Hamnet

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Historical Note-Chapter 6

Chapters 7-12

Chapters 13-17

Chapter 18-Author’s Note

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

The Shifting Balance of Certainty and Doubt

At the outset of O’Farrell’s novel, Agnes is the confident one who dwells in certainties, while her husband is adrift. However, as the narrative progresses she becomes more doubtful, and he grows in confidence and status. The death of their son accelerates this trend, as Agnes largely retreats into obscurity and her husband channels his feelings into his master-work, Hamlet.

The daughter of a mystical forest woman, Agnes inherited her mother’s deep insight and healing powers. When the Latin tutor meets her, she lives in harmony with a kestrel, a wild bird of prey, and can read a person’s essence by feeling the muscle between their thumb and forefinger. While her father and stepmother worry that her “odd gift” is unchristian and “she grows up feeling wrong,” Agnes’s strong instincts lead her to a man who will allow her to be herself without trying to crush her individuality, as was common in marriages of the time (49). Although people sometimes gossip about her witch-like powers, Agnes also finds a place in the community as a healer who rivals the physician. She is thus able to reconcile her pagan gifts with the demands of a Christian, patriarchal society. With her uncanny awareness of ghosts, life expectancies, and the number of children she will deliver, she moves “serenely through a world utterly transparent” (189). Her foresight and belief that she can read nature like a book allow her to dwell in “certainties” that give her confidence and peace of mind (189).

Agnes’s inability to allow for uncertainty and the fact that she might be wrong causes her to become inflexible, muddling her insights. For example, her conviction that she will only have two children causes her to overlook the clue that during her second pregnancy the size of her belly means that she may be carrying twins. Whereas during her first childbirth she felt secure and in control under the guidance of her mother, during her second, which is orchestrated by her mother-in-law and a midwife, she feels deeply insecure and afraid. Her fear causes her to become delusional and disoriented, and she ends up “raving” about Mary and the midwife being the two figures in her vision of her deathbed (197).

When Agnes finds that she is wrong about having two children, she puts up a fight against her foresight and vows to do everything she can to ensure the survival of all three. Upon realizing that hardy-seeming Hamnet is more susceptible to the plague than fragile Judith, Agnes feels as though fate set a trap for her in making her “concentrate on the wrong child so that it could reach out, while she was distracted, and snatch the other” (208). When she mourns Hamnet, she also mourns the loss of a benign, flexible world order, as she is uncertain how to navigate life and its unpredictability. At the end of the novel, Agnes reaches some acceptance of uncertainty when she takes the trip to London, determined to find out what is in the play that so scandalously bears her son’s name. The unexpectedly moving nature of her husband’s play helps to restore some of her trust in the workings of the world.

Agnes’ husband, who also grew up feeling out of place in a world that rewarded practical skills and business acumen rather than imagination, never shared his wife’s experience of certainty. Although his essence is vast, in Stratford he is stifled by his father and has no outlet for his gifts: “[H]e is like the picture of a man, canvas thin, with nothing behind it; he is like a person whose soul has been sucked out of him or stolen away in the night” (154-155). This morbid image shows how domestic life of stability and certainty eats away at Agnes’s husband, making him sickly in both mind and body.

The notion that his soul has been stolen away in the night implies that his current living arrangements rob him of what is rightfully his. Agnes sees this and makes the brave decision to allow her husband to go away to London, even as it will damage her children who suffer from his absence. Agnes’s declining confidence in her second childbirth stems in part from the fact of her husband’s absence and the knowledge that he has gone “back to himself. Restored. Better. Returned” (194). The succession of one-word sentences indicate that the soul that was once stolen from Agnes’ husband returned and flourished while away from his family. Here, O’Farrell makes the point that as with all great men, someone paid for his historic success.

Agnes’ husband, who prefers densely populated London to bucolic Stratford, thrives in an environment of chaos and unpredictability. His players become his second family and provide an engrossing distraction from his grief. On a further level, he is able to turn his grief and ponderousness about the uncertainty of the world into moving works of art. By writing the play that bears his son’s name, he provides a structure for his son’s memory, even as his son’s body is substituted by a shifting stream of actors.

Twins, Doubling, and Duplicity

Twins, doubling, and duplicity are crucial themes in the novel. On a literal level, the novel features twins, Hamnet and Judith, who are alike enough to be mirror images or “one person split down the middle” (235). The idea that Hamnet and Judith could be two sides of the same person is expressed in Agnes’s inability to conceive that she is carrying more than one baby. Hamnet internalizes this superstition when he gives over his life to Judith, as he senses that “perhaps there never was […] enough life” for the two of them (169).

At the twins’ birth, both nature and patriarchal custom favor the male twin Hamnet, who is twice the size of his sickly sister Judith. This favor of nature and nurture continues throughout the twins’ childhood, as hardier Hamnet is sent to school, while Judith remains illiterate at home. By the time they are 11, society has gendered the twins and set them up with the expectation that they will have starkly different lives. The prepubescent twins, however, still feel as though they are similar enough to swap their distinctly gendered clothes and pass as each other. In this respect, they resemble the twins Viola and Sebastian in Shakespeare’s 1602 play, Twelfth Night.

Despite what Hamnet may have been taught about male superiority and his grandfather’s intention to hand over the glove-making business to him, he values his uneducated female twin’s life more than his own: “You shall stay,” he tells her, “they need you” (167). Personified Death agrees with Hamnet, taking him instead and allowing Judith to survive and live a quirky existence of singing to herself and raising cats; Hamnet, meanwhile, becomes a ghost who is reembodied by a succession of player boys. While the female twin reaches maturity, the male twin dies young and is reborn again in art. Judith’s predicament of living and then being forgotten in death is a typical female one, while Hamnet’s immortalization is typical of select lucky males. Here, O’Farrell uses the motif of twins to explore the tension between nature and nurture, and between fate and the unexpected.

