Susanna's Cabinet: An Augmented Reality Exhibition

At a time when our shared experience of history and heritage sites is at a crisis point, as dual global crises of climate change and Covid meet positive movements towards greater inclusivity of cultural memory, 'Susanna Hall and Hall's Croft: Gender, Cultural Memory, Heritage' will provide an urgent intervention in how we experience literary and cultural heritage, both local and global. It will offer the first ever full case study of Susanna Hall (William Shakespeare's eldest daughter) and her home, Hall's Croft, owned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the organisational partner for the project. Rectifying Susanna's sideline position in cultural memory is both practically vital in increasing understanding of women's history and heritage and powerfully symbolic in building an inclusive, transparent future for heritage presentation and academic research.

The project challenges how early modern women have been historicised and mediated in the construction of literary and cultural heritage, both local and global, via a case study of Susanna Hall (née Shakespeare) and her home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Susanna's house, Hall's Croft, is open to the public and attracts 85,000 visitors each year. Susanna lived to 66 years of age, during which lifetime she married, had a daughter and suffered the major scandal of a public accusation of adultery, countered by a slander case she brought, together with her husband the renowned physician, John Hall. She outlived John to manage a household, negotiate the sale of her Hall's manuscripts and probably took over aspects of his medical work in the form of healing and acting as a 'wisewoman'.

Via new research based on a range of evidence, including from the first complete modern English translation (Wells & Edmondson, 2020) of John Hall's Casebooks, the project contextualises Susanna within the female population of her home town, Stratford-upon-Avon, in her own time. Primarily, the project scrutinises the construction of Susanna and her home as a site of cultural memory and heritage both nationally and internationally. The project re-examines Susanna's contribution, both as a 'real' and as an imagined woman, to private and public life and to textual and material history. It investigates Hall's Croft's case to interrogate the gendered nature of cultural memory and heritage and their relationship with individual and group memory, locally, nationally and globally.

This project presents new ways to present heritage narratives of early modern women (or, more accurately, their truncation or omission) and the construction of literary cultural heritage, specifically early modern women in the Shakespeare narrative and heritage spaces. The intersections of women's history at Hall's Croft and the construction of Susanna Hall are paradigmatic of a wider need for the re-mediation of women's narratives in heritage presentation. This project presents new research and examines how archive sources have been utilised in past narratives to construct and represent Susanna and Hall's Croft. The project reveals the importance of the site as a space to explore early modern women's health and wellbeing, literacy and resource management practices as well as questioning the dominance of father and husband in our cultural memory of Susanna.

Examining female agency, power and identity in constructing discourses and narratives of memory and heritage, the project uses Susanna's life, reputation - and subsequent historicisation, fictionalisation and mediation - both to scrutinise and to intervene in how sites and narratives construct cultural memory. The project utilises innovative digital humanities technologies to create outputs that encourage autonomy in how we experience heritage narratives, both in academic and leisure contexts, lifting the lid on how academic research informs heritage presentations and inviting users to play an active part in constructing shared heritage narratives.