Gloves Symbol Analysis

Gloves stand for the limitations of conventional propriety and expectations. To a lesser extent, they also stand as a testament to the hard work and occasional anguish that go into creating works of artistic genius. John is a glove maker. His trade involves taking the skins of once-living and once-wild animals, cutting and sewing them into shape, then stretching them so that they fit their owner’s hands as exactly as possible. The gloves represent the way he would like his son, the tutor, to live a life without wildness, curiosity, or imagination, so that John may then shape him into the kind of man John would prefer him to be. At one point, Agnes muses on all that an animal must lose to become a good glove, and her thoughts clearly indicate that neither she nor her husband can live such domesticated, limited lives. They cling to their wild natures—and each other—even when no one else around them seems to understand why. When the tutor first heads to London, the fact that he’s replaced some of his father’s glove samples with books represents the flight from the limits of convention and parental expectations he is about to take—which he must take, the book implies—if he is to become William Shakespeare.

There is one thing about gloves, however, that the tutor does appreciate: it takes a tremendous amount of work and attention to make them well, just like his plays. Yet, most of this work is invisible, contained in the hard-working but plain seams and gussets rather than the flashy but superficial embroidery and decoration. In much the same way, then, while his patrons see only the flashiest part of his creative process—the fully realized plays he and his company stage in London and elsewhere—the novel Hamnet dramatizes the process by which the wildness and trauma of life can be transformed through the hard work of living into works of art that seem—but most certainly are not—effortless.