Lady Ann

This memorial in a local church fits with 'Unreal' the Shakespeare Challenge words for today. She married Sir Henry Lee in 1554 and they had three children. John and Henry died as babies but Mary lived to adulthood, although died before her mother; Lady Ann and her children are in the tomb together. there are red flowers on the tomb following the inscription - extract below:

Entombed here doth rest a worthie dame
Ex tract and born of noble house and blood
........ strew with crimson flowers
This tomb wherein her cinders rest,
For sure her ghost lives with the heavenly peace...


Un- was another prefix Shakespeare appended to adjectives liberally. In the case of ‘Romeo and Juliet’, a tragedy in which a father mourns his daughter’s suicide, “uncomfortable” seems to have originated with a slightly more drastic sense than how we use it now. Just because the first written instances of these terms appeared in Shakespeare’s scripts doesn’t mean they didn’t exist in everyday language before this. As Shakespeare might have said, it was 'high time' (The Comedy of Errors) for such 'household' words (Henry V).