Shakespeare's Daughter

Who was Shakespeare’s youngest daughter Judith? Scholar and novelist Grace Tiffany first imagined her as a young woman in her 2003 novel, My Father Had a Daughter. Now she’s back with The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, a new novel about Judith Shakespeare, this time a midwife-apothecary at age 61. Her marriage foundering, her adult sons dead from the plague, Judith is forced to go on the run to avoid arrest for witchcraft, accompanied by a zealous Puritan woman and child displaced by the bloody 17th-century English Civil War. In this excerpt, we observe the events leading up to Judith, Jane, and Pearl leaving Stratford. 

The book’s title comes from Hamlet. In Act IV, Scene 5, Ophelia says: “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are but know not what we may be.”

The trouble started a fortnight after Jane and Pearl’s hiring, when the pair of them accompanied me on a birthing call. I barely knew the chandler’s wife, who had come to Stratford recently from Snitterfield, but I’d delivered hundreds of babies in Warwickshire by now, and most of them had lived, so my name as a midwife was unbesmirched, and the call didn’t surprise me when it came. As for Jane, she told me she’d assisted at the childbeds of two cousins, and she seemed, when I quizzed her, to know something of the craft. So I brought her into the house with me, and charged her with boiling the water and sitting close by the bed with clean towels to the child when it came out all new and slippery.

I took care to wash my hands with soap before I touched the woman, a custom whose oddness prompted stares and whispers from the maids peeping in through the doorway, though I would swear that this practice, taught me by Doctor Hall, is the ground of my success in keeping not only babies but also their mothers alive. Her labor was brief—it was her sixth—and the boy yelled lustily when I bit the cord. Her eyes on the infant, the woman seemed undismayed by my new servant Jane’s loud praising of God, as I saw to the afterbirth and Jane mopped and wrapped him; praise for sending us one more Christian warrior to increase His Kingdom on Earth and speed us toward the Millennium. As for me, seeing that Jane’s hands did good work, I let her mouth run, and only bit my lip and hoped it were no Royalist household. These days you asked before going anywhere, but this call had come suddenly, awakening us at daybreak, and in my rush I’d forgotten. But the mother remained absorbed by her new son. She seemed spent and weak but hale as she held her babe to her breast.

And then we heard the growling.

The mother started and let go the babe, which set up a weak wailing as it slid down the counterpane. Quickly I restored the infant to her arms and her nursing, then looked tensely around to see what dog had entered the room. What I saw sent a shock of fright through me. I jumped backwards, stumbling over a stool.

We had forgotten Pearl. Left in the garden to play with a rag poppet, she had thrown it in the dirt and crept or crawled into the birthing room. Now she was pushing herself up gradually at the end of the bed, her hands on the frame, so that only her eyes and the top of her head could be seen from the mother’s perspective, and from mine. She had lost her cap, and her hair, like her eyes, was wild. As the chandler’s wife stared, Pearl changed her growl to a bark, then began snapping her teeth. “I will eat you, my pretty!” she said between snaps. “Yum yum yum yum, give it me, give it me—”

The chandler’s wife shrieked and clutched her new boy so hard it lost the nipple and began its crying anew. I grabbed Pearl by the arm, hauled her to her feet, and dragged her to the door, where I all but threw her down the passageway. The two female servants scuttled from our path, exclaiming in horror, and the little girl slid parlorward on her arse, yelling “Plague on this house!” She said it in that same strange imitation of a man’s voice I had heard her use outside my door on the day we met. I looked back at Jane, who, oblivious to the ruckus, had placed her hand on the baby’s head and was speaking some kind of blessing, though it was unlike any blessing I had ever heard, something about the child growing to observe the covenant made by Moses with the children of Israel in the land of Moab. From the terrified expression on the chandler’s wife’s face, I could tell she thought this some satanic curse.

“Get out!” the woman yelled, more heartily than a woman lately delivered is wont to be able to call. “Hands off my child!”

I yelled at Jane to cease her chanting and hastily gathered up my soaps and cloths. Thinking it best not, at this moment, to introduce the matter of my fee, I hurried us both from the room. I’d brought some boiled eggs for the mother to nibble on, to restore her strength, and these still lay in my bag, but no matter, she’d done this five times before and could see to herself, she and her goose-like maids. Outside we scooped up Pricey Pearl, who was now humming and spinning about in the front yard while the silly girls peeped from the windows. “JesuMaryJoseph,” I swore as we hustled down the lane, dragging our short prisoner by the arms.

That afternoon Pearl suffered the beating of her life from her aunt Jane, who, as she smacked, shared with her niece much godly invective concerning wicked offspring. Her memory was marvelous. With the voice of a prophet, she quoted fluently from both the Old Testament sages and the Apostle Paul. I left her and her hard hand to it, hoping only that my decades-old good name as a licensed Warwickshire midwife would prove a charm against any tales the chandler’s wife and servants might tell, about the apparition of Satan’s spawn at the good woman’s childbed.

But I couldn’t keep it from Quiney, who was expecting the money (which, by the way, I never got). I made the tale as humorous as I could, even barking like a dog to mimic Pearl mimicking the devil, but he only looked at me in frowning dismay. “They will bring us to ruin,” he said. “That child is possessed.”

“You may call it the devil,” I said coldly, disappointed in him. There’d been a time when my tales could make him spit his ale in laughter. “You may call it what you will. I call it imagination.”

***

Some five days after the unhappy episode at the chandler’s house, a strange thing befell me at the Market Cross. Standing before a stall, a townswoman and I reached at the same moment for a cabbage. When our hands met, she snatched hers back as though she’d touched a hot coal. She looked at me with a face of fear, then averted her eyes from mine and scurried away. I looked down at my hand, then touched my hair to see if something was amiss with it as I watched her fleeing back. She stopped to say something to another dame, and the pair of them looked over at me, frowning. When they saw I was staring boldly back at them, they both dropped their eyes.

I bought the cabbage and walked home briskly, standing as straight and looking as youthful as a woman of sixty-one can, and cursing the luck of the old. I knew what the woman had meant. There are folk who think any hag who has cunning with herbs is a witch, and this woman didn’t know me. She had no inkling that I was the wife of a respected townsman or the sister of the proprietress of New Place. Or the daughter of William Shakespeare.

But as I discovered later that day, it was worse than that.

Because she did know.

Meet the author

Grace Tiffany is a professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama at Western Michigan University, an editor of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a translator of Jorge Luís Borges’ writings on Shakespeare, and the author of six other novels, including My Father Had a Daughter (2003), a predecessor to The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter (2025); Gunpowder Percy (2016), based on the real story of the doomed Catholic zealots who plotted to blow up the English House of Lords in 1605; and Paint (2013), based on the life of Emilia Lanier, a scandalous 17th-century poet thought by some to have been the mysterious Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Tiffany’s sole novel for teenagers, Ariel, appeared on the 2006 American Library Association list of best novels for young adults. She has also written two nonfiction books about English Renaissance culture.