Hamnet: Chapter 1  Summary & Analysis

A boy (later identified as Hamnet) creeps down the stairs. He leaps to the floor from the third-to-last stair, as usual. But this time he misses his landing and falls, bruising his knees. The downstairs room is empty; the embers of the fire quietly smolder in the grate. He slips out the front door and into his grandparents’ house, which adjoins his. Normally, the house and his grandfather’s attached workshop would be busy at this time. But today it’s filled with nothing more than its usual smell of woodsmoke, polish, leather, and wool. The workshop is empty. The boy receives no answer as he calls for his mother, grandparents, his uncles and aunt, the maid, and his grandfather’s apprentice.

Hamnet cannot imagine where everybody could be; his grandfather (later identified as John) and the apprentice, Ned, are usually in the workshop at this hour. Hamnet pauses at the door to the empty workshop, then slips inside. Usually, he’s not allowed inside. Usually, his grandfather yells at him for merely standing in the doorway. The thrill of being in the workshop chases all thought of Hamnet’s mission from his mind. It’s like that with him: he is very, very bright. But everything distracts him. His teacher, unable to understand his wandering mind, has whipped him twice in recent weeks. When his mind wanders at home, it annoys his grandmother (Mary) and sisters (Susanna and Judith). But his mother (Agnes) looks at him as if she understands the way his mind works.

So, in the workshop, Hamnet forgets that he’s trying to find help for his sister Judith, who has suddenly fallen ill. He fingers the fine, soft leather hides his grandfather turns into gloves. His eyes slide over the tools on the workbench. He replaces a glove stretcher which Ned has left out, hoping to protect Ned from John’s wrath. A small sound alarms him, and he darts from the room. But, to his growing consternation, no one is in the house or any of its outbuildings. He looks around the yard in desperation, wondering to whom he should turn to for help.

In every life, there is a defining moment. This moment—Hamnet’s rising desperation, the empty house, the unanswered call—will become that moment for Agnes.

Hamnet wonders what to do next as he looks around the yard, where he and Judith were playing just moments earlier with the kittens from the family cat’s most recent litter. Usually, Mary drowns the cat’s kittens as soon as they’re born, but this batch evaded her notice until they grew too large for her to do it in good conscience. Usually, Hamnet would have been pleased to discover himself unexpectedly alone with Judith. Usually, he would have seized the opportunity to talk her into doing something daring, like climbing on the cookhouse roof to steal plums from the next-door neighbor’s tree. But today, in the middle of their game, she abruptly complained of pain in her head and throat, and she went inside to lie down.

As Hamnet passes back through his grandparents’ house, he hears a noise. For a second, he entertains the fantasy that it might be his father, no matter how unlikely that is. To his disappointment, he finds grandfather hunched over a stack of papers on the parlor table. When Hamnet coughs to announce his presence, he startles John. He watches John slosh ale into a cup and onto his papers, realizing that his grandfather is drunk and angry, with the unpredictable rage that Hamnet recognizes all too well. His father—on one of his precious and too-short visits—warned him to keep his distance when John is in a “black humor.” Hamnet tries, even as John demands help with the wet papers. But he gets within striking distance, and John lands a harsh blow on Hamnet’s face. When Hamnet bursts into tears, John mocks him for being soft, like his father.

Hamnet flees his grandparents’ house, running through his own door and back up the stairs to the bedroom where Judith lies on a pallet next to their parents’ big, curtained bed. She kicked off her shoes then laid down, fully dressed, on top of the sheets. Hamnet stares into her face, so like his own—they are, after all, twins—with love and concern. He notices two little lumps the size of quail’s eggs at the base of her throat and near her shoulder. He says he will find a physician. Judith wants Agnes, and  Hamnet promises that she will be there soon. He says that she isn’t far away.

In fact, the children’s mother, Agnes, is more than a mile away at Hewlands, tending the bees she keeps in a wild, witchy garden near the house where she grew up. One of her brothers sent word that the bees had abandoned their hives and were swarming in the orchard. Agnes visits each hive, waving the smoke from a rosemary smudge to calm the remaining bees so that she can harvest their honey and comb. Suddenly, she feels a shift in the air, as if something—a silent bird, a warning—has passed by. She looks around but sees nothing amiss. Telling herself not to be foolish, she returns to her work. But for the rest of her life, she will wonder if heeding that mysterious, abrupt sense of unease would have changed things.

Hamnet hurries through the streets toward the physician’s house, where he bangs anxiously on the door. A woman answers it. He explains Judith’s sudden fever and she demands to know if his sister has “buboes,” or lumps, under her skin. Hamnet knows what that word means, but he cannot believe that that (he won’t even think the word) has returned. He doesn’t answer but his evident flash of fear alarms the woman. She pushes him out the door, promising to send him the physician  as soon as possible.

Unbeknownst to him, Hamnet passes both his grandparents and his sister on his errand. Susanna and Mary are out delivering finished gloves to customers. John stands outside the guildhall, trying to insinuate himself into a meeting of the town’s dignitaries. He desperately misses the power he held before he was disgraced. He still has one of the finest houses in town and a steady income—augmented by what his no-account son (Hamnet’s father) sends back from London—but being cast out from the fellowship of these men bothers him deeply. He retreats to the tavern for a drink, alone.

Judith, meanwhile, lies in bed, hallucinating. The room’s walls and the posts of her parents’ bed writhe and move like living creatures. She closes her eyes and finds herself in the grip of feverish dreams. She’s walking through a meadow, trying to cling to her sister Susanna’s hand, afraid that if she loses her grip, she will sink into the grass and be lost forever. She’s with her family at the Candlemas fair. She sits on her father’s shoulders; his firm grip on her ankles makes her feel safe. They watch tumblers performing; when her father lets go of her ankles to applaud, she fears that she will fall. Suddenly, she is afraid. She begins to cry and her tears rest like pearls in her father’s hair.

In the streets, Susanna silently observes Mary trying too hard to ingratiate herself with a formerly friendly neighbor. She knows that most of her grandparents’ friends started avoiding the family as John’s reputation crumbled. At home, Judith lies on her bed, trying to understand how so sudden a fever interrupted her perfectly normal day. In the market, John’s and Mary’s maid flirts with the dairyman. At the farm, Agnes, having finished collecting her honey, prepares to shoo the swarming bees back to their hives. Two days’ ride away, in London, the father leaves his rooms to buy an afternoon snack, ignoring the empty prattle of his landlord’s fussy son-in-law as they walk toward the river. Many miles away, Hamnet reenters his house, hoping he and Judith won’t be alone for much longer. But all he hears is silence.