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Chapter 17
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
In the long, narrow, silent room, a group of people cluster near the curtained window. Flowers wilt in a jar on the table; empty and half-used cups sit around a pitcher of water. At one end, near the fireplace, Agnes stands in silence next to a door placed across two trestles on which Edmond and Richard tenderly placed the child Hamnet. Dirt from recent adventures still dusts his feet, but his skin is rapidly losing the look of life, becoming hard and waxen. The women have burned the pallet, aired the room, put Judith to bed, and brought warm water, cloths, and a burial shroud. Now they wait for Agnes to begin the task of preparing Hamnet's body for burial.
In the first section of the book, the narrative has most often come from Hamnet’s perspective; now, in the wake of Hamnet’s sudden, horrifying death, it pulls so far back that readers seem to be viewing a picture rather than a living scene. Readers see the results of action (the cups on the table, the moving of the body) but in this instant, everything remains silent and still. Agnes stands, arrested in her grief, unable to move in a way that suggests how difficult it will be to move on from this loss emotionally.
Themes
But Agnes cannot begin the work. She cannot comprehend this catastrophe. Over and over, she tells herself, “He is dead,” but the words make no sense. How can Hamnet, her healthiest, most robust child, lie there, cold and lifeless, on the board? Agnes hears people come and go, hears them speak to her, but she cannot grasp their words. She stands over Hamnet, clinging to his hand and warming his cold, dead fingers with her body’s heat. Out of habit, she presses the skin between his thumb and forefinger. But instead of the usual noise and riot she associates with her children, there is silence. She cannot tell where Hamnet, now released from his body, has gone.
As the narrative zooms in on Agnes, its movement slows even further, getting stuck in the moment just as she is caught in disbelief. Death is not unfamiliar to Agnes—remember the early loss of her own mother—yet this loss possesses an entirely different character than what she has experienced before. Agnes’s actions—her refusal or inability to accept Hamnet’s death, her habitual attempt to look into his spirit by squeezing his hand—suggest she’s in denial and point to how stuck Agnes is in this moment of disbelief.
Themes
Bartholomew arrives. Agnes smells the familiar scent of hay and wool and feels the familiar weight of his hand. He consoles her. But he also, ever so gently, reminds her that she must prepare Hamnet’s body for burial. All victims of the pestilence must be buried quickly. Agnes shakes her head. She looks at Hamnet’s palm, tracing the strong lifeline that has been there since he was a baby. It was Judith’s that petered out and restarted in another place. It was Judith, not Hamnet, that Agnes feared suddenly losing. Bartholomew gently insists that she begin her task; he knows she wants to wait for the boy’s father, but she cannot. They have no way of knowing if he has the letter yet.
Agnes’s vision of her life shows her two children, yet she has three, a conflict which can be resolved only with the loss of one child—assuming, as she and others do, that her visions are never wrong. But as her thoughts make clear, other signs were more ambivalent. Hamnet’s vigorous lifeline suggest survival, for instance. Judith’s two-part one offers—or offered—another clue to fate, if only Agnes had known how to interpret it: its stop and start patten matches the idea that she only lives now as the beneficiary of the body swap, of Hamnet offering her his life.
Themes
Agnes waits until everyone else has gone to bed to begin the task. Ever so gently, she washes Hamnet’s face. She combs his hair with her fingers and cuts a lock from it. She washes his ears, his neck, his chest. Mary comes in, and Agnes allows her to stay; the women were together when Hamnet came into the world and they will prepare him to leave it together, too. As Agnes washes the small body, she traces its scars. When she finishes, Mary unfurls the shroud, which flashes brightly in the dim room. Together, they slide it under Hamnet’s body. Agnes cannot bring herself to cover up Hamnet’s face. She tries three times and each time, pulls the shroud back again to look at her son for one last time. Finally, Mary gently takes the sheet from Agnes, folding it with practiced hands around Hamnet’s body.
The book tenderly describes the way that Agnes washes and prepares her son’s body for burial, showing her deep maternal love. Importantly, in this moment, Mary joins her—their differences and mutual grievances fade away as they consider their shared grief for Hamnet’s loss. Hamnet’s scars trace the history of his short but precious life; while death comes for all eventually, each loss remains an individual tragedy. Mary’s practiced motions remind readers of all the bodies she must have prepared in her day, including her three dead daughters.
Themes
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Hours later, as the pale light of dawn seeps into the room, Agnes rethreads the needle to stitch the shroud closed around Hamnet’s face. Susanna and Judith watch. Four loud knocks fall on the door, then Agnes’s husband bursts into the room, pale and crazed with worry. He sees Judith and smiles with relief, then he catches sight of the body on the trestles. His glance sweeps the room, looking to see who is missing. An anguished, strangled sob wrenches itself from his throat. Agnes uncovers Hamnet’s face again, and the women draw themselves protectively around the form of the grieving father.
