Hamnet

“No bee-keeper veil covers her face — she never wears one. If you came close enough, you would see that her lips are moving, murmuring small sounds and clicks to the insects that circle her head, alight on her sleeve, blunder into her face.” 

Written in the present tense, this passage creates an immediate and intimate portrayal of Agnes’s remarkably trusting relationship with nature. O’Farrell introduces a “you”—perhaps the reader—who would approach a bee-keeper with the expectation that she would wear a veil and be afraid of these stinging insects. On the contrary, Agnes trusts the bees and communicates with them using nonverbal sounds. The fact that an onlooker would have to come “close enough” to notice Agnes’s communion with the bees, indicates that she does not openly flaunt her powers.

“As he stands at Hewlands’s window, the need to leave, to rebel, to escape is so great 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.” 

This passage shows how the Latin tutor, who will become Agnes’s future husband, is restless in Stratford. His need to escape from the confined community and his father’s will is so great that it fills the space in his stomach that hunger should occupy. Instead of becoming grounded through eating the food that the farmer’s widow left him, the energy goes to his feet and legs which want to carry him away. Given that the Latin tutor becomes a playwright in London, he eventually succeeds in his mission. 

“At the edge of a forest, a girl. There is a promise, from teller to listener, concealed in that opening, like a note tucked into a pocket, a hint that something is about to happen.” 

While the community in Stratford is a conformist one, they delight in tales of those who are different. The girl who lives “at the edge of a forest,” which is an unknown and potentially threatening space, becomes the object of much curiosity amongst the townsfolk, who talk about her to take a break from their monotonous lives. The forest-dwelling girl embodies the potential for adventure and change. While in this instance the narration is omniscient, the passage also refers to the particular circumstances of the Latin tutor, who will have his life changed by the girl. 

“Susanna curls her fingers around the carved ends of the chair arms, which are worn apple-smooth with the touch of a hundred palms. She shuffles her body backwards until her spine meets the chair’s back. It is the chair her father likes to sit in, when he comes home. Twice, three, four, five times a year.” 

This excerpt shadows Susanna’s thoughts regarding the chair on which she sits. It is the privileged seat, normally afforded to her mother’s many patients, whose palms have made the arms “apple-smooth,” or to her father when he returns from London. For Susanna, the chair becomes a metaphor of love and veneration. Neglected by both of her parents, she rarely gets to be the person who gets the most attention. When she allows her spine to touch the chair back, she tests out what it would feel like to be at the center of attention and privilege.

“When she had taken his hand that day, the first time she had met him, she had felt — what? Something of which she had never known the like. Something she would have never expected to find in the hand of a clean-booted grammar-school boy from town. It was far-reaching: this much she knew. It had layers and strata, like a landscape […] There wasn’t enough time for her to get a sense of it all — it was too big, too complex. It eluded her, mostly.”

When Agnes first grasps the muscle between the Latin tutor’s forefinger and thumb, the place that alerts her to the essence of a person, she finds that his is too vast and unwieldy to grasp. O’Farrell shows this surprise in Agnes’s stumbling over a question when she tries to summarize her feeling. The repetition of “something” indicates her inability to concretely verbalize her feelings. This is one of the first instances where Agnes’ impeccable intuition is stumped by something unfamiliar. Still, she is drawn to the Latin tutor’s promise of vastness and adventure.

“When Eliza gets married, she wants to walk down Henley Street in a crown of flowers, in bright sunshine, so that all may see her. She does not want some ceremony miles from town, in a small church with a strange priest sneaking her and her groom in through the door.”

This passage illustrates Eliza’s desires for her own marriage and contrasts them with her brother’s wedding. Eliza’s ideas for her own wedding include bright sunshine and visibility to all who live on Henley Street, where she grew up. She wants her wedding to be publically celebrated, rather than the rushed secretive affair that her brother’s turns out to be. While Eliza’s wedding would establish her place at the heart of the community, her brother’s ceremony, conducted “miles from town” by a “strange priest,” is made shameful and melancholy by its occult nature.

“She has seen these before; there are few in the town, or even the country, who haven’t at some time or other in their lives. They are what most people dread, what everyone hopes they will never find, on their own bodies or on those of the people they love. They occupy such a potent place in everyone’s fears that she cannot quite believe she is actually seeing them, that they are not some figment or spectre summoned by her imagination.” 

This passage, illustrating the scene where Agnes finds buboes on Judith’s body, shows how common the plague is and the element of disbelief when it happens to a loved one. When Agnes thinks that the buboes are so universally feared that she cannot believe her eyes, even she, a medicine woman, thinks that this particular misfortune happens to other people. Although the plague is an illness specific to the novel’s time and place, Agnes’s thought process is a universal human one that transcends time and place.

