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Birds—especially Agnes’s kestrel in the earliest chapters of the book—represent freedom and the wild-hearted nature that Agnes and her husband share. Agnes’s kestrel is a bird of prey, a tamed animal that has been trained to return to her when called but which clearly does not belong to the human realm. Similarly, while neither Agnes nor the tutor are interested in totally removing themselves from life among other people, neither are fully willing to submit to conventional expectations and limitations. Agnes refuses by defying her stepmother Joan, wearing pants (at least before her marriage), and communing with nature; the tutor does this by fleeing his parents’ house for London and choosing to pursue his artistic calling rather than live a normal life in Stratford with his wife and children.
Yet, neither Agnes nor her husband is willing to abandon society completely. Agnes may yearn for the woods, but she makes a good life for herself in town, complete with friends and a thriving trade as an herbal healer. The tutor escapes to London but remains bound by ties of love and affection to his wife and children; he returns to Agnes’s side again and again, much like her hawk.
Moreover, the kestrel has super-human hearing, and both Agnes and the tutor “hear” things that others can’t: the tutor listens for the inspiration that turns into plays like Hamlet, and Agnes hears the whisperings of ghosts. In this way, birds take on an additional layer of symbolism in Hamnet as the creatures that connect the living, everyday world with broader realms. Agnes receives a premonition that all is not well at home in the shape of a bird flying past; birds are among the creatures she looks to in her grief when she wants to reconnect with Hamnet’s spirit. When Judith searches late at night for her brother’s ghost, she does so under the watchful eyes of an owl. Thus, birds represent the points at which small human lives intersect with bigger powers such as nature, artistic inspiration, and the realm of the supernatural.
Birds Quotes in Hamnet
The Hamnet quotes below all refer to the symbol of Birds. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 2
Quotes
As he stands at Hewlands’ window, the need to leave, to rebel, to escape is so great that it fills him to his very outer edge: he can eat nothing from the plate the farmer’s widow left for him, so crammed is he with the urge to leave, to get away, to move his feet and legs to some other place, as far away from here as he can manage.
[…] He is just about to turn and face his pupils when he sees, from the trees, a figure emerge.
For a moment, the tutor believes it to be a young man […who] moves out of the trees with a brand of masculine insouciance or entitlement, covering the ground with booted strides. There is some kind of bird on his outstretched fist […]. It sits hunched, subdued, its body swaying with the movement of its companion, its familiar.
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Chapter 4
Quotes
“It’s a kestrel, not a hawk,” he says, in a rush. “She trained it herself. A priest taught her. She has a gauntlet and the bird takes off, like an arrow, up through the trees. You have never seen anything like it. It is so different when it flies—it is almost, you might think, two creatures. One on the ground and another in the air. When she calls, it returns to her, circling in these great wheels in the sky, and it lands with such force upon the glove, such determination.”
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Chapter 18
Quotes
To him, it is the best place to be, before a performance: the stage below him, the audience filling the circular hollow in a steady trickle, and the other players behind him, transforming themselves into sprites or princes or soldiers or ladies or monsters. It is the only place to be alone in such a crowd. He feels like a bird, above the ground, resting on nothing but air. He is not of this place but above it, apart from it, observing it. It brings to mind, for him, the wind-hovering kestrel his wife used to keep, and the way it would hold itself in the high currents, far above the tree tops, wings outstretched, looking down on all around it.
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Get the entire Hamnet LitChart as a printable PDF.
Birds Symbol Timeline in Hamnet
The timeline below shows where the symbol Birds appears in Hamnet. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...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...
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Chapter 2
...figure (later revealed to be Agnes) emerges from the woods. Its calm self-possession and the bird on its gloved fist strike the tutor as masculine. But then he notices the long...
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...Latin tutor, proudly telegraphing his learning. She remains unimpressed. Boldly, he asks to see her bird, confessing that he saw her coming in from the woods. She begs him not to...
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Smells—some familiar, some intoxicating—fill the dim room. The kestrel sits on a pole at its far end. The bird strikes the tutor as utterly...
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...the experience he doesn’t remember that the family’s wild daughter is supposed to keep a hawk until he’s halfway back to town.
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Chapter 4
...neither John nor Joan will support the match. To cheer him, she asks about the hawk. It’s a kestrel, he corrects her, and he breathlessly describes how amazing it is to...
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...carefully placed fruits rock on their shelves as Agnes and the tutor make love. The kestrel, hooded but alert, listens to them with little interest; they are too big to be...
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...moment of deep, wordless communication between the two, she picks up the bundle, collects her kestrel from the apple store, and turns her back on the farm.
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...and bloodied Agnes sits on a low stool with a bundle at her feet, the kestrel perches on the top rung of a ladderback chair, and his parents John and Mary...
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Chapter 10
...the farmyard at Hewlands, held in place by a waterlogged skirt and a flock of birds—ducks, hens, partridges, doves, wrens—trampling its hem. Her mother called out, “The branches of the forest...
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Chapter 18
...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...
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...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...
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...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...
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