Shakespeare’s sudden arrival upsets the delicate balance of the previous scenes, reminding readers just how far his life has diverged from his family’s over the last several years. Yet, after an instant of surprise and upheaval, the family folds him back within its arms as an integral member—if love is stronger than death, this suggests it is stronger than distance, too. Still, their embrace is incomplete; all too often before, Shakespeare was absent. And now, for the rest of time, Hamnet will be.
Themes
The father carries Hamnet to the graveyard, leading the procession and followed by Agnes, Susanna, Bartholomew, Judith, and the rest of the family. Partway there, Edmond runs up to help his brother with the burden of the door and the boy’s body. Townsfolk gather to watch, offering prayers and condolences. Agnes cannot stand the way the crowd parts to let them through and then flows seamlessly back together, leaving no trace of their passing. In the graveyard, a grave waits for Hamnet. Agnes cannot fathom how her husband can so easily consign him to the cold, dark earth. She finds it even harder to leave the graveyard than it was to enter it. She clings to the gatepost with both her hands, refusing to go. It takes Bartholomew, her husband, Susanna, and Judith to peel her hands from it and carry her away.
Shakespeare carries Hamnet’s body to the cemetery alone almost as if he’s trying to do penance for his absence. The townsfolk’s whispered words indicate their awareness that the loss this family has suffered could very easily be their own; no one is safe from grief or exempt from death. But that doesn’t make the loss any easier for Agnes or her family to accept. Crucially, Agnes wonders how her husband can “easily” put their son in the cold earth, hinting that she no longer has an almost perfect understanding of him. This points toward the rifts in their relationship that Hamnet’s death has brought to light.
Themes
The first two nights, the husband paces ceaselessly in the downstairs room. Agnes hears no crying, no sighing; she only hears the thud of his feet. On the third night, as they lie together in their bed, Agnes confesses that she didn’t see Hamnet’s impending death; she was too distracted by caring for Judith, the weaker twin, the one she always feared losing. Her husband says she did everything she could. She turns her back to him and reminds him that he wasn’t there to see what she did.
United in their loss, Agnes and her husband are nevertheless divided by their grief. In this moment, Agnes obsesses about the machinations of fate, the things that even she—with her prophetic gift—could not see. Similarly, her growing resentment over her husband’s absence springs from her plan, hatched so long ago, to save him by sending him to London. This offers a pointed reminder that no one can fully see—or ultimately escape—all the consequences of their actions.
Themes
Two days after the burial, the husband tries to collect his tenant’s rent, but he cannot bear the sight of living children playing in the sunny street. He quickly returns home, where he finds Judith sitting by the back door, tasked with peeling apples with her left hand. As he watches, he remembers Judith and Hamnet eating slices of an apple one day when they were small. Hamnet had grasped his slice in his right hand and Judith in her left, and they moved as if one person reflected in a mirror, or as if they were two sides of one creature.
The husband’s aborted errand shows that, no matter what Agnes may think about his extended absences, he does truly care for his family. He will not approach the loss of Hamnet in the way she does, but it nevertheless affects him too. His memory of the twins emphasizes this love. It also emphasizes trauma since it shows death’s power to permanently divide things that were once whole—like this set of twins.
Themes
Everywhere the father looks, something triggers a memory of Hamnet. He cannot stand Agnes’s silence, Susanna’s anger, or Judith’s tears. He cannot stand the smell of the workshop or the endless, pointless conversation of John’s customers. He wants desperately to escape, and he worries that he might be trapped in Stratford forever. He fears that his theater company will fall apart without him or—worse—discover they don’t really need him. He worries about the future; so much hard work lies beneath the ephemeral beauty of a play. He longs for the silence and solitude of his city rooms, to let the world fall away until he is little more than a channel for the words of his inspiring muse.
Shakespeare’s growing desperation echoes his earlier discontent when he also felt hopelessly trapped in Stratford. He longs to return to the city where he feels that he might find some relief from his pain, but readers should treat his assumption that he can outrun grief with suspicion. His inability to deal with everyday tasks in Stratford suggests his hopes may be foolish. However, his determination does mark a change in his approach to life: he no longer needs Agnes’s (secretly applied) pushes to act.
Themes
Agnes is in the yard when her husband comes to say goodbye. He insists that he must return to London before the start of the theater season. She expected her husband to remain with her and their children. But when she turns, she sees his bag already at his feet. She doesn’t believe his reasons for going—she suspects he longs to escape his current pain by disappearing into his mind—and she tries to grab his hand to pull from him knowledge that would confirm her suspicions. But he holds her back. Awkwardly, even though she refuses to look at him, he embraces her. Despite her anger, she feels her heart drawing towards his. She wishes she could unwind time to before they conceived Hamnet and Judith, or that she could appeal to fate for a different outcome. But she can’t.
