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Chapter 16
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
Agnes startles awake. For an instant, she feels disoriented. Then, she remembers Judith, the fever, the long, dark night. She gropes for Judith’s body on the pallet; she finds the child’s burning, feverish hands clasped together. Agnes gropes for a candle, lights it, and turns to the horrific sight of her beloved child, pale and gasping for breath. But as she bends to take Judith’s pulse, she realizes that there are two Judiths on the bed—or rather, twins Judith and Hamnet. Agnes looks from her sick daughter and her healthy son, but something about the scene isn’t right. The fingers of the child she takes to be Judith are ink stained. Its wrist bears Hamnet’s scar. With growing horror, she realizes that Judith is well, and Hamnet is dying.
Earlier the book described Judith and Hamnet as two halves of a walnut, nestled together in its shell, yet for most of the book, they’ve been on separate trajectories. Now, however, they’ve returned to a sort of primordial oneness. Agnes's inability to recognize which twin is which, even only momentarily, emphasizes a unity so complete it verges on interchangeability. But, of course, the twins are separate people, and as Agnes takes in the small details of the scene, she realizes that, as readers witnessed, Judith and Hamnet have switched places.
Themes
Hamnet will never know his father is desperately driving the ill-tempered horse his friends secured towards home. No one, not Susanna, not Mary, not Agnes, not Judith—who’s now recovered enough to sit weakly at the table and take some broth—knows about it. Agnes feels torn in two as she cradles Hamnet. She’s grateful for Judith’s evident deliverance and fearful for Hamnet. She has given him every medicine she can think of; she even tied the toad around his waist. But nothing has touched his fever. Agnes curses herself for being too busy protecting Judith that she neglected to pay attention to Hamnet’s symptoms and for thinking she could outwit death. Still, she does what she can for her son, swabbing his forehead with cool rags and holding his hands. She would empty the blood from her own veins to save him if she could. Still his fever climbs.
The twins snuggled together on the pallet overnight, but they will never again recapture that sense of wholeness. Similarly, Agnes feels herself divided, with one part of her attached to each twin. Just as the birth of the twins caused a rupture that demands a resolution—for Agnes’s vision of two children to come true, one of her children must die—so does Agnes’s sense of division here. On one level, she already seems to know what the outcome will be, even as she fights to stave off Hamnet’s now apparently inevitable death.
Themes
Hamnet’s mind, in contrast to his body, is peaceful. For a long time, he can hear and feel Agnes, Mary, Susanna, and Judith around him, but then their presences receded from his awareness. He is alone in an unfamiliar landscape, surrounded by softly falling snow. He wants to lie down in the cool snowbank to rest. Outside his mind, Agnes tries to apply a poultice to his convulsing body. Susanna turns her tearful face to the wall, while Judith struggles to break free from Eliza’s arms to go to her brother on the pallet. He lowers himself to the snow slowly, then lets his eyes close, just, he thinks, for a moment. Outside, Hamnet’s family watches as he draws one final breath, slowly exhales, and is still.
Even as he lays dying, Hamnet retains his sense of connection to his family for a long time. And when their physical presences recede from his awareness, readers know that they still cluster around and minister to his body. Death can separate but cannot sever the bonds of love between people. The book offers a vision of death as a peaceful experience and thus provides some comfort to readers. But they must also remember that his family sees only suffering in Hamnet’s convulsing, fever-wracked body. This will color their grief in the days, weeks, and months to come, in ways the book will trace in its final section.
Themes
