John Hall (physician)

• 1. Introduction

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  John Hall was born in 1575 and died on the 25th of November 1635. He spent most of those six decades working as a physician in a small English market town. His name is remembered today largely because of one marriage: he became the son-in-law of William Shakespeare. Hall left behind more than a family connection, though. He kept private notebooks recording his medical cases. He was pulled into a courtroom fight to defend his wife's reputation. And centuries later, actors on stage and screen stepped into his role. What did those notebooks actually contain? Why did his wife need defending in court? And how did a country doctor's story end up dramatized for modern audiences?

• 2. Physician And Son-In-Law

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  Carlton, in Bedfordshire, was where John Hall came from before Queens' College, Cambridge, admitted him as a student in 1589. He earned a B.A. in 1593 and an M.A. in 1597, then went on to practice medicine, though he never held an English medical degree. Some have speculated he trained in France instead, since no record places him at an English medical school. He set up his practice in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was the only doctor serving the town. On the 5th of June 1607, he married Susanna, William Shakespeare's daughter, and the couple went on to have one child, a daughter named Elizabeth. Their house, known today as Hall's Croft, is now open to the public. Hall's bond with his father-in-law extended beyond the household. In 1613, the two men are recorded as being in agreement over a local dispute concerning enclosure, and in 1614 they travelled together to London on business. After Shakespeare died, Hall and Susanna left their own home and moved into New Place, the house that had been his.

• 3. The Slander Suit

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  In 1613, John Lane accused Susanna Hall of adultery with Ralph Smith, a 35-year-old haberdasher, adding that she had caught a venereal disease from him. Thomas Wilson, the Puritan vicar whom Hall supported, had drawn considerable local opposition, and Lane belonged to the faction working against Wilson. On the 15th of July, the Halls brought a suit for slander against Lane in the Consistory Court at Worcester. Robert Whatcott testified on the Halls' behalf; three years later, he would witness Shakespeare's own will. Lane did not appear in court, and he was found guilty and excommunicated as a result. He did not let the matter rest there. Lane later took part in a riot staged to protest against Wilson.

• 4. The Casebook

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  By 1611, John Hall was already recording patient cases in Stratford, the earliest entries in what would become two notebooks he intended for publication. James Cooke, a surgeon who lived from 1614 to 1688, purchased those notebooks and translated them from Latin. He published them in 1657-22 years after Hall's death, under the title Select observations on English bodies, or Cures both empericall and historicall performed upon very eminent persons in desperate diseases. That 1611 date makes it nearly certain Hall had already been living and working in Stratford by the time of his marriage. Only the first of the two notebooks survives; the original manuscript of the second has been lost. In 2020, Greg Wells and Paul Edmondson revisited that casebook in a study titled John Hall, Master of Physicke, published by Manchester University Press.

• 5. Stage And Screen

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  Peter Whelan turned the slander case into a stage play, The Herbal Bed, with Liam Cunningham playing Hall in its original production. Tom Hiddleston later portrayed him in A Waste of Shame: The Mystery of Shakespeare and His Sonnets, a television film broadcast on BBC Four on the 22nd of November 2005 as part of the ShakespeaRe-Told season. Kenneth Branagh directed the most recent screen version, the 2018 film All Is True, with Hadley Fraser in the role of Hall. Three different actors, across a stage play and two screen productions, have now carried a Stratford physician's name to audiences who never knew him.