Hamnet

Mary is furious that her son is going to London. She is convinced that some harm with come to him because he is so absent-minded. She is especially angry with Agnes for not taking her side; now more than ever, Mary sees Agnes as a forest-dwelling interloper who seduced her son. Agnes, meanwhile, is heavily pregnant with what she believes to be one baby of an indeterminate sex.

Although she is reluctant to have her husband go, she does not want to keep him against his will. Although he is eager to get going, he promises that he will send for Agnes, Susanna, and the new baby as soon as he is settled. 

Mary delivers Eliza’s letter to her brother to a boy, who takes it to the posting inn. The innkeeper then hands it to a merchant, who is going some of the way to Banbury. Eliza’s brother is in Kent because, due to the plague, the theaters in London are shut down to prevent the gathering of large crowds. In Kent, however, people are still permitted to gather. The letter passes through several hands before it reaches Eliza’s brother, who at the time is occupied with encouraging his colleagues to deliver a good play, even though they are unused to the smaller dimensions of the stage. When he opens the letter and finds that his daughter is ill, he is devastated and determined to get to Stratford as quickly as possible.

Agnes experiences labor pains a month before she expects them. While she tries to go and give birth in the forest, Mary catches up with her and prevents her from doing so. Throughout the labor, she thinks about the letter her husband wrote from London, which she asked Eliza to read aloud to her twice. Her husband said he was outfitting actors from the playhouse with gloves, but Agnes finds that “there is something in the way he has written […] the long passage about these gloves for the players” that signals “some alteration” in him (188). The alteration is that he seems happy, enthusiastic, and more like himself away from the family. Agnes feels as though her husband is very far off and has a premonition of dread.

Assisted by Mary and the midwife, Agnes gives birth to a boy. The midwife then has an intuition that Agnes has a second baby to deliver. The next baby, a girl, is born with her umbilical cord around her neck. While they assume that the baby is dead, she is eventually revived. The girl, Judith, is half the size of her brother Hamnet and very frail. Although Agnes has plans to move the family to London to join her husband, she keeps putting them off to ensure Judith’s survival. Agnes toils to “push back, fight against, undo the foresight she always had, about having two children” and vows to do everything to protect them (202). Agnes and the children do not move to London, and the husband continues to live apart from his family. 

Upon waking at Judith’s bedside, Agnes makes the astonishing discovery that Judith and Hamnet appear to have swapped clothes and bodies. Judith dressed as Hamnet is the healthy one, while Hamnet dressed as Judith is grievously ill. Agnes feels as though fate has played a trick on her; she should have been showering Hamnet, not Judith, with medical attention. None of her cures work on Hamnet. Hamnet meanwhile envisages a snowy landscape and prepares himself for rest. He dies surrounded by his grieving mother, sisters, and grandmother.