We were grammar-school boys – and when I talk about his ‘small Latin and less Greek’, I mean to praise the lad and all of his Warwickshire cheek! Both of us left school with a limited knowledge of the Classics, but it never held us back. I went on reading and studying and making those Romans and Greeks more my own; Will showed that even by only having been to grammar-school he could rival some of the greatest authors of all time. Not a bad actor, either. Well, all right – he was bloody good. I saw that immediately he took up that part in my Everyman In His Humour. But can I just say for the record: he took my Stephano and Matheo and turned them into Andrew Aguecheek and Toby Belch in his slight, Ilyrian comedy. Little did I know we had a thief in our midst! And Thorello, my jealous husband, got transformed into his Othello – even the names are similar. I challenged our Warwickshire Will, and in public down the Mermaid, and all he could say was "well, isn’t it interesting how similar your bragging soldier Bobadillo is to my belovèd Sir John Falstaff" (he emphasised the knighthood, too), and, furthermore, he got to his hind legs, isn't the case therefore altered to one of everyman for himself?

I don’t know how Will Shakespeare first became aware of me, but maybe it was when he was acting at court even before he helped to found the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Anyhow it came as quite a surprise when I had a letter from him asking if he might dedicate a poem to me. I got my secretary to reply a bit guardedly, but saying I’d be willing to read it, to see if I liked it. He sent me a manuscript, and as soon as I started to read I could see he had real talent – but it was also a bit cheeky, a really sexy poem about a beautiful young man – how could I fail to see myself in Adonis? – resisting the advances of the goddess of love – and all this just at the time when I was telling my guardian Lord Burleigh that I hadn’t the faintest intention of marrying the Earl of Oxford’s granddaughter, however large her dowry! Anyhow I quite fancied having a clever long poem written in English dedicated to me, so I told him he could go ahead, and he brought me the first printed copy along with a sonnet beginning with the words ‘Lord of my love’, and that really did it. He was ten years older than me, brimming with creative energy, witty and sexy. He completely bowled me over, and before long I was in thrall to him.

Pancakes and mustard! That’s what I like to say. That’s why he chose me! You know - Touchstone in As You Like It! It was my first part in the new Globe. What a great year 1599 was: in some ways the start of my acting career – certainly my major break. The days of grammar school back in King’s Lynn and those seven years training to be a goldsmith seemed far behind me, as I sat and watched the Lord Chamberlain’s Men: Augustine Phillips, Henry Condell, Will Sly, Richard Burbage, John Heminges, Thomas Pope, Christopher Beeston, John Duke – all of them great in their way. And funny Will Kemp was there, too, showing off as usual, always saying a bit more than was set down for him. Anyway, Will Shakespeare had invited me to perform before the company to see if they wanted to take me on, and I was watching a performance of theirs just beforehand.

Master Shakespeare and I got on fine - at first. We joined together with Burbage to found the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. I was already quite a star. I’d travelled to the Low Countries as an entertainer with the Earl of Leicester and made a reputation for myself not just as a comic actor but also as a writer of jigs – those comic song and dance pieces performed after plays. I always acted in them myself , which meant that I always got the last laugh. And Shakespeare wrote some great parts for me. Admittedly Peter in Romeo and Juliet didn’t stretch my abilities, but Dogberry always went down well with audiences. But as the years rolled by we didn’t always see eye to eye. I bought a share in the Globe but never actually acted there.

That Will Shakespeare’s a very promising young man. We were born within a couple of months of each other, and we’re both grammar school boys, but he’s been a bit of a slow starter, maybe because, unlike poor Robert Greene, and George Peele, and me, he didn’t go to university. I’ve seen him act in some of my plays at the Rose. I think he found The Jew of Malta rather too cynical – he’s romantic by nature, always inclined to see the best in people. He’s a decent actor and has a great sense of theatre, but I think his future lies more in writing plays, and even poems, than in acting. I was pleased to lend him a manuscript of my poem Hero andLeander, and shouldn’t be surprised if he were to try something in the same vein, especially now that the plague has closed the playhouses and he needs to find a new way of earning a living.

It came as a surprise to my family that I went into the theatre. My father was a bishop, a bold preacher, not afraid of rebuking even the Queen when he thought it right to do so. When I was only eight years old he had to be with her cousin, Queen Mary of Scotland, on the scaffold begging her to convert to the Protestant faith... He was able to tell me all about her execution. But my Uncle Giles was a poet, and so are my cousins, and my own brother writes verses in Latin from time to time. And of course my plays are mostly in verse. It was getting to know Francis Beaumont that made me a man of the theatre. We were very good friends, kept house together, it was a terrible blow to me when he got married. But, oh, I was dazzled by Master William. He took it in very good part when I wrote a sequel, The Tamer Tamed, to his early play The Taming of the Shrew. And when his inspiration was flagging a bit he asked me to work closely alongside him writing for the King’s Men.

I always enjoyed writing in collaboration with other playmakers, like Thomas Dekker and William Rowley, early in my career. It was hard work – the companies were crying out for new plays and we had to write at great pressure, often late into the night. And it didn’t help when Dekker got thrown into prison because of his extravagant ways. But there was a real excitement about the camaraderie of the playhouse, knowing the actors you were writing for, thinking what would please audiences best, and hoping to surprise them, even shock them out of their settled ways from time to time. It was a special privilege to be asked to work with Master Shakespeare. Of course I knew his work well before getting to know him personally, and his biggest hit, Hamlet, was a great inspiration to me when I came to write The Revenger’s Tragedy. So I felt really privileged when Master Heminges told me one day that William had got stuck while writing a play about Timon of Athens.