“The heat in the room is unbearable to Hamnet — he can feel it, breathing at him, like fumes down the gates of Hell. It almost blocks the doorway, filling the space, pressing its fierce mass against the walls. […] He passes a hand over his brow and its outer edges seem to shimmer and he sees, or seems to see, just for a moment, a thousand candles in the dark, their flames guttering and flaring, wisp lights, goblin candles.” 

The feverish heat and imagery Hamnet experiences is a sign of his sickness. The diabolical imagery, with the kitchen fumes seeming like the gates of Hell and the illusion of goblin-like candle flames, indicates the extent of his hallucinatory pain. He is in pain because of the start of plague symptoms and also because he is worried about his twin. When he corrects himself, stating that he “seems to see” rather than seeing, he attempts to reinforce his standing in the world of the well and sane.

“‘You frightened me. Whatever are you doing, boy? You look like a ghost, standing there like that.’ Mary will tell herself, in the days and weeks to come, that she never said these words. She couldn’t have done. She would have never said ‘ghost’ to him, would never have told him that there was anything frightening, anything amiss about his appearance.” 

After Hamnet’s death, Mary is haunted by her careless use of the word “ghost,” as though using such a word could have brought the boy’s death on. In the end, Hamnet’s ghostly aspect turned out to be an omen, and Mary wants to take back her words in case doing so will change the outcome of events. This thought process is a means of denying that her grandson is really dead.

“Her husband is split in two. He is one man in their house and quite another in that of his parents. In the apartment, he is the person she knows and recognizes, the one she married.” 

This passage introduces the double nature of Agnes’s husband’s character. At this stage in the novel, one half of his personality is relaxed and free with Agnes, while the other is furious and depressed at being under his father’s thumb. However, the significance of Agnes’s husband being “split in two” continues throughout the rest of the novel as he makes two lives: one in Stratford, and the other in London.

“You and I are to have two children and they will live long lives. But she remained silent: people do not like to hear such things.”

Agnes’s conviction that she will bear two and not three children haunts the novel, as the reader knows from the outset that Agnes has three children and only two survive. However, even at this stage in the novel, when she is about to give birth to her first child, Agnes knows to keep quiet about her premonition. She knows that even those closest to her can find her clairvoyance unsettling and censors herself to keep them at ease.

“For the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet.” 

The omniscient narration at the beginning of Chapter 11 refers to the faraway events and coincidences that cause the plague to attack Hamnet’s family. The use of a future conditional tense for an event that took place in the past augments the element of random chance in the events that caused the plague to come to Stratford. The emphasis on the number two—in the two events and the two people—indicates the importance of meeting and contact in plague transmission.

“Tears are appearing on her cheeks now, like silver seeds, as if by magic. He knows they are his, falling from his eyes on to her face, but they could just as easily be hers. They are one and the same.” 

As Hamnet hovers over what he believes to be Judith’s deathbed, he senses the intense connection between him and his twin, which makes him feel as though they are really one person and not two. When tears appear on her face “as if by magic,” he half-imagines that they were produced by Judith’s eyes and not his. The approach of Judith’s death makes him feel his own; thus it could be Judith pouring out tears of mourning for him. The twins’ feeling of interchangeability presides over the later scene when they change places in death. 

“Certainties have deserted her. Nothing is as she thought it was […] She, who has always known, always sensed what will happen before it happens, who has moved serenely through a world utterly transparent, has been caught off guard. How can this be?”

On the approach of her second labor, Agnes feels as though the world, which she could formerly read like a book, has become a stranger. The sense of not knowing, engendered by her uncertainty over her due date and the feeling that her husband has changed, overwhelms her. For the first time, she feels fear as other less intuitive, less clairvoyant humans feel it. This marks a turning point in the novel, as Agnes goes from being confident to uncertain.

“The glee that rose up, like steam, between the words he had written. It feels wrong that the two of them are so far away from each other, so separated. While he is deciding what length of glove, what manner of beading, what embroidery would best suit a player king, she is clenched by agony and about to die.” 

Agnes is disturbed by the “glee” that her husband feels without her, outside of the domestic realm of the family. Glee, a quasi-onomatopoeic word, describes the exhilaration her husband feels away from her in London. It is galling to Agnes that her husband should be so fulfilled and carefree while she is forced to give birth in a manner she thinks will kill her. She feels the personal sacrifice of having sent her husband away, even if it is for her own good.