The last time readers watched Agnes and her husband say goodbye, it was at Agnes’s behest as she sent her husband to London to save him from the despair that threatened to overrun his life. This time, though, because his current discomfort arises from the death of his son, readers should suspect—with Agnes—that he’s not likely to find the relief he seeks in London or anywhere else. Last time, despite her unwillingness, Agnes sent him on; now, she tries to make him stay, as she needs his love and support as much as he has always relied on hers.
Themes
In the weeks after Hamnet’s death, Agnes learns it’s possible to cry all day and all night. She learns that she can comfort Susanna and Judith with promises about heaven that she herself doesn’t believe. She doesn’t know what to do with Hamnet’s clothes, so she unfolds and refolds them, pressing them to her nose to catch the scent of her lost son. Judith and Susanna sleep in the bed with her, at least until Agnes’s anxious tossing and turning disturb Susanna, who begins to sleep at her grandparents’ house. Agnes lies awake at night listening for threats, for the sound of spirits at the door. She examines her daughters’ bodies for the symptoms of illness. She promises herself that no harm will come to her surviving children on her watch.
Shakespeare tries to outrun his grief by fleeing back to London; readers will have to wait to find out whether this plan succeeds. Agnes has no choice but to stay, and her grief initially traps her into a sort of suspended animation, a timeless fugue state where she repeats the same actions over and over without a sense of time passing. The only way readers know that it does pass is by the actions Agnes’s daughters take—moving into her bed and then, in the case of Susanna, to an entirely different space altogether.
Themes
Over subsequent weeks, Agnes stops sweeping her floors because they just become dirty again. She stops cooking, and Susanna and Judith take their meals with their grandparents. She visits Hamnet’s grave each Sunday, feeling relief and pain in equal measure. She dreams about her mother. She wishes she could tear the world down and hurl it to be scattered by the winds. She reads letters from her husband filled with minutiae. She avoids the windows when the boys go to and from school and the streets are flooded with boys like Hamnet. Judith sews a silk pouch for the lock of Hamnet’s hair. She asks Agnes if there’s a word for a bereft twin, like “orphan” for a person who’s lost their parents or “widow” for a wife who’s lost her husband. Agnes says there may not be one.
The narrative flows through a series of tiny vignettes conveying the depth of Agnes’s (and Judith’s) grief. The short scenes recreate in readers a sense of disorientation and timelessness like that which Agnes and Judith feel—albeit in different ways—after being cut off from Hamnet. Susanna, as always, behaves in a much more practical, no-nonsense manner. The vignettes also make it hard to discern how much time has passed; their briefness and their rapid pace suggests a flow of time, yet their picture-like stillness contradicts this idea and suggests that time has, in some way, stopped with Hamnet’s death, at least for Agnes and Judith.
Themes
Agnes sits upstairs looking at Hamnet’s pebble collection when Susanna and Judith come to her, insisting that it’s time to gather rosehips ahead of wintertime illnesses. It seems like an impossible amount of work to Agnes, who only wants to sleep. But the girls insist. The rosehips in the hedgerows look like constellations. They remind Agnes of a night soon after her marriage, when she stood in the empty street with her husband. He taught her the word “constellations” and showed her how to trace their outlines and Susanna had turned over in her womb as if she was listening. The father writes to say that he will not be home until after winter due to the poor state of the roads. He says his company has had great success with a new comedy, which they played for the queen herself.
Within the world of the book, even without a name for the malady that Agnes suffers, Judith and Susanna intuit the need to draw her back into the business of life. But, like Shakespeare earlier, everything reminds her of her losses. In this regard, readers should note the shift in language as the book (and, by implication, Agnes) begin to think of Shakespeare more as the children’s father than her husband, reflecting the growing emotional distance between them.
Themes
Judith longs to escape the business of the household. She weaves a roof to cover a nook between the pigpen and the cookhouse where she and Hamnet used to hide away together. Two of the kittens, now grown into cats and wearing identical faces and white-stockinged feet, follow her into her retreat, listening to her singing to herself. But her voice cannot fill the bottomless empty place inside her. In the market, Agnes listens to her stepmother Joan and other women complain about sons who refuse to accept the apprenticeships their parents have arranged, or to get out bed without complaint in the morning, or to stack firewood the right way. She wants to tell them they are all fools.
