Loss and Grief Theme Analysis

Eliza must, Mary has said, share her bed with Agnes until such time as the wedding can be arranged. Her mother told her with tight, rigid lips, not meeting Eliza’s eye, flapping out an extra blanket over the bed. Eliza had looked down at the half of the pallet nearest the window, which has remained empty since her sister Anne died. She had glanced up to see that her mother was doing the same and she wanted to say, Do you think of her, do you still catch yourself listening for her footsteps, for her voice, for the sound of her breathing at night, because I do, all the time, I still think that one day I might wake and she will be there, next to me, again; there will have been some wrinkle or pleat in time and we will be back where we were, when she was living and breathing.

Agnes is gripping the child’s limp fingers, Mary sees, as if she is trying to tether her to life. She would keep her here, haul her back, by will alone, if she could. Mary knows this urge—she feels it; she has lived it; she is it, now and for ever. She has been the mother on the pallet, too many times, the woman trying to hold on, to keep a grip on her child. All in vain. What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. […] Never for a moment forget that [your children] may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.

Agnes’s concept of death has, for a long time, taken the form of a single room, lit from within, perhaps in the middle of an expanse of moorland. The living inhabit the room; the dead mill about outside it, pressing their palms and faces and fingertips to the window, desperate to get back, to reach their people. Some inside the room can hear and see those outside; some can speak through the walls; most cannot.

The idea that this tiny child might have to live out there, on the cold and misted moor, without her, is unthinkable. She will not let her pass over.

Hamnet, in this place of snow and ice, is lowering himself down to the ground, allowing his knees to fold under him. He is placing first one palm, then the other, on to the crisp, crystalline skin of snow, and how welcoming it feels, how right. It is not too cold, not too hard. He lies down; he presses his cheek to the softness of the snow. The whiteness of it is glaring, jarring to his eyes, so he closes them, just for a moment, just enough, so he may rest and gather his strength. He is not going to sleep, he is not. He will carry on. But he needs to rest, for a moment. He opens his eyes to reassure himself the world is still there, and then lets them close. Just for now.

She cannot bear the rows and rows of peering eyes, raking over them, sealing an image of her son’s shrouded body inside their lids, thieving that essence of him. These are people who saw him every day, passing by their doors, below their windows. They exchanged words with him, ruffled his hair, exhorted him to hurry […] He played with their children and darted in and out of their houses and shops. He carried messages for them, petted their dogs, stroked the backs of their cats as they slept on sunny windowsills. And now their lives are carrying on unchanged, their dogs still yawning by fireplaces, their children still whining for supper, while he is no more.

He will never come again. There is a part of her that would like to wind up time, to gather it in, like yarn. She would like to spin the wheel backwards, unmake the skein of Hament’s death, his boyhood, his infancy, his birth, right back until the moment she and her husband cleaved together in that bed to create the twins. She would like to unspool it all, render it all back down to raw fleece, to find her way back, to that moment, and she would stand up, she would turn her face to the stars, to the heavens, to the moon, and appeal to them to change what lay in wait for him, to plead with them to devise a different outcome for him, please, please. She would do anything for this, give anything, yield up whatever the heavens wanted.

Judith weeds the garden, runs errands, tidies her mother’s bench. If her mother asks her to run and fetch three leaves of bay or a head of marjoram, Judith will know exactly where they are. All plants look the same to Susanna. Judith spends hours with her cats, grooming them, communicating with them in a language of crooning, high-pitched entreaties. Every spring she has kittens to sell; they are, she tells people, excellent mousers. She has the kind of face, Susanna thinks, that people believe: those wide-set eyes, the sweet, quick smile, the alert yet guileless gaze.

On all sides, bodies and elbows and arms press in. More and more people are pouring through the doors. Some on the ground are gesturing and shouting to others in the higher balconies. The crowd thickens and heaves, first one way, then the next; Agnes is pushed backwards and forwards but she keeps her footing; the trick seems to be to move with the current rather than resist it. It is, she thinks, like standing in a river: you have to bend yourself to its flow, not fight it.

Hamlet, here on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghosts talks, she see that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy to his place. […] He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.