“She fears her foresight; she does. She remembers with ice-cold clarity the image she had of two figures at the foot of her bed where she will meet her end. She now knows that it’s possible, more than possible, that one of her children will die, because children do, all the time. But she will not have it.” 

Agnes’s premonition of bearing two and not three healthy children is cemented in the clear vision of having only two figures by her deathbed. She is haunted by the feeling that one of her children may die and intends to struggle against fate. O’Farrell conveys Agnes’s desire to take control of the situation in a succession of sentences and clauses that begin with pronoun “she.” Although “she” knows the odds against her three children surviving, especially when child mortality is so common, the same “she” will do all she can to ensure their safety.

“The first thing she registers is that Judith’s hand is not, as she first thought, clasping her other hand. It is entwined with another’s. There is someone on the pallet with Judith, another body, another — as strange as it seems — Judith. There are two Judiths, curled up together, in front of the dying fire.” 

When Agnes wakes up at Judith’s sickbed, she is confused by the strange apparition of two Judiths. Judith does not clasp her other hand so much as entwine it with another person’s hand. The fact that Agnes conceives of two Judiths, before she remembers Hamnet, reflects her premonition of having only two surviving children at her deathbed. O’Farrell’s transposition of the adjective “dying” from the child’s body onto the fire is a melancholy image that opposes the tender one of the twins curled up together. The fire represents a dwindling life force which can animate one child’s body but not two.

“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.” 

Although Hamnet vowed to give his life to his sister, at the moment he gives his life up he hesitates to admit that he will die. He comforts himself by saying that he is going to rest and makes a final effort to open his eyes to ensure that his life is still there. O’Farrell’s understated, matter-of-fact approach to death is more moving than a melodramatic description would have been, as it shows a weakened child treating his struggle for survival as a mere difficult task. When he says that he will rest “just for now,” he treats himself to the indulgence of giving up the struggle. The reader and those at his deathbed know that his rest will last forever.

“His bared feet splay outwards, his toes curled. The soles and nails still bear the dirt so recently accrued from life: grit from the road, soil from the garden, mud from the riverbank, where he swam not a week ago with his friends. His arms are by his sides, his head turned slightly towards his mother.”

This passage shows how dead Hamnet’s body retains vivid marks of his live state. The position of his feet, turned out with curled toes, is one that might be assumed in sleep, while the dirt accrued from local places testifies to his lively, boyish existence. The head turned slightly towards Agnes is a touching detail; as in life, this dead young boy always looks out for his mother. Overall, the passage shows how for the shocked witnesses of the body, the boundary between life and death is not yet finalized.

“She is hollowed out, her edges blurred and insubstantial. She might disintegrate, break apart, like a raindrop hitting a leaf. She cannot leave this place, she cannot pass through this gate. She cannot leave him here.” 

This passage highlights the visceral nature of Agnes’s grief and the continuation of the maternal feeling that she cannot abandon a live child. The repetition of “cannot” signals her sense of helplessness. O’Farrell further conveys the feeling of physical and mental fragility through the image of a raindrop hitting a leaf. Agnes feels as though burying her son will be the end of her.

“You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child.” 

Agnes is disturbed by the fact that her husband can retreat to the place in his head, which she first saw when she took his hand. However, now that place has become “more real” to him than the real world, where their son has died. She sees the inexorable hold of this place of imagination on her husband and is awed and disgusted by his duty to serve it at any cost.

“There is a new boy to try out for the other has grown too tall, his voice trembling, his beard coming in (and such a secret, private pain it is, to see a boy growing like that, from lad to man, effortlessly, without care, but he would never say that, never let on to anyone else how he avoids this boy, never speaks to him, how he hates to look upon him).” 

Agnes’s husband’s grief surprises him even in London, where he moved to escape it. It pains him to see that a boy who acted the female parts in his plays must be replaced because he grew too manly. The player boy’s incumbent manliness reminds him that Hamnet will never achieve similar maturity because he died at an age when he was still young enough to play the female parts. Agnes’s husband bears his grief privately, as he is careful to not show his London circle how he hates to contemplate growing boys.

“Agnes looks at her husband and suddenly she sees it, feels it, scents it. All over his body, all over his skin, his hair, his face, his hands, as if an animal has run over him, again and again, leaving tiny pawmarks. He is, Agnes realizes, covered in the touches of other women.” 

This passage illustrates the multisensory manner in which Agnes discovers that her husband has been unfaithful and multiple times. These strange women left their scent and pawmarks on him the way an intrusive animal might. Agnes senses that he is no longer only hers and that the marks of his guilt are inescapable, because they completely surround his body.