Career
Little is known about Joan"s husband, William, apart from the fact that he was sued for debt in 1600 and 1601. He died in April 1616, and was buried 17 April, a week before William Shakespeare died. She continued to reside there for the remainder of her life, dying at the age of 77.
Her son William never married.
Her other descendants via Thomas lived in Stratford until 1806. Thomas inherited the Henley Street house known as Shakespeare"s Birthplace.
He had many descendants. By the 18th century Joan"s descendants were identifying themselves as carrying the poet"s family line.
John Hart (1755–1800) was identified as "the 6th descendant of the poet Shakespeare" on his gravestone in Tewkesbury Abbey Churchyard, Gloucestershire.
In her essay A Room of One"s Own, Virginia Woolf created a character, "Judith Shakespeare", supposed to be Shakespeare"s sister. lieutenant is unknown whether this was a mistake or a deliberate conflation of the two women. When her father tries to marry her off, she runs away to join a theatre company but is ultimately rejected because of her sexual
She becomes pregnant, is abandoned by her partner and commits suicide.
A teenage Joan appears in Laurie Lawlor"s novel The Two Loves of Will Shakespeare (2006), in which she presented as an aspirant poet who resents the restrictions placed on her as a woman. She is in love with Richard Field, but he pursues Anne Whateley.
In Shakespeare"s Will, Vern Thiessen"s speculative biographical play about Anne Hathaway, Joan is a "bitch" who is constantly interfering in Anne"s life.