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Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Anne Shakespeare's Epitaph

Anne Shakespeare's Epitaph

Paperback

Series: Elements in Shakespeare and Text

Business of Writing

ISBN10: 1009611089
ISBN13: 9781009611084
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: Apr 23 2026
Pages: 120
Weight: 0.24
Height: 0.25 Width: 5.00 Depth: 7.00
Language: English
The Shakespeare family occupies five gravesites on the chancel steps at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. Anne Shakespeare's grave is the only one commemorated with a brass plaque and an epitaph in original Latin poetry, eulogizing her as a beloved mother, pious woman, and 'so great a gift'. For nearly four hundred years, this epitaph has remained largely unreadable to visitors, enabling a long history of undervaluing Anne's significant maternal role in the Shakespeare family. Anne Shakespeare's Epitaph offers a new reading of the content and the related material conditions and interpersonal connections behind this text. It provides new evidence about the identity of the engraver and suggests several possible scenarios for how the Shakespeare family came to memorialize Anne as a cherished maternal figure. This Element reinscribes the original significance of Anne's epitaph, and reclaims it as an important Shakespearean text that offers traces of a lost documentary record.

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