These paired scenes show how grief continues to affect Judith and Agnes even as the weeks turn into months. Judith tries to recapture the sense of wholeness she felt by retreating to the nook she shared with Hamnet and trying to fill the silence of his absence with song. But because the hole inside her is meant to be filled by him, nothing that she can do or say can fill it. The women at the market focus on the minor annoyances of family life, where children grow and develop their own ideas about the world. This is, Agnes knows, a small price to pay for the continued existence of one’s son, even if the other woman cannot see that.
Themes
One day, as they are washing laundry, Judith asks Susanna if their father hasn’t come home because of her face, which reminds everyone so painfully of Hamnet. Susanna herself hasn’t failed to notice that he hasn’t been home since the burial. But she comforts her sister, promising Judith that those who love her have always seen her for who she is, not as a reflection of Hamnet.
The ever-practical Susanna has been visible in this time largely through her absence as she has moved more into Mary’s orbit. But despite her practical outlook, she shows here that she observes the world and people around her as keenly as the rest of her family. She also confirms for readers that Shakespeare is staying away from home due to his grief.
Themes
In the months after Hamnet’s death, Agnes cannot stop herself from looking for her son in the real world and in the spiritual realm. She always used to be able to see spirits, but she cannot find his no matter how hard she looks. In contrast, Judith sees and hears him everywhere: in the flight of a bird over the wall, in the sound of hail against the windowpane, or in the rustle of the wind through the woven roof of her secret den. She calls to him in her mind, asking him where he is.
The book places Agnes’s and Judith’s experiences side-by-side, suggesting the inescapable, physical proximity to their grief. Agnes cannot forget the baby she carried in her body and raised; Judith cannot forget the brother with whom she shared everything. The fact that Judith, but not Agnes, can still sense Hamnet’s presence recalls the body-swap and the book’s strong implication that Hamnet saved her by imbuing her with his life force. Thus, in a way, he lives on through her.
Themes
Susanna grows distant from Agnes and Judith and retreats to her grandparents’ house. Agnes loses her customary certainty. The smallest things begin to upset her. She shutters her windows, avoids the sick who try to hail her in the street, and lets her garden of medicinal herbs go to weed. Eventually, Susanna clears out Agnes’s old, desiccated, and expired stores. She orders Judith to water the herb garden with an imperious tone like Mary’s creeping into her voice. Agnes realizes that she has become a stranger to herself, and her daughters have become almost unrecognizable, too. Susanna compounds remedies, while Judith greets customers at the window. At first, Agnes refuses to join them or help. But over time, the girls slowly coax her back.
Like her father, Susanna retreats in the face of her mother’s and sister’s unshakeable grief. Yet, in sharp contrast to Shakespeare, she doesn’t allow the emotional distance to undermine her relationships within the family. Instead of miring her in the past, Hamnet’s death seems to push her into the future as she takes on more (and more mature) responsibilities in the family and her mother’s business. This realignment is so radical that as Agnes slowly begins to heal, she cannot recognize either herself or her daughters.
Themes
One night, the sound of footsteps draws Agnes into the street. I am here, she thinks. Are you? At this exact moment, under the same stars, her husband is travelling down the Thames by boat with the rest of his company. He’s too excited to doze like them. They’ve just performed his newest play, a history, for the queen. He sticks mainly to histories and comedies now, afraid of his own grief. He can’t stop scanning crowds, looking for Hamnet’s face. As he gazes toward the city, he sees a woman with several children on a wharf. They remind him of his own family. He knows he should go home, but he cannot face returning. If he stays in London, he can almost persuade himself that nothing has changed. He can imagine that all three of his children are asleep back in Stratford, under these glittering stars.
On this night, the distance between Agnes and her husband at first seems uncrossable. Although they both look up at the same sky, they seem to be as distant from each other as one star to another. But it’s possible to interpret the footsteps Agnes heard as the ghost of Hamnet trying to draw his parents back together by bringing them a shared experience, despite their distance. This, in turn, suggests that despite the devastating scope of the loss, a reunion remains possible.
Themes
On a warm summer day, Susanna helps Mary hem washcloths. She feels sleep sneaking up on her, and wonders if death feels the same. Agnes, her dress hanging loosely from her emaciated frame, enters the parlor. She looks blankly out the window until a rustling draws her attention, and she rushes from the room to investigate. Susanna sews, wishing that she could stitch her way past all this madness and grief.
Susanna and Mary have a sense of certainty and control over themselves and the world that Agnes lacks and that, the book suggests, she must rediscover if she is to recover and move on from her grief. Admittedly, no one has full control over the world; Susanna’s stitching cannot fix everything. But work, the book suggests, can provide stability.