On a more metaphorical level, all of the novel’s characters are twin-like in that they have one side they expose to the public and another private, vulnerable side. For example, the twins’ grandfather, John, presents a stern and aggressive front, while he secretly drinks to ease the pain of his social shunning. In a patriarchal society, the public side of his personality would be gendered male, while the hidden vulnerability would be labeled female.

However, the most twinned character in the novel is the man variously known as the Latin tutor and Agnes’ husband but never by a single name. O’Farrell deliberately withholds the name “Shakespeare” or even “William” from the reader because of its power to hypnotize and give the impression of a fixed, famous identity. Instead, it is important for the reader to see that Hamnet’s father and Agnes’ husband has a mutable, doubled identity. His double life begins in earnest when he goes to London and makes a career as a playwright, before returning to Stratford and resuming the role of family man. While he is initially able to keep his twin identities alive and separate, when his own twin son Hamnet dies, the London identity takes over and depletes the twin self that could be a faithful husband and family man.

The well-dressed man of consequence who buys his family a large Stratford home is shaped by his London success. However, his twinned nature continues in a different form: When Agnes goes to London, she finds that her husband’s lodging resembles a “monk’s cell” in its austerity (293). She asks herself, “how can the man who owns the largest house in Stratford, and much land besides, be living here?” (293). Despite being so successful, her husband needs space to nurture the introspective, feminine side to his nature — the side, incidentally, which his public self depends on. In this instance, the apparently weaker, quieter twin needs to thrive in order to ensure the apparently stronger one’s survival. This echoes the exchange that took place between bold Hamnet and delicate Judith.

Literate and Illiterate Spheres

At the heart of O’Farrell’s project lies a paradox: her book draws readers’ attention because it is based on the most famous playwright in the English language and what is arguably his most famous literary work; however, her narrative centers on the vibrant, sensory lives of the illiterate. This creative decision reflects the fact that the vast majority of the population in Shakespeare’s time were illiterate and without formal education.

Those officially gifted with schooling were boys from noble or wealthy middle-class families, such as the glove merchant John’s. In addition to English—the spoken language that would enable them to communicate in their everyday lives—they were taught Latin, the revered language of ancient Roman poets and philosophers. Hamnet’s world takes for granted that study, especially the study of Latin. For example, although Hamnet has an aptitude for grammar, rhetoric and calculations, these disciplines often seem less lively than the phenomena of the real world. For example, a cart going by during a lesson will produce “wonderings to where the cart might be going and what it would be carrying” (7).

Similarly, his father, a Latin tutor, feels uninspired by listening to boys droning on with their conjugations. Instead, the reward for being literate is deferred to a time and place outside of the schoolroom. Those who can read and write are able to post letters that allow their thoughts to travel where their bodies cannot; they have important roles as the transmitters of messages and records. Both Eliza and Susanna achieve this distinction, as they are taught to read by the Latin tutor, a male who recognizes the importance of all people being able to express themselves in writing, regardless of their gender. A scholar of letters, both as a Latin tutor and as a playwright, the husband is able to carry both his and his son’s name into posterity in a way that the illiterate characters cannot. Still, prior to this achievement, the Stratford community mocks and is suspicious of his literate gifts because they are intangible and not immediately useful in the town’s economy. He has to go elsewhere to prove how they will help him flourish.

Interestingly, O’Farrell shows how literacy and illiteracy are not black and white concepts but relative. Agnes reads “painstakingly, her finger moving from word to word, her lips forming the sounds” and was taught by her father to recognize the letter A, which he drew in the mud and said was “her letter, always hers” (55; 113). Agnes’s ad-hoc literacy causes her to have a more sensory and personalized relationship with words and letters, which she sees as concrete and pictorial rather than abstract signifiers. For example, she sees the triangular roof of her marital home as another A, because “the house slopes together at the top and has a floor across its middle” (114). Her new husband is enchanted by this statement because it proves that Agnes sees “the world as no one else does” (114). Arguably, Agnes’s ability to see the world and letters so creatively stems in part from her lack of formal education. Agnes, who is rooted in nature, does not feel that she suffers from her lack of verbal literacy; rather, she enjoys learning to read and communicate with her bees and medicinal plants.

The couple’s youngest daughter, Judith, is the only child in the family to remain illiterate. Left-handed Judith literally gets off on the wrong foot with letters when her sister Susanna tries to teach her by making her hold the pen with her right hand. After complaining that using her nondominant hand seems wrong, “Judith refuses to grasp the letters, to see how they merge together into sense” and “wonders if there could be a trace of something Hamnet wrote on this slate” (278). This, in addition to her habit of drawing “eyes and mouths in all the gaps in the letters, making them into different creatures,” shows how Judith looks to make the letters familiar enough to be interesting to her (278). Ultimately, when she gives up learning to read, she decides that the world without letters is far richer to her, shifting her focus to rearing cats and cultivating plants. Agnes defends her youngest daughter when Susanna complains, saying that “Judith’s skills are different from yours but they are skills just the same” (278). Arguably, illiterate Judith’s skills are intuitive ones that are opposed to the uniformity and rigor that letters impose.

Still, O’Farrell shows how being illiterate restricts women especially to the immediate spheres of the land and the domestic realm; they can only inhabit the present moment, as they do not have the means to leave a record for posterity. In focusing her narrative on them, O’Farrell records and celebrates their sensory existence.