It was the burning down of the Globe that broke his spirit. He loved that place. He’d helped to put it up, after that exciting time when we all got together to lug the timbers of the Theatre across the river and make a new playhouse out of them close to the Rose and under the very eyes of our old rival Philip Henslowe. Will’s greatest triumphs had been there. Henry V, with himself as the Chorus; Hamlet – I’ll never forget the first time we did that, Dick Burbage at the top of his form, everyone else in the company giving it their all. And I wasn’t bad as Polonius, if I may say so. After that, what a run of parts for Dick Burbage – Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Leontes, Coriolanus – just one triumph after another. Will took it all very modestly, just going on doing his bit for the company, popping off to Stratford when he could, to see his family and look after his business interests there. And of course getting on with a new play whenever he could find a bit of peace and quiet. Mind you, towards the end he lost a bit of his popular appeal. Sometimes you’d have thought he was writing for himself – that Cymbeline – not much for the groundlings there. So we got handsome young John Fletcher and clever Tom Middleton in to help him out. Still, he never gave up, till that terrible summer day when we are playing All Is True and a stupid apprentice pointed a cannon in the wrong direction and the thatch caught fire.

He used to come and worship with us quite often at St Mary’s, Aldermanbury, which was only ten minutes from his lodgings. Heminges and I were churchwardens there – though looking back, I don’t know how we managed all that and the work at the playhouses. I met Heminges when Lord Strange’s Men visited my home town of Norwich, back in 1593. I moved up to London with my mother shortly afterwards. We’d inherited my uncle’s tavern, The Queen’s Head, near the Middle Temple. My lovely wife Elizabeth gave me my big break, though – always very generous with her money she was, and I was able to buy shares in the King’s Men in 1603, and the Globe a couple of years later. I acted for our pal Ben Jonson, too – Sejanus, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Catiline. And good John Marston even cast me as myself in the induction to The Malcontent. I didn’t mind coming across as slightly bossy – because someone has to be around theatre folk! And I was able to show off some of my Latin, too. I was trying to tot up with Heminges the other day the number of times we’ve taken part in performances at court before their majesties Elizabeth, James, and Charles.

As soon as I heard that Master Shakespeare had died at his home in Stratford-upon-Avon I thought he should be buried in the Abbey. After all Chaucer and Spenser are there, and it was only a few weeks since Francis Beaumont had joined them – a fine writer especially when he worked with Will’s great friend, John Fletcher, but look what Shakespeare accomplished – two great poems, a wonderful book of sonnets (even though it didn’t make much of a splash when it came out) – and all those plays! –histories, comedies, and above all tragedies – he was the greatest of them all. So I made the case in my little poem, and lots of people agreed with me and have told me that they copied it into their notebooks. Of course surly old Ben Jonson made fun of it in the poem he wrote for the big collected book of plays, but I still think Shakespeare deserved a place in the Abbey, whether along with his great predecessors or under a monument to him alone.

I expect you’re surprised to find me in this company aren’t you, after all the trouble I’ve been in? Up in court time and again for being drunk, for beating women up, for keeping a disorderly house (as they call it) - you name it. But there was a time when I thought I might make a respectable living as a writer. My father was a poet, he knew Edmund Spenser and people like that. I know Latin, and I’ve translated some books, and I’ve written plays for the King’s Men, no less. There were those terrible happenings up north - the Calverley family – a man who murdered his wife and kids and was tried for it and pressed to death with stones, heavier and heavier until he could stand it no more – a terrible way to go, he lasted for hours before giving up the ghost. Well I read all about it in a pamphlet, and so did my pal Thomas Middleton. He started to write a play called A Yorkshire Tragedy – never got round to finishing it, but a publisher got hold of it and pretended it was by Shakespeare.

I was only eight years old when grandfather died, but I remember what a solemn time it was. New Place was all hung with black, and hundreds of friends and neighbours came to the funeral. Of course not many of his London friends and colleagues could make the journey, but Michael Drayton came across from Clifford Chambers where he was staying, as he often did, and promised that he would tell Master Jonson all about it next time he was in London. My grandmother was very sad. I think she rather regretted that grandfather left me most of his silver plate as she often used it for entertaining visitors, but of course I had no use for it at that time, and I let her keep it till I married my first husband, Tom. We got married in Holy Trinity on 22 April because that was as close as we could get to grandfather’s birthday, and I laid my flowers on his grave.

My father? Yes, I suppose he was an important man. He had a fine coat of arms and a scarlet livery and a sword, and he had to go to London a lot, and they say he knew the King quite well, and other important people. And he wrote books. He owned a lot of land around here, and half of the parish tithes. We liked to say we lived in the largest house in town (which is true), with a great garden and barns, and we owned another house on Henley Street that he’d inherited from my grandfather – the place where he’d made gloves and dealt in wool. Father’s sister, Aunt Joan, and her family lived in it till she died and her sons are still there. There’s a fine monument to Father in Holy Trinity, though not as grand as the one to John Combe who lived in The College. Father left our big house to my sister, Susanna, and now it belongs to her daughter, my neice, Elizabeth, Lady Bernard. But she lives away now, in another grand house, in Northamptonshire.