Themes
Judith is playing in warm sunshine in the street when her father appears, out of nowhere, sweeping her up into his arms and calling out a greeting in his biggest, loudest voice. Later, Agnes sits at Mary’s table, trying to figure out why he seems so different than the last time he was home a year ago. He has brought everyone pretty gifts, including a ruby-studded silver bracelet for her. It feels wrong, first too cold, then too hot. Suddenly, she knows that someone who dislikes her has worn it. She looks at her husband and can see the touches of other women all over him. She thinks she might vomit. She takes the bracelet from her wrist. He looks up, flushing suddenly, and she holds his gaze as she places the bracelet on the table and leaves the room.
Like the kestrel, Agnes’s husband has always come home to her no matter how far and high he flew. For a while, it seemed as if he would not come back this time, and when he does, it’s clear that he has drifted farther from her than ever before and is cheating on Agnes. Yet the fact that she can still see into his heart—and he can see into hers, although to a much lesser degree—suggests that enough affection might still exist between them to rebuild, no matter how disgusted Agnes is in this moment.
Themes
That evening, the husband finds Agnes tending her bees and flowers at Hewlands. He makes awkward conversation about her plants, her brother, and her family. She answers in monosyllables. He can’t look her in the eye. Eventually, they both sit on the ground, the silence expanding around them. Her husband is the one who has become famous for writing “pretty speeches,” she thinks, so let him be the one to break it. After all, he has betrayed her. When he clears his throat, she expects an apology, an explanation. But instead, he asks, “How often do you think of him?” Agnes looks at her husband, who sits in a posture of abject grief. She watches a bird swoop along the top of the grasses. She settles into herself before she answers that she thinks of Hamnet all the time; she thinks she may never stop. She’s not sure she wants to.
Agnes’s husband comes to her to try to make things right, as he must. Agnes, after all, sacrificed her own happiness for his; even though he does not know that she sent him to London in the first place, he has seen the sacrifice she made in staying behind in Stratford to raise their children. He refuses to insult Agnes’s intelligence—or her insight—by pretending not to have betrayed her. Instead, he confesses how deeply Hamnet’s loss still affects him. Agnes, who has not been herself since Hamnet’s death, understands intimately how grief can make a person a stranger to themself.
Themes
The husband seizes Agnes’s hand; she twists her wrist so she can grasp his hand between thumb and forefinger. And she sees everything: other women, but also fear and deep, dark grief, and at the very bottom, something she’s never felt before: her husband’s great beating heart. That night, his groping, insistent hands wake her from a dream. She does not resist as he struggles to remove her shift; she finds herself laughing. When they have sex, she loses all sense of where she ends and he begins. When they’ve finished, he tells her his newest plan: he wants to buy a house for her, all her own, here in Stratford. If she’s willing to leave the narrow apartment where Hamnet drew his last breath. Agnes thinks for a moment, then agrees; despite all her looking, she knows that he is no longer here.
Agnes doesn’t necessarily trust the words of a husband whom she knows all too well can make “pretty speeches” at will, but she does trust her intuition and insight. And when she grips his hand, she finds that grief has laid bare a treasure she was never able to find before: his heart. Her love and this gift of insight give her the capacity to forgive him. Letting go of her anger and resentment toward Shakespeare for his absence and betrayals allows her to take her first real, if tenuous, steps out of her grief.
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The husband writes to Bartholomew, asking him to help broker the purchase. His letter drives Joan, who cannot read it, wild with curiosity. Bartholomew keeps quiet but agrees to help his brother-in-law. A few weeks later, he finds his sister in town, tending to a dying man. As they walk together, he confesses how unhappy their stepmother makes him; she’s refusing to allow him to expand the house at Hewlands. Agnes tells him that Joan thrives on discontent; she will refuse whatever he desires. So, to get what he wants, he must pretend to hate the idea of it. Bartholomew thanks her for the advice. Then he takes her to see the house he bought for her with her husband’s money.
One year after Hamnet’s death, and soon after her husband’s return to her heart and her home, Agnes slowly begins to recover. She begins to tend to the sick willingly—not at the behest of her daughters—and regains a measure of her characteristic insight into others. The book demonstrates how Hamnet’s death has irrevocably marked her life, but also suggests that neither she—nor anyone else—need be defined by grief forever.
Themes
The new house is a noisy place. Agnes roams its three stories through sleepless nights listening to the wind in the chimney flue, the thrashing of branches in the back garden, and the skittering of mice. Susanna locks her door and sleeps soundly; Judith wakes easily like her mother, starting from her slumber often. But, within the walls of the new house, Agnes can imagine that a woman and her three children—two girls and a boy—live in the old house. She can pretend that if she crossed town and walked through her old door, she would find things as they used to be. She lets this idea soak into her, and it comforts her.
The real gift of the house is that it allows Agnes to step away from her grief, however momentarily. It allows her the space to forget—or willfully pretend—that her life has not changed. These pockets of forgetting or denial, the book implies, create space that’s necessary for Agnes’s healing process. And, in turn, the fact that this works underlines the inherent similarities in her temperament and her husband’s, who also finds solace in his work far from home.
