The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter

(Run Time: approx. 8 hours)

For readers of Hilary Mantel and Madeline Miller, a deeply engrossing work of historical fiction, a tale of a woman of the Shakespeare family struggling to manage both her private grief and public danger.

At the age of sixty-one, Judith Shakespeare, a midwife-apothecary and twin of the long-dead Hamnet, must flee provincial Stratford on horseback to avoid arrest for witchcraft. Her traveling companions are a zealous Puritan woman and child who have been displaced by civil war, the bloody seventeenth-century strife between Royalists and Roundheads. Judith is also leaving her marriage, which has foundered since the wrenching loss of two adult sons to the plague.

The sequel to the author's My Father Had a Daughter, a tale of Judith in her youth, The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter revisits this character for the ages, Shakespeare's sharp-tongued, witty youngest child, no less feisty in her maturity. Four-hundred years after Judith's death, Grace Tiffany brings her back onto center stage. Judith's latest tale offers profound insights, into friendship, motherhood, marriage, religious extremism, and war, which remain resoundingly true today.

This work is narrated in Original Pronunciation, that is, Early Modern English, as a nod to the phonological system of Shakespeare's time.

Grace Tiffany (Author) is an American writer and Shakespeare scholar. She's edited Shakespeare's The Tempest and written articles and nonfiction books about Renaissance literature, as well as seven novels, including Will (Berkley 2004), My Father Had a Daughter (Berkley 2003), Ariel (HarperCollins 2005), The Turquoise Ring (Berkley 2005), Paint (Bagwyn Books 2013), Gunpowder Percy (Bagwyn, 2016), and The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter (Harper, 2025). Her first novel, My Father Had a Daughter, appeared on the Booksense 76 independent bookstores’ best-books list of 2003. Her fourth, Ariel, was listed as a best book by the National Library Assocation in 2006. Her third novel, The Turquoise Ring, is a retelling of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice from the perspective of the five women in the play. The book has been translated into Hebrew, Russian, and Hungarian (Magyar). Renowned Columbia University Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro has called The Turquoise Ring one of the six best creative adaptations of Shakespeare in history, grouping it with Millais' painting Ophelia and Tom Stoppard's dark comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Tiffany's 2016 Gunpowder Percy follows the fortunes of one of the ringleaders of the infamous Gunpowder Plot, an instance of early-modern religious terrorism, and its chilling punishments, in England. Her 2013 novel, Paint, is based on the turbulent life of seventeenth-century poet Emilia Lanier, a reputed lover of Shakespeare and one of the first Englishwomen to see her writing in print.

Mary Jane Wells (Narrator) trained as an actor at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, doing theatre in the UK and Europe for 12 years prior to her long-term love affair with the US. She is an award-winning actor and writer who has performed at The Mark Taper Forum with an adaptation of French classic, The Red Balloon, returning later with a solo show, Martha, which toured to the Annenberg Centre, the Kennedy Center, the New Victory on Broadway, and at an international showcase in Philadelphia. She has toured extensively with the Smithsonian and Honolulu Theatre.

Her next new solo show, The Good Girl, is a recent recipient of sponsorship. She partners with Author’s Republic, Capital Theatres and The Kennedy Center from the very beginning — for what she hopes will be an irreverently hilarious new show for those who care for and live with Dementia.

It is her wildest dream to serve with storytelling and create appropriate social impact where possible. maryjanewells.org