Short answers, pulled from the story.
Judith Quiney was the younger daughter of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, born on the 2nd of February 1585. She was the fraternal twin of Hamnet Shakespeare, the playwright's only son, who died at the age of eleven. She married Thomas Quiney, a vintner of Stratford-upon-Avon.
Shakespeare altered his will on the 25th of March 1616, striking out a bequest to his son-in-law Thomas Quiney and inserting Judith's name instead. Quiney had recently been found guilty by the Bawdy Court of fathering a child with another woman, Margaret Wheeler, who died in childbirth. The revised will protected Judith's inheritance by denying Thomas access to the money unless he settled lands of equal value on her.
Thomas Quiney had impregnated a woman named Margaret Wheeler, who died in childbirth along with her child; both were buried on the 15th of March 1616. Weeks after marrying Judith, Quiney appeared before the Bawdy Court on the 26th of March and confessed in open court to "carnal copulation" with Wheeler. He was originally sentenced to public penance in a white sheet but was let off with a five-shilling fine paid to the parish poor.
Judith Quiney was probably illiterate. In 1611 she witnessed a deed of sale and signed the document twice with a mark rather than her name. Unlike her father and her husband, she left no written record in her own hand.
Judith and Thomas Quiney had three children, all of whom predeceased her. Their firstborn, named Shakespeare after his grandfather, died at six months of age in 1617. Their two younger sons, Richard and Thomas, were buried within nine days of each other in 1639 at ages 21 and 19. Judith outlived her last surviving child by 23 years.
Judith Quiney has appeared in numerous works, including Edward Bond's 1973 play Bingo, Neil Gaiman's graphic novel The Sandman, and Grace Tiffany's 2003 novel My Father Had a Daughter: Judith Shakespeare's Tale. In Kenneth Branagh's 2018 film All Is True, Kathryn Wilder played her as a rebellious young woman who resents her father. Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 novel Hamnet centres on her childhood and her twin's death, with a 2025 film adaptation directed by Chloé Zhao.