Themes
Agnes quickly realizes that the house will always attract gossip. People who remember her husband as a soft-headed, hare-brained daydreamer can’t imagine him becoming rich through a playhouse and they whisper that he must be involved in some criminal activity in London. But outside, in the garden, she can breathe and find quiet. She plants fruit trees and medicinal herbs. She turns the old brewhouse into a room where she can compound medicines for the sick and builds a new brewhouse, the biggest in the town. The father comes to the new house two or three times a year. He comes when plague forces the theaters to close, although no one in the family ever says the word. Judith notices that Agnes is always icy when he returns, at least initially, waiting for his London life to wear off him. He follows her around like a puppy until she thaws.
Although life takes a new shape after Hamnet’s death, with enough time, the entire family begins to reach a new equilibrium. Agnes finds redemption in nature, particularly in the large and wild garden she cultivates. Shakespeare comes home to Agnes (to a home unassociated with Hamnet’s life) as invariably as her kestrel once returned to her fist; no matter how he longed to escape the prison of his parents’ house or conventional expectations, he remains willingly bound to his wife. And, although it takes her longer than it used to, she always welcomes her wildly creative husband home.
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Time passes and all things—the garden, the growing dynasty of cats descending from Judith’s two original kittens, the girls themselves—change. Susanna begins to take charge of the family’s business dealings in partnership and correspondence with her father. Judith clings to her mother, helping with the garden and medicine-making. Each year when her cats have kittens, she sells some of them as mousers. Over time, Susanna grows frustrated with her responsibilities and begins to consider her mother and sister little better than “half-wits.” She worries she will never escape home. As Agnes watches Judith grow, she must make a conscious effort to see Judith for herself, not just search her daughter’s face for hints about the man Hamnet would have become.
The fertility of the garden, like the endless generations of cats, suggests that life is, ultimately, more powerful than death. Agnes and her daughters can take some comfort from this fact, without dishonoring Hamnet’s memory. As they grow, it becomes clear that Judith is her mother’s child while Susanna is far more like her father, both in her practical attention to the activities of making a living and in her fears that she will not be able to escape the confines of her own family.
Themes
Late one night, Judith prowls the town’s dark streets. Earlier in the fall, the now-ancient midwife came to Agnes for medicine to treat her arthritis. When Agnes left to fetch a poultice, the midwife told Judith that sometimes, when her work calls her into the streets in the middle of the night, she sees something—sees him—running between Judith’s old house and her grandparents’. Judith has come out every night since, hoping to see him. She has told no one; this is her connection to her lost twin. She begs him to give her a sign of his presence. And on this night, she sees something out of the corner of her eye. She wants to reach out, but she holds still, forming a message in her mind: I miss you, I miss you, I miss you. In the morning, Mary finds her sleeping on the doorstep.
Agnes has tried for months and even years at this point to find her son in the afterlife; she has failed, despite being able to see the dead on other occasions. Earlier, she confessed to Shakespeare her worry that Hamnet wasn’t there to find after all. But the midwife comes to Judith with a different story. This suggests, first, that Agnes will find her ultimate redemption in moving beyond her grief. Further, Judith’s enduring connection with her brother points to the unique circumstance of the twins, who were tied together so closely in life that death seemingly cannot fully divide them. Ultimately, readers don’t get to see what Judith does, but her impassioned words demonstrate an ongoing sense of connection, despite her loneliness. And her message is that Hamnet is still loved, still wanted, and still remembered, even though death has separated him (temporarily) from his family.
Themes
One tempestuous autumn day, Joan visits as Agnes is tying the frailer plants of her garden to stakes for additional strength and protection. When the maid fetches Agnes, she proceeds directly to the parlor, over Susanna’s protests about her frightful, windblown, and muddy appearance. Judith is waiting for her. They share a strained greeting; Joan lies and says she came to town to visit a sick friend. Then, she asks after Agnes’s husband. Agnes senses danger in the question. Clearly, Joan knows something she doesn’t; she must’ve learned some bad news that she wants to use to wound Agnes. Agnes lies, too, claiming that he wrote a week earlier to say all is well.
The gale foreshadows the emotional impact of Joan’s visit—even before she reveals her juicy nugget of information, Agnes intuits that she brings hurtful news. That Agnes is staking her plants to provide them with extra strength and protection against the storm metaphorically demonstrates her ability to withstand whatever it is Joan is about to reveal. And it suggests that Agnes is in the process of returning to her full power, which is drawn from the wildness of nature around her, including its storms.
