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Chapter 10
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Hamnet, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Loss and Grief
Fate and Fortune
Freedom, Restraint, and Genius
The Power of Love
Identity, Choice, and Sacrifice
Summary
Analysis
These are the things that need to happen for the pestilence to reach Warwickshire in the summer of 1596. Months earlier, a master glassmaker in Venice must burn his hand making millefiori beads, leaving another man to pack the beads for transport, using filthy rags as padding instead of wood shavings and sand. A cabin boy must disembark from a merchant vessel at Alexandria, where he must encounter and play with a monkey, thereby transferring three infected fleas back to the ship in the folds of his red neck scarf. There, the fleas infect first the ship’s cats and then its crew. Within days, so many have died from a mysterious “Afric fever” that the ship must hire new sailors and procure new cats. At Venice, dock workers load the box of beads into its hold.
As the book traces the long and arduous journey by which the plague reaches Judith, it emphasizes the role of fate and happenstance in people’s lives. No one in Judith’s family could have predicted this calamity, whose roots lie so deep in the past and so far away from the small orbit of their Stratford lives. Although this general scenario was common enough in Early Modern England, where there were several outbreaks of plague during Shakespeare’s life, it remains shocking and devastating when considered in the context of the individual lives touched.
Themes
The new, Venetian cats spend most of their time in the hold, sleeping on the boxes of beads, so no one notices when almost all of them die, too. Their fleas nestle into the filthy rags padding the beads, where they wait out the voyage and a layover in the London Customs House. One box of the glassmaker’s beads eventually makes its way to Warwickshire, ordered by a seamstress to adorn the bodice of a dress for a wealthy client. It arrives at her door at the same moment as the little girl who lives next door. Judith begs to see the precious beads; the seamstress hands her a pair of scissors and asks her to open the box.
The patience of the fleas as they rest in the box during the tail end of the voyage and long layover in London again points to the implacable nature of fate—those things which will happen regardless of what a person might do to forestall or prevent them. And it underlines the cruelty of Judith’s illness, since it seems like there were so many points along the way where something might have happened differently to prevent this catastrophe.
Themes
