Origins of The Trust
For more than 200 years after the Bard's death, his birthplace was occupied by the descendants of his recently widowed sister, Joan Hart. Under the terms of Shakespeare's will, the ownership of the whole property (the inn and Joan Hart's cottage) passed to his elder daughter, Susanna; and then on her death in 1649, to her only child, Elizabeth. Elizabeth died in 1670, bequeathing it to Thomas Hart, the descendant of Shakespeare's sister, Joan, whose family had continued as tenants of the cottage after her death in 1646. The Harts remained owners of the whole property until 1806, when it was sold to a butcher, Thomas Court. When it was again put up for sale in 1846 on the death of Court's widow, the American showman P. T. Barnum proposed to buy the home and ship it "brick-by-brick" to the US. To purchase the property for the Nation, the Shakespeare Birthday Committee was formed, and such luminaries as Charles Dickens helped the Committee raise £3,000 and bought it the following year. Incorporated by a private Act of Parliament, the Birthday Committee became the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
Read more about this topic: Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
Famous quotes containing the words origins of, origins and/or trust:
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)