Themes
Joan says that in that case, Agnes already knows about the new play, a tragedy. She must already have a copy of the playbill like the one Joan produces, which her cousin brought back from London. Joan drops the paper into Agnes’s lap. Agnes stares at it dumbly, her mind taking a long time to make sense of what she sees: her husband’s name; the word “tragedie;” the name of her son, who’s been dead four years now, right in the middle. She cannot understand it. Hamnet, she thinks, is a person and her son, not the subject matter of a tragic play. She cannot move. Susanna and Judith usher Joan—startled but pleased that the playbill produced such a strong effect on her stepdaughter—from the house.
Earlier Agnes warned Bartholomew that Joan only finds contentment in making others miserable; Joan’s palpable glee in this moment confirms this insight. Shakespeare’s play Hamlet was first performed around the year 1600, or four years after Hamnet’s death. Agnes takes it as a sign of a betrayal almost as painful as the discovery that her husband had been sleeping with other women in London. Her horror indicates her belief that Shakespeare has exploited the family’s tragedy—the ramifications of which he ran away from—into fuel for his own fame.
Themes
Agnes subsequently takes to her bed, refusing to get up for meals, callers, or the sick who knock on the side door. She listens to life going on around her as if through deep water. She only rises at night, to sit alone and listen to the bees in their hives. Susanna writes an enraged letter to her father, demanding to know how he could have done this without telling them. Judith brings her mother soup, flowers, and walnuts still tucked in their sealed shells. Agnes’s friend, the baker’s wife, brings cakes. She asks if Agnes wonders what is in the play. And Agnes does.
In the wake of what she perceives to be this second betrayal, Agnes falls more completely apart even than she did following Hamnet’s actual death—in part, it seems, because she believes his death to be the subject matter of the play. It isn’t until someone else questions this assumption that Agnes herself does. As elsewhere, Susanna’s and Judith’s reactions diverge in ways typical of their characters—Susanna responds directly while Judith tries to help her mother quietly and obliquely. Yet the sisters are united in their desire to keep their mother from falling apart.
Themes
Agnes tells her family she has decided to go to London—alone. Susanna, Judith, John, and Mary protest and send for Bartholomew, hoping he will dissuade her. He doesn’t; instead he agrees to procure horses and go with her. Agnes rides well enough, even if the motion of the horse beneath her makes her giddy. It takes three days to reach London. The size, noise, and crush of humanity in the city overwhelm Agnes. Bartholomew takes care to keep them from being separated. As they approach her husband’s lodgings, Agnes worries about getting lost. She wonders what she was thinking, showing up on his doorstep unannounced. She cannot remember what she wanted to ask him.
In her typical way, Agnes makes the choice to go to London without concern for what others may think; she has never felt constrained by outside opinions. This also marks an important shift in her life, as this is the first time since her marriage that she herself has taken flight. She refuses to keep waiting at home for her hawk-like husband to return. It is characteristic of the way that grief has reshaped Agnes’s temperament that she feels so uncertain as she approaches the confrontation with her husband.
Themes
Finally, Agnes and Bartholomew find the right house, a three-story building with stained and crooked windowpanes. A girl opens the door and directs Agnes to the attic. The room where her husband lives shocks Agnes with its austere simplicity. She gets the very distinct sense that no one but him ever comes here. She finds a sheet of paper on the desk, the beginning of a letter addressed to her that doesn’t get farther than her name. As she wonders what he planned to say, Bartholomew calls from the street; a neighbor told him that they would find Agnes’s husband at the playhouse.
Shakespeare’s austere rooms and incomplete letters show Agnes how little she actually knows about his life in London—in a way, his life has become as mysterious to her as hers is to him. These facts also emphasize that he has struggled as much as she has to deal with his grief. While Agnes has (not incorrectly) conceived of his flight to London after Hamnet’s death as an attempt to avoid pain, his room demonstrates that he has failed. Grief imprisons him as easily in London as it has imprisoned her in Stratford.
Themes
Agnes’s husband is indeed at the playhouse, watching from the wings as the audience arrives. He hovers like a bird, like Agnes’s old kestrel, above the growing crowd, aware of its presence but totally separated from it. Soon, he will take off his everyday garments, discolor his face with chalk and charcoal, and don armor and a shroud. He will wait for his cue, he will walk onstage, and he will say his lines. He cannot yet tell if this new play is good or not. But he does know that it moves him more than anything else he has written. Suddenly, he feels a stab of foreboding, the premonition of a coming reckoning. He resolves to go straight to his rooms after the performance, to write the long-delayed letter to his wife. He will tell her everything. Tonight.
