Susanna Shakespeare

Susanna Shakespeare is Agnes and William Shakespeare’s elder daughter, a practical presence in a family shaped by illness, loss, and work. As she grows, she assumes responsibility for the household’s keys, accounts, servants, and businesses; her competence gives her substantial authority even as grief and family tension remain unresolved. Her story also turns on contrast: where Susanna organizes, keeps accounts, and teaches, Judith gravitates toward plants, animals, and their mother.

Identity and Family

Susanna appears first in the household as a child among the family’s daily demands. During Judith’s dangerous fever, Mary Shakespeare sends her to fetch clean sheets while Hamnet brings wood for the fire. The episode places Susanna within a network of practical care shared across generations: Agnes and Mary work together at Judith’s bedside, while the children are given tasks that help sustain that work.

Hamnet’s death changes the family’s emotional landscape. In William Shakespeare’s recollections, Hamnet returns in sharply specific childhood images: pointing out a passing horse, playing with a ball, asking about Greek grammar, and calling for help when a bird lands on a pig. Against those memories, William sees his eldest daughter as furious with the world, her anger reaching the family in words. The portrait does not explain Susanna’s feelings, but it makes her grief visible as part of the household’s aftermath.

Care and Household Work

Susanna’s care often takes the form of maintaining the conditions that let other people act. As the medicinal herbs dry out and Agnes stops tending them, Susanna wipes dust from the jars, removes the useless herbs from the rafters, and burns them. She instructs Judith to carry water each day to the small patch behind the henhouse. Susanna also prepares a remedy of calendula petals pounded into vinegar with honey, taking responsibility for stirring the mixture daily.

These tasks mark a change in the household: Agnes’s former work with remedies is no longer being sustained by Agnes herself, and Susanna steps in to preserve parts of it. Yet Susanna does not simply reproduce her mother’s role. She delegates the watering to Judith and takes charge of other duties, making care a matter of both labor and organization.

That capacity becomes even clearer as she grows taller than Agnes. She carries the house keys on a ring at her waist, keeps the accounts, pays the servants, and supervises the flow of business from Agnes’s remedies and the expanding trade in beer and malt. When someone fails to pay, she sends an uncle to call at the debtor’s door. She also reports to William on income, investments, rents, and late-paying tenants, and advises him about what to send or retain in London. Her attention extends to property coming onto the market: she alerts him when she hears of a field, house, or plot for sale.

At William’s request, Susanna also arranges furnishings for the new house, including chairs, mattresses, linen chests, wall hangings, and a bed. Agnes refuses to give up her own wedding bed, so the larger new one remains in the guest room. The detail captures Susanna’s practical authority alongside the limits of it: she can furnish a house, but not displace the personal history her mother attaches to a particular object.

Authority and the Limits of Teaching

Susanna’s command of household affairs does not translate into an easy command of Judith. She has promised William to teach her sister the first letters, and each day calls Judith inside to sit before an old slate. The lesson becomes a struggle of attention. Judith looks out the window, refuses to use her right hand, fidgets with a loose thread, and loses track of the letters; the street seller’s cries draw her away from the task. She turns the spaces in letters into faces, giving them different expressions, rather than treating them as steps toward reading.

It takes Judith a year to produce a legible signature, and even that is a crooked, upside-down initial. Susanna eventually gives up. When she complains that Judith will not learn to read or write, help with accounts, or take on the management of the house, Agnes answers by distinguishing what each daughter does well. Susanna’s frustration is real, but the household does not treat her own strengths as the standard by which Judith must be measured. Their competence is different, not interchangeable.

Sisters and Different Ways of Belonging

Judith stays close to Agnes, tending the garden, running errands, and keeping her mother’s workbench in order. She knows where to find the bay leaves or marjoram Agnes asks for, and spends hours with the cats, grooming them and making a business of the kittens born each spring. Susanna, by contrast, is uneasy with the garden’s constant demands, the bees, and the stream of visitors; she is usually indoors. The division is not simply between a capable sister and an incapable one: Susanna’s strengths lie in accounts and administration, while Judith’s lie in intimate knowledge of plants and animals and a closeness to their mother.

Susanna also takes on the role of teacher because William has asked it of her, but the failed lessons reveal the limits of authority within a family. She can manage money, servants, and commercial obligations; she cannot make Judith’s attention or aptitude conform to a schedule. Agnes’s response preserves both daughters’ distinct places in the household rather than resolving their differences by making one a model for the other.

Grief, Correspondence, and Change

In a later period of Agnes’s withdrawal, the contrast between the sisters becomes a form of care. Judith brings soup to her mother’s bed, along with lavender, a rose, and a basket of unshelled walnuts. Susanna, meanwhile, sits down at a desk with a blank sheet and writes to William in anger, demanding to know how he could have acted as he did without telling them. The account does not specify the action that provokes the letter, so its force lies in the breach it registers: Susanna’s practical role in the family has not spared her from feeling excluded from her father’s decisions.

Across the novel’s episodes, Susanna’s responsibilities expand from helping with household tasks to managing money, property information, servants, and trade. But management is not a cure for loss, nor does it make her the same kind of caregiver as Agnes or Judith. Her anger, her failed lessons with Judith, and her work sustaining the household show a daughter trying to hold family life together through concrete duties, even when the family’s grief and silences cannot be administered away.