‘Let me weep for such a feeling loss': The emotional significance of Shakespeare’s heritage

On 11 August 1596, the only son of Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare, 11-year-old Hamnet, was buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. There was no direct male heir to assume the coat of arms that John Shakespeare had once sought, and that his son William had, it seems, renewed in October 1596, just after Hamnet’s death. Whatever Shakespeare’s own sentiments, today the sense of loss that is represented by New Place is surely rendered more palpable by the obvious absence of built remains at the site. For Shakespeare’s last home, the proud reflection of his lifetime of achievement on the London stages and in which he died in 1616, no longer stands – demolished by a subsequent owner in 1759. The space that is left to be interpreted for modern visitors is powerfully structured through emotions about the relative strengths and weaknesses of blood, stone and land in representing Shakespeare in his own time and ours.

The purchase of New Place … is associated with great sadness. His only son, Hamnet, died in August 1596 at the age of 11. However grand the house, there was now no male heir to carry on the Shakespeare name. 1

Perhaps initially Shakespeare felt he could cope best with Hamnet’s death not by being in places associated with his son, but by moving away from them. In the year after Hamnet’s death, he took his family to a new and bigger house, New Place.