Best known for his ’80s comedy ‘Lend Me a Tenor’ and his ’90s musical ‘Crazy for You’, the US playwright Ken Ludwig has clearly invested prudently over the years. Upon a recent visit to Stratford-upon-Avon he was told of the plight of the former home – to be fair, very former home – of Shakespeare’s daughter Susannah and her husband John Hall.
Built in 1613, Hall’s Croft (as the home is know) is one of the last complete examples of Jacobean architecture in the country. But to paraphrase Susannah’s dad, time doth waste it, and the 411-year-old building is in a fairly bad way at the moment, with steel girders installed to support the roof now sinking into the ground and an extension added later in the seventeenth century now pulling away from the original house, meaning it’s literally pulling in two directions.
However, as reported by the Guardian, when Ludwig was in town and told about this he didn’t hesitate to open his chequebook to the tune of a cool mil, the largest donation ever made to the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust in its 177-year history.
Lena Cowen Orlin, SBT’s vice-chair, said to the Guardian: ‘Hall’s Croft is a beautiful and atmospheric building that has been suffering from the need for serious intervention. Now we have the angel to make this possible … It’s a sleeping beauty of a building and Ken Ludwig is helping the trust bring it back to life as Shakespeare and his family knew it.’
Hall’s Croft has not been widely open to the public since the pandemic, which has given conservationists time to examine the building, but presumably Ludwig’s large donation ought to help the process of its eventual reopening.
For more information on Hall’s Croft, head to its official website.
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