This passage shows that, while London doesn’t provide an escape from suffering for Shakespeare, the theater certainly does, since it allows him to shed his everyday life for a few hours at a time. In this way, the book introduces an idea about the ability of art to transcend tragedy, which it will explore in its final episode. His premonition intimates that, despite Agnes’s current feelings of anger and betrayal, the bond of love that brought them together so many years ago remains intact. And his reticence also recalls his earlier indecision and inability to escape his family and his small life on his own efforts. He has always needed Agnes’s push to action, and he still needs it now.
Themes
Agnes and Bartholomew cross London Bridge, with its shops, market stalls, and crush of humanity. On the far side of the river, a local directs them to the theater where Bartholomew takes the horses’ reins to wait in the street while Agnes pays her penny and joins the audience streaming through the doors. Agnes slides through a seething sea of people, getting as close as she can to the stage. She watches people scuffle for better positions and for food. She realizes that she can keep her footing by moving with the ebb and flow of the crowd rather than resisting it.
Since Judith fell ill on a summer’s day in 1596, Agnes has resisted the flow of events around her. At first, she tried to fight Judith’s illness, and then she struggled to accept Hamnet’s death. In London, she several times finds herself swept along by crowds. This recalls her realization years ago that resisting the current of a river or the pain of labor leads to more suffering. And in this moment, as she begins to let go of all the things she has tried ineffectively to hang on to, she begins to find a measure of peace.
Themes
Trumpets blare and the crowd erupts into cheers, then it falls into a hushed and reverential silence. Agnes watches the players on the stage, but she takes in the crowd, too, seeing the spell fall over them. She alone, it seems, is exempt from the magic; her fury keeps her aloof as she searches the actors’ words to learn what this play about battlements and night watches has to do with her son. A ghost appears, sending a thrill through the audience. Agnes recognizes it instantly as her costumed husband.
Readers know by implication that Agnes is watching a production of Hamlet, Shakespeare’s great tragedy of familial revenge and madness. But the book skims over the details of the play, since these do not interest her. She cares only about how her husband has utilized the loss of their son to (she fears) advance his career.
Themes
Agnes wonders what her husband will say, and—as if her thoughts traveled directly from her mind to his—he snaps his head around and looks directly at her. Yes, she thinks back at him, I am here. Now what? The ghost disappears and the men on stage recite wordy speeches peppered with the name of her son, her dear son, her dead son. She cannot understand how her husband could have taken that name, stripped it of the life it once embodied, and turned it into just another word to be bandied about on stage. Each repetition hurts her. She almost leaves, ready to go home and forbid her husband ever to return.
In this moment, Shakespeare plays the ghost of Hamlet’s father, coming back to bring a message to his son. In the audience, Agnes takes on a role similar to the ghost: her presence suggests that Shakespeare will have to take accountability for his perceived crime. The ghost of Hamlet’s father will only be satisfied with retribution, a fact that gives rise to the excessive number of deaths in the play. Like him, at first Agnes cannot imagine redemption; she muses on punishment instead.
Themes
But then a boy, whom the actors hail as “Hamlet” walks onto the stage, and it is Agnes’s boy, her Hamnet, as he would have been if he had grown into a man. Her husband, still in the character of the ghost, also returns. As Agnes watches the actor embody her lost son, she realizes how much effort it must have taken her husband to teach him how to move, to speak, to stand just so in order to bring Hamnet back to life, no matter how temporarily. She sees that he has put some of Hamnet into the living boy and the dead ghost of his father, and that he’s done—in fiction—what any father would do in real life if he could substitute his life for his son’s.
Agnes has been anticipating a jaded use of her son’s death to create fictitious drama on this London stage, but as the play unfolds, she realizes that Shakespeare has done something quite different. Instead of using Hamnet to serve the play, he has used the play to celebrate and preserve Hamnet’s life. He has used art to transcend his own grief and ensure that the world will never forget his son’s life any more than he or Agnes could possibly forget it.
Themes
Agnes will say all of this to her husband, later, after he has come to her through the crowds and clung to her as the theater emptied until only they were standing there. But for now, she stands at the very edge of the stage, close enough, almost, to reach out and touch her Hamlet, as he might have been. As he prepares to leave the stage, her ghost-husband looks her squarely in the eye and says his final words: “Remember me.”
The book ends on a note of reconciliation and redemption, promising an embrace between Agnes and her husband that once again unites them in the face of a sometimes-cruel world. Agnes’s recognition that the play honors rather than exploits Hamnet creates the grounds for this reconciliation. But so too does the fact that seeing her husband’s unique genius on display confirms that she was right to sacrifice her own happiness to help him achieve his full potential. Thus, according to the book, it’s only in combining their forces—his genius, her willingness to make difficult, unappreciated choices and sacrifices—that together they give the world William Shakespeare, the great playwright. Furthermore, Hamlet stands as a testament not just to their lost son, but eloquent proof of the human capacity to make meaning out of even the most unexpected and terrible of circumstances.
Themes
