Shakespeare in Retirement Shakespeare in Retirement Author Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Law Marriage Literature and the Arts Quartos Published file. Updated metadata proofed Review of article finished. Created File Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
Shakespeare in Semi-Retirement

About 1610 or 1611, Shakespeare stopped living in London for much of the year and semi-retired to Stratford-upon-Avon, perhaps because of failing health, or simply because he was ready to lead the life of a comfortable country gentleman. Shakespeare wrote or contributed to numerous plays during this period, including The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen after moving back to his hometown. He was about 49 or 50 when he returned to his hometown to live in the large home, New Place, he had purchased there about a dozen years before.

One momentous event occured after Shakespeare left London: The Globe burned down during a performance of Henry VIII. Thomas Lorkin’s letter reporting the fire has survived. According to Heather Wolfe’s entry on this topic on Shakespeare Documented: The Globe went up in flames on June 29, 1613, a newsworthy event mentioned in numerous contemporary accounts. In his weekly letter to his former student Sir Thomas Puckering, Thomas Lorkin notes that it burned down during a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. His description is tucked between other gossip: the Earl of Southampton’s trip to a spa town in Germany, the publication of a controversial book by an English Catholic, and the rumors that Puckering himself had converted to Catholicism. (Wolfe)

Wolfe also notes some of Lorkin’s comments about the event itself, No longer since than yesterday, while Burbage his company were acting at the Globe the play of Henry 8, and there shooting of certain chambers theatrical cannons in way of triumph, the fire catched and fastened upon the thatch of the house and there burned so furiously, as it consumed the whole house and all in less than two hours (the people having enough to do to save themselves). (Wolfe)

An Active Retirement

Records also indicate that Shakespeare went to London periodically for business matters and was present at Court on several occasions, as when he and Richard Burbage designed an impresa (an emblem accompanied by a motto) for the Earl of Rutland. In 1611, he was one of several citizens who contributed to the maintenance of highways in the Stratford area. In 1612, he was in London, giving evidence in a civil suit brought by a London tire-maker (a craftsman who created the elaborate headdresses worn by noblewomen), Christopher Mountjoy, against a former apprentice.

In the winter of 1614, he traveled to London in the company of his son-in-law, the physician John Hall. They may have gone to inspect the theaters (perhaps even the rebuilt Globe) or other London properties in which Shakespeare was still an investor, or it may have been for medical reasons. Thomas Greene notes that during that visit, At my cousin Shakespeare coming yesterday to town I went to see him how he did. Perhaps Greene merely meant to visit his old landlord (hence the term of endearment, cousin, which was used to describe close friends as well as relations in this time), or perhaps Shakespeare was in declining health.

Shakespeare’s Works?

After his return to Stratford, many fewer of Shakespeare’s works were published in quarto, the small volumes produced by printers in which some of his previous plays had been printed since the 1590s. Of the 45 quarto versions of 18 different plays published before his death, only five were published after Shakespeare’s retirement. This may mean that the King’s Men were holding back those playscripts so that Shakespeare could work on them prior to publication. Some scholars speculate that he may have been preparing his plays for publication, as Ben Jonson was. Jonson published his Workes of Benjamin Jonson, a sort of collected works edition, in 1616, treating them as serious literature rather than merely entertainment. Certainly, Shakespeare’s colleagues treated his collected works as literature when they published them in folio form in 1623, seven years after his death.

A Wedding and Some Scandal

During the last year of his life, Shakespeare may also have been finalizing the arrangements for the marriage of his younger daughter, Judith. In February 1616, just a few months before her father’s death, Judith married Thomas Quiney, the son of a prominent Stratford family. The bride was 31, while the groom was 27. In the period, the average age of first marriage for women was 24, while it was 26 for men, so Judith had delayed marriage well past the typical age for reasons unknown.

Departing from normal practice, Judith and Thomas were married during Lent, a time of religious observance before Easter, so that a special dispensation from a bishop had to be obtained before a parish priest would perform a marriage. Lent was a season of somber religious repentance and fasting, so it was not viewed by the Church of England as suitable for weddings.

The couple did not receive the necessary special permission, which someone reported to the local religious authorities. Scholars presume the couple was in some haste to marry because the groom had fathered a child with a local woman, Margaret Wheeler, out of wedlock. Margaret and her child died during labor about a month after Judith and Thomas’s wedding. Thomas Quiney was excommunicated from the Church of England for this offense and he did public penance by paying a fine just days after his new father-in-law died in 1616.

Key Print Sources Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. W.W. Norton, 2004. Greer, Germaine. Shakespeare’s Wife. Bloomsbury Press, 2007. Potter, Lois. The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Key Online Sources Bearman, Robert. Parish Register Entry Recording Judith Shakespeare and Thomas Quiney’s Marriage. Shakespeare Documented. The Folger Shakespeare Library, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/node/515.. Best, Michael. A Country Gentleman. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/retirement/countrygent.html.. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026. Thomas Quiney and Judith Shakespeare Summoned to Appear at the Bishop’s Court on their Citation for Having Married in Lent Without Securing a License. Shakespeare Documented. The Folger Shakespeare Library, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/thomas-quiney-and-judith-shakespeare-summoned-appear-bishop-s-court-their-citation. Wolfe, Heather Letter Describing the Burning of the Globe During a Performance of <title level="m">Henry VIII.. Shakespeare Documented. The Folger Shakespeare Library, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/letter-describing-burning-globe-during-performance-henry-viii..