John Ward (vicar)

• 1. Introduction

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  John Ward kept a diary that turned out to matter far more than he could have imagined. Ward served as vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon from 1662 to 1681, and among his notebooks he jotted down five entries about William Shakespeare. Those fragments are now among the most-cited sources in all of Shakespeare biography. What makes them strange is that Ward seems to have known almost nothing about Shakespeare when he arrived. His notes suggest a man dutifully catching up on a local celebrity, not a devoted scholar chasing literary history. So who was John Ward? Why did a physician-vicar with a persistent cough and dreams of learning Arabic end up as one of the closest witnesses to the Shakespeare legend? And what exactly did he write?

• 2. A Royalist Upbringing

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  Ward's father was captured at the Battle of Naseby, the decisive engagement that sealed the fate of the Royalist cause in the English Civil War. That family history shaped the son. The diary Ward kept reflects a continuing devotion to the Royalist side, a loyalty that persisted through the years of Cromwellian rule.

  Charles Severn, who later transcribed and published the diary in 1839, identified Ward as a man born in 1629 in Spratton, Northamptonshire. Ward received his Master of Arts in divinity at Oxford in 1652. While at Oxford he also read widely in medical literature, an interest that would define his later life in Stratford. After graduating he settled in London, likely practicing and studying before the political landscape shifted again.

  The Restoration of 1660 opened a door for men of Ward's background. In 1662, Charles II appointed him vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon. His predecessor, Alexander Bean, had been removed following the Act of Uniformity, which swept Cromwellian clergy from their posts. Bean did not disappear quietly; he appears to have established a rival non-conformist congregation in the town.

• 3. Doctor and Vicar

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  At the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford, Ward served as rector, but the notebooks he kept tell a richer story than the parish register could. Entries about medicine run throughout his diaries, and they suggest he practiced as a medical doctor alongside his clerical duties. This was not unusual for a man who had studied medical literature at Oxford, but it gave Ward an unusual dual role in the town.

  His ambitions stretched further still. The diary records a private promise Ward made to himself: to learn Arabic, Old English, and Hebrew, the ambition of a man drawn to philological study. He also made notes on the history and geography of Stratford and commented on current events. The notebooks were not a simple diary but a collection of documents, including drafts of sermons and medical observations.

  Through all of this, Ward was not entirely well. His own diary records a persistent cough and physical frailty for much of his time in Stratford. He died on the 7th of September 1681 at the age of 52 and was buried six days later, on the 13th of September. He never married. His will left his property to his brother.

• 4. Five Entries on Shakespeare

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  Ward's diary contains five entries that refer to Shakespeare, and they appear sporadically among the medical and theological notes, not in any dedicated section. The first concerns Shakespeare's family line: Ward noted that Shakespeare had two daughters, one of whom married a physician named Mr. Hall, and that their daughter in turn married Sir John Barnard of Abington Park, becoming the Lady Bernard of Abbingdon.

  A second entry captures a piece of received opinion about Shakespeare's character and working life. Ward wrote that Shakespeare was "a natural wit, without any art at all," that he had frequented plays in his younger years, and that in his later life he had lived at Stratford while supplying the stage with two plays a year. Ward also noted that for this work Shakespeare received an allowance so large that he spent at the rate of a thousand pounds a year. Ward adds the qualifier "as I have heard," acknowledging the claim was secondhand. The scholar Karl J. Holzknecht later described that figure as "absurdly high," and it contradicts other sources on Shakespeare's finances.

  Immediately below that entry Ward wrote a reminder to himself: to read Shakespeare's plays and become well versed in them so as not to seem ignorant. Scholars have read these two entries together and concluded that Ward arrived in Stratford with no particular knowledge of or interest in Shakespeare, but felt he would be expected to know something about the dramatist as a local celebrity.

  A third entry records the most dramatic claim in the diary. Ward wrote that Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and that it seems they drank too hard, and that Shakespeare died of a fever contracted at that gathering. This is the only source for that account of Shakespeare's death. Gerald Eades Bentley wrote that the story "is not necessarily accurate, but at least he was in a better position to get the facts, or an echo of the facts, than anyone else who has written on the subject."

  A fourth entry questions whether the scholar Peter Heylin did well to omit Shakespeare from his lists of famous English dramatic poets in his book Cosmographie. Ward uses the title "Dr. Heylin" for the man, suggesting he knew of him by reputation.

  The fifth reference is more oblique: a note about a letter to his brother asking to see a woman Ward calls "Mrs. Queeny." She is assumed to be Judith Quiney, Shakespeare's daughter. The note appears to have been written shortly before Ward arrived in Stratford, and Judith Quiney died in the same year he was appointed vicar, just before he was inducted into his post. Whether they ever met is not known.

• 5. A Document's Long Journey

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  Ward's notebooks did not remain in Stratford. The original manuscripts eventually came to rest in the Library of the Medical Society of London, and it was there that Charles Severn found them and transcribed them. Severn published his transcription in 1839, which is how the five Shakespeare entries first reached a wide readership.

  The collection has since moved again. The manuscripts are now held by the Folger Shakespeare Library, the major research institution in Washington, D.C., dedicated to Shakespeare and early modern studies. The diary itself covers the years 1648 to 1679, making it a document that begins during the Interregnum, the period between Charles I's execution and the Restoration, and extends almost to Ward's death. The Shakespeare passages, written by a frail vicar who once reminded himself to read the plays he was expected to know, now sit in one of the most significant Shakespeare collections in the world.