Though very little is known about Judith Quiney, commentators do not shrink from casually disparaging her. Because at 31 years old Shakespeare's younger daughter was still unmarried, it is assumed that she was unattractive. It is all the more remarkable, then, that Judith became the wife of a scion of the most distinguished and successful family in Stratford. He, we are told, ‘did not prove a satisfactory husband’, and theirs was ‘not a fortunate union’, though it lasted for nearly fifty years (Fripp 1924, p. 205).

At some point in her childhood, Judith's father went away and ended up in London. Somehow Anne Shakespeare, and her three children, Susanna, Judith and her twin Hamnet, survived until August 1596 when Hamnet died. Summer, when virulent fevers stalked the land, was often a time of high mortality but in Stratford that August only five deaths are recorded, three of them new-borns (Holy Trinity Parish Register, 243/1). Perhaps Hamnet had always been frail; perhaps he had suffered in the womb; perhaps he was carrying a birth injury. No member of the Shakespeare family would have felt the loss of Hamnet more keenly than his womb-sister. Within a year her mother would take on the mammoth task of restoring New Place together with the training of her own female workforce.

Judith then joined the ranks of vanishing women. If we examine the records of Holy Trinity we find that of the thirty-nine girls who were christened the same year as Judith, a third were buried before they reached marriageable age. Of the other twenty-six, only three were married in Stratford, and another was buried unmarried (Holy Trinity Parish Register, 243/1). If the others ever married, an outcome by no means certain, it was in their employers’ parishes rather than their own.

I have decided in default of better information that, if at the age of thirteen or thereabouts Judith Shakespeare was placed in service, she was sent no further than the house of Richard Quiney and his wife Bess in the High Street. This is how I interpret the fact that she was called upon to witness a deed of enfeoffment (transfer of land) for Bess Quiney and her son Adrian in 1611 (SBTRO, ER 27/11).