Hamnet

The eldest son of a glovemaker who later becomes Agnes’ husband, the Latin tutor is the man who O’Farrell’s readers would identify as William Shakespeare. However, that famous name is mentioned nowhere in the novel. This is likely a deliberate gesture on O’Farrell’s part; she wishes to present the contemporary Stratford view of the famous playwright as a character who was put in the shade by his dictatorial father and locally renowned wife.

This daydreaming, melancholic grammar-school boy, who is “all head, with not much sense,” feels stifled by his critical, authoritarian father John (160). Agnes sees that he has a vast “landscape” in his essence, which he needs to be able to inhabit fully if he to avoid engaging in destructive behavior (69). When Agnes and the family they create prove to be an insufficient escape, the Latin tutor looks to London. There, at the playhouse, he finds the perfect outlet for his imagination. From the time of his escape to London, he begins to live a double life. Whereas in Stratford he is a little-renowned family man, in London he becomes a famous playwright.

After Hamnet’s death, London life imprints on the former Latin tutor and makes him seem like a changed man. The people he grew up with finally see him as “a man of consequence,” given his fine, fashionable clothing and the large home he buys his family (230). This comes at the cost of putting his career ahead of his family, as he becomes committed to his craft, his players, and the reputation he built in London. When he comes home after long absences, during which he is engrossed in the theater and several adulterous relationships, Agnes feels cold towards him. She has to allow for some time to pass before “London, and all that he does there […] rub off him” and she can accept him as the man she married (276). However, when he writes a play named after their son, his London and Stratford lives merge to an acute degree, and Agnes is finally forced to witness the event that unites both halves of her husband’s identity. Through the play, her husband expresses his grief about his son and keeps the memory alive. 

The novel’s eponymous protagonist is an 11-year-old boy at the time of his death. He has a heart-shaped face, “corn-colored hair,” and eyes “flecked with gold” (14). He is accident-prone, frequently falling and skinning his knees, and has a tendency towards scruffiness, given his undone doublet and tuft of unruly hair. Like his father, Hamnet is highly intelligent but a daydreamer, with “a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place” (7). This habit incidentally gives him much in common with the Hamlet of his father’s play, who is himself a thinker and dreamer rather than a practical man of action. Through the play, Hamnet’s bereaved father gives his son a chance to grow up and test his imagination.

While Hamnet shares common traits with his father, he has a “driving need” to be with his mother and his female twin, Judith (166). Hamnet and Judith are so alike that they can pass for each other in the manner of Sebastian and Viola in Shakespeare’s later play, Twelfth Night. Judith is no mere companion but someone who feels like so much part of Hamnet that he would be “incomplete” without her (167). When he learns she is ill, he does everything he can to save her, even offering his life in exchange for hers. He believes that by swapping clothes with his twin, he can trick Death, as though the switch of identities is a practical joke. When he succeeds in exchanging his life for Judith’s, the text shows that it is for the twin reasons of his already having a fever, in addition to the supernatural fulfillment of his wish. Judith and Hamnet’s bond remains steadfast after his death, as Judith is the only family member who can successfully feel his presence, whereas others are haunted by his absence. 

Judith is Hamnet’s twin and a more feminine, delicate version of him. Though “preternaturally beautiful” with “clear blue eyes and soft, celestial curls” (204), Judith is prone to ill health. The surprise second twin, she was born with her umbilical cord around her neck and was not expected to survive infancy. Judith’s fragility, coupled with Agnes’s superstition that she would only have two children, is at the root of the family’s separation. While Agnes’s husband is in London writing plays, she and the children are in Stratford, a place where it is more likely that Judith will survive.

Judith grows up a sensitive, introverted child with a fondness for cats, who does not mind being in Hamnet’s shadow, or following his lead with regard to the games they will play. After Hamnet’s death, she gives full expression to her grief, weeping endlessly, even as those around her fear that she will damage her own health. She will do anything for Hamlet to come and visit her, even going as far as following the midwife’s superstition to wait around and see him running. It is only after losing Hamnet a second time that Judith can accept he is truly gone.

As she grows accustomed to Hamnet’s death, Judith finds strength in breeding and taking care of her cats. She ensures that these misfit, semi-wild animals, who are drowned when they became too plentiful, find the homes and respect they deserve. Thus, left-handed Judith, who shows little inclination to become literate, continues her mother’s work of uniting the domestic and the savage. 

The eldest child of Agnes and the Latin tutor, Susanna has “thick dark hair” like her father and is more practical than either of her twin siblings (21). Although she was a happy, curious baby who was close to her mother, as she grows up Susanna becomes dutiful. Both at the house on Henley Street and later at the big house in Stratford, she is the one responsible for keeping things running. At Henley Street she is at her grandmother Mary’s beck and call, and at the Stratford house she is charged with such tasks as buying fields for her father.

