The one notable exception is John Ward, a seventeenth-century vicar of
Stratford, who settled there in 1662, at the age of thirty-three,
forty-six years after Shakespeare's death. Ward remained at Stratford
till his death in 1681. He is the only resident of the century who
wrote down any of the local story. Ward was a man of good sentiment.
He judged that it became a vicar of Stratford to know his Shakespeare
well, and one of his private reminders for his own conduct
runs--"Remember to peruse Shakespeare's plays, and bee much versed in
them, that I may not bee ignorant in that matter."
Ward was a voluminous diarist and a faithful chronicler as far as he
cared to go. Shakespeare's last surviving daughter, Judith Quiney, was
dying when he arrived in Stratford; but sons of Shakespeare's sister,
Mistress Joan Hart, were still living in the poet's birthplace in
Henley Street. Ward seems, too, to have known Lady Barnard,
Shakespeare's only grandchild and last surviving descendant, who,
although she only occasionally visited Stratford after her second
marriage in 1649 and her removal to her husband's residence at
Abington, near the town of Northampton, retained much property in her
native place till her death in 1670.
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