Hamnet

Agnes prepares Hamnet for his burial. With Mary’s assistance, she makes a winding sheet for him. As Judith cries over her twin, Agnes is heartbroken when she has to tell her that he will never come back.

The husband returns to Stratford surprised to see that Judith survived and Hamnet is dead. At the funeral, he bears his son’s weight and lowers him into the earth at his riverside grave.

The family is mired in grief, and Agnes is angry at her husband for not being present. Although he is devastated by the loss of his son, he wishes to return to the playhouse in London and his company. A perplexed Agnes insists that he stay and accuses him of being caught by “the place in your head”—the land of his imagination which is more real to him than any real-life place (240). He leaves them and says that he hopes to return before Christmas.

Beset by grief in her husband’s absence, Agnes neglects her routine chores and medicinal work. Her husband’s letters seem briefer and more slapdash, and he postpones his return by a year. He stays in London, as keeping busy with his playhouse enables him to temporarily forget their family tragedy.

When he returns, Agnes senses that he has been with other women. Although their reunion is difficult, he asks Agnes to move the family to London. Agnes refuses on account of Judith’s health. Her husband then surprises her by convincing Bartholomew to buy the family an enormous house in Stratford.

Agnes and her daughters settle into the new house, with Susanna taking charge of practical matters. On one occasion, the midwife who delivered the twins comes by and tells Judith that she sees Hamnet at night, running between the door of the new big house to the door of the little one where he was born. Judith guards this secret, seeing it as her connection to her twin. She goes out at night looking for Hamnet and on one occasion feels that she can hear “another’s breathing […] underneath her own” (283). When the moment passes, she feels as though she has lost her twin all over again.

Joan pays the family a visit, bearing the news that Agnes’ husband wrote a play with the title of their dead son’s name. Agnes takes to her bed, and Susanna writes her father an angry letter.

Agnes and Bartholomew make their way to London to see the play, curious about its content. At first, Agnes is angry when she learns that the play she expected to be about their son takes place in a faraway Danish castle. She feels that her husband is lost to the artificiality of the theater. However, when she sees the boy Hamlet, who is of a similar appearance to her son, she is profoundly moved. She recognizes that her husband “brought him back to life, in the only way he can” (304).

O’Farrell states that the novel is a work of “idle speculation” about the mystery of Hamnet’s death (308). She states that the origin of Hamnet’s sickness is unknown, and while she improvises on the theme of the plague, it could have been something else entirely.

Although most people know Shakespeare’s wife as Anne Hathaway, her father Richard named her as Agnes in his will, a name which O’Farrell prefers. Similarly, the historical record is divided as to whether Joan Hathaway was Agnes’ biological mother; O’Farrell opted to make her a stepmother.