In both houses, Susanna feels overworked and underappreciated. At Henley Street she greatly misses her absent parents, while at the Stratford house she laments her grief-stricken mother’s slovenly appearance, her sister’s daydreaming eccentricity, and her father’s plays, which have a reputation for being “extremely bawdy” (279). She longs to escape her strange family and worries about who will come to court her. Susanna’s character represents the sacrifices children make for their parents. She feels that her prospects are submerged by her parents’ needs for self-definition.

Agnes’s stepmother Joan is the opposite of her mother Rowan in being “wider, her hair pale, screwed up in a knot, hidden under a coif grimed by sweat” (44). Joan is the second and less preferred wife of Agnes’s late father Richard, despite her ability to give him six healthy children. She is suspicious of her striking, supernaturally-gifted stepdaughter Agnes, superstitiously believing that she is the author of her woes. Bitter and worn down by the fact that her husband died with a lock of Rowan’s hair in his pocket, Joan opposes Agnes’s marriage to the Latin tutor but has no power to stop it. Instead, Joan expresses her anger and resentment by delighting in news of Agnes’s misfortune. She longs to spread the word that Agnes’s husband capitalized on their son’s death by writing a play named after him. When she hears that Agnes’ husband has not written to her in a while, Joan licks “her lips, as if tasting something good, something sweet on them” (286). This hyperbolic detail of Joan’s malice makes her seem comically pathetic. Her attitude toward Agnes, which is one of ill-will without the power to enact revenge, is a testament to the limited and miserable life of the average woman in the 16th century.

Agnes’s brother Bartholomew is Rowan’s second child and the heir to his father’s farm. He is a huge man with “wide, surprised eyes and fingers that opened into white stars” (44). He and Agnes are very close, sharing a deep respect for the land they cultivate.

While Bartholomew is a gentle soul, he uses his huge size to intimidate the Latin tutor into taking good care of his sister. He often acts as a go-between to ensure Agnes’s family’s happiness. While Bartholomew has a wife and family of his own, the text refers to them fleetingly. Instead, O’Farrell presents him as an earthy man and a more reliable counterpart to Agnes’s restless husband. 

The Latin tutor’s father, John, is a glove merchant. Once the man of foremost consequence in the village, he became disgraced after “secret dealings in the wool trade” (20). His relationship with his eldest son, who he dismissed as a wastrel and forced into the position of Latin tutor at Hewlands, is frosty and at turns violent.

By the time the novel begins, when Hamnet is 11, lonely, bitter John has taken to day-drinking. John is a figure of fear to Hamnet, who can feel that his grandfather’s anger “seems to unsheathe itself and stretch out from him, like a rapier” in search of an opponent (12). Hamnet becomes that opponent when he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and John jabs him in the face. The bruise John leaves on Hamnet’s face is the first thing that gives him the appearance of a victim and an omen for his impending death. Despite John’s hostility, the reader learns that he admired his grandson and hoped to pass his business over to him.

John’s wife, Mary, is a mother of eight who saw three of her children die. Although she is a stern woman who drowns excess kittens and threatens to beat the twins when she thinks that they neglected their duties, she is devoted to her role as a mother. She laments the loss of her eldest son to London and tries to control her daughter-in-law Agnes’s birthing. When Mary assists Agnes with her second delivery, the midwife notices that “despite her own eight children, despite her age,” Mary wants to experience the feelings of maternity again and take possession of Agnes’s twins (196). While Mary is suspicious of Agnes and views her as the “sorceress” who “bewitched and ensnared her boy,” she grows to respect her, as the two work in tandem at the twins’ sickbeds (174). Mary also takes care of Agnes’s daughters when Agnes is too deep in mourning to be able to do so herself. Here, O’Farrell shows that in times of emergency women are able to put their differences aside and form harmonious communities. 

The Latin tutor’s sister, Eliza, was taught by him to read and write, which is remarkable in an era when few women were literate. She is also her brother’s confidante prior to his marriage and in childhood was closely companionate with him and Anne, the sister who died. In adulthood, her brother still uses the attic where they played “as a refuge from the household” (60).

Eliza, who admires Agnes and asks to make her bridal crown, is sympathetic to the eccentric couple and their children but is more grounded in the realities of their town and family. Unlike her brother’s secret nuptials, she wants to ensure that her future wedding is in town, with “her banns read loudly at the church door” and audible to all who know her (93). She marries a milliner, and they take over the space that Agnes and her children occupied.