Shakespeare Trust launches 'Save Hall's Croft' Transatlantic Campaign

We would like to open this blog with very important news from our colleagues, friends and partners — the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. We are proud to support their bold new initiative: Help Us Save Hall’s Croft, a transatlantic fundraising campaign to protect one of Stratford’s most precious historic sites.

Once the home of Susanna Shakespeare and Dr John Hall, this house in the Old Town that we all know well requires a major conservation programme to secure its structure. The total restoration plan requires £2.5 million to safeguard the building’s fabric, repair ageing timbers, and ensure that this 1613 house can continue to tell the story of Shakespeare’s family life.

The very first donor was American playwright Ken Ludwig, whose extraordinary gift of £1 million in 2024 set this entire effort in motion — the largest private donation in the Trust’s 177-year history. Now the first public fundraising push is underway, with a target of £500,000. This will go into the crucial “phase two”, and will allow to begin stabilising the building and addressing the most urgent structural issues.

Together with its partner Shakespeare USA, the Birthplace Trust invites supporters in both the UK and the US to join this mission. It’s incredible how Ken Ludwig’s generous act underscores the power of Shakespeare’s words — written and spoken — to connect England and America. There’s a part of the famous Democracy in America that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote after visiting the US in the 1830s which both Shakespeare scholars and politicians like to quote: “There is hardly a pioneer hut in which the odd volume of Shakespeare cannot be found.”

James Shapiro, one of the most renowned American Shakespeare scholars, has gathered an impressive collection of texts, letters and documents demonstrating how Shakespeare was passionately embraced in the everyday life of so many Americans. In his 2014 anthology “Shakespeare in America”, he unveils fascinating facts such as Abraham Lincoln, who possessed very few books as a young man - nevertheless had access to Shakespeare; or Lieutenant and the future 18th president Ulysses S. Grant rehearsing the part of Desdemona in 1846; or King George V praising the Folger Shakespeare Library for “forming another bond of friendship between our two nations” in his message to its opening ceremony in Washington in 1932.

As Shapiro himself reflects, after the American revolution, for the nation to question its relationship with Britain meant questioning its relationship to Shakespeare as well. “Could he serve as an American no less than an English national poet? It was a question American writers wrestled with time and again in the course of the nineteenth century, from Charles Sprague's hope in 1824 that Shakespeare would bind the two countries together to Willa Cather's confident declaration at the century's end that "Shakespeare belongs to two nations now.”, the author notes.

Today, the goal is not to divide this heritage but to save it together. Supporting Hall’s Croft becomes a shared cultural act — a testament to Shakespeare as a playwright who continues to spark imaginations, inspire a love for theatre, and offer us a common artistic language.

Donate to support Hall’s Croft, and have a look at the beautiful Adopt-a-Beam campaign, symbolically funding individual timbers and structural elements of the house. Contributions with higher tiers offer unique adoption certificates. All donors will be invited to witness conservation in action through special tours and behind-the-scenes updates.

By supporting Help Us Save Hall’s Croft, we affirm that Shakespeare’s legacy — local and global — is worth protecting together.