What did Shakespeare’s son die of?
We don’t really know how Shakespeare’s young son Hamnet died. He had a twin sister named Judith, who lived to adulthood and married, but Hamnet died at the age of eleven and a half. Child mortality was high in the sixteenth century; there were no antibiotics and many childhood diseases might therefore prove fatal, such as scarlet fever, whooping cough, diphtheria, and even measles. He was buried on August 11, 1596.
