Hamnet: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

In the 1580s, the tutor suddenly finds nothing so delightful as visiting his pupils at Hewlands. On those days, he’s up at dawn to wash and dress himself carefully; he helps himself to large portions at breakfast but forgets to eat them; and he waves his brothers off to school with a cheerful smile. On days he stays in town, he mopes about the house, sighing, unable to focus on any task, and getting in the way of John’s and Ned’s work.

One such day, Eliza finds the tutor hiding in the attic above their parents’ bedroom. She’s surprised he still goes to the attic, where John hides the bales of wool the family isn’t supposed to have, and where she, her brother, and their sister Anne used to play as children. It was their refuge from the danger and chaos of the rest of the house. It was here that the tutor taught his two sisters how to read in the long afternoons after school. Eliza can see, now, that the tutor has been scribbling on scraps of paper, but she can’t make sense of it.

Carefully, Eliza raises the subject of Agnes. She’s heard plenty of gossip in town claiming that she and the tutor have been seen together. People think the penniless and tradeless scholar is after Agnes—who is several years his senior—for her generous dowery. She’s also heard plenty of gossip about Agnes’s abilities. When she hears these stories, she doesn’t pretend not to have heard them. Instead, she fixes her intense, uncanny stare on the gossipers until they fall into uncomfortable, chastened silence. At only 13, she has found great power in silence, a lesson she wishes her brother could learn too.

The tutor will hear no ill word spoken of Agnes. But when Eliza realizes that he’s set his heart on Agnes, he becomes silent. He knows neither John nor Joan will support the match. To cheer him, she asks about the hawk. It’s a kestrel, he corrects her, and he breathlessly describes how amazing it is to watch the trained bird fly. He thinks Eliza would like Agnes, since they are similar in some ways. This horrifies Eliza, given Agnes’s reputation, but it also piques her curiosity. Eliza suggests that if the tutor waits until he’s of age in a year, things may have changed. The tutor starts to his feet, angrily retorting that their father has never treated him kindly. And anyway, he cannot stand waiting. He storms down the ladder, leaving Eliza behind.

Days later, in the apple store, the carefully placed fruits rock on their shelves as Agnes and the tutor make love. The kestrel, hooded but alert, listens to them with little interest; they are too big to be her prey. Agnes perches on the edge of a shelf, realizing with surprise that her body knows exactly what to do and fits perfectly with the tutor’s. She wonders how their bodies can fit together so well, so exactly, with such rightness. He opens his eyes, and she looks into the dark depths of his wide pupils. She doesn’t take his hands; she doesn’t need to any longer. 

When Agnes pressed the tutor’s hand on the day they first met, she saw depth and complexity she hadn’t expected in a mere grammar-school boy. What she saw in him and for him was bigger than she could fully grasp. She saw then that there was something holding him back and preventing him from taking command of the amazing, complex world that rightfully belongs to him. They’re both being held back; last time he came, they encountered Joan while on one of their walks. Joan swore that she’d never let them marry. Agnes, she said, is destined to marry a well-off farmer, not the son of the disgraced and despised former bailiff. So when the tutor came today, she decided that they would take matters into their own hands.

Joan keeps busy raising her children and minding the business of the “idiot” stepson to whom the farmer left almost everything. So, it takes her a few months to notice that she’s washing conspicuously fewer menstrual cloths on her twice-monthly washing days. When she does, she confronts her daughters Caterina, Joanie, and Margaret, who are watching their youngest brother, William, whom they’ve tied with a rope to keep from running into the pigpen. The girls know nothing. Joan stomps inside the house to survey the household supply: every single cloth is accounted for. Someone hasn’t been bleeding. Although she already suspects the truth, she confronts her daughters first, laying rough hands on Caterina and Joanie’s smooth, flat abdomens (Margaret is too young to menstruate yet).

Then Joan demands to know where Agnes is; Margaret says her stepsister is milking the cow. Joan storms into the barn spitting angry words and only belatedly realizing that her son James is there, and that he witnesses her wrenching Agnes from the milking stool. She presses her hand to Agnes’s tell-tale, swelling belly. Agnes pushes away and runs from the barn as Joan calls her a “whore” and a “slut.” In the farmyard, Joan seizes Agnes by her long braid and pulls her to the ground. She stares down into Agnes’s haughty, beautiful face—which looks like the beloved first wife she knows her husband the farmer always preferred—and demands to know who the father is. Agnes refuses to answer and instead fights back, kicking Joan’s shin and returning every blow she receives from her stepmother. Bartholomew and Joan’s son Thomas must separate the women.

Caterina, Joanie, Margaret, and William gather around as Joan explains Agnes’s situation to Bartholomew. He immediately intuits that the Latin tutor is the father of her unborn child, shocking Joan. She had utterly dismissed the tutor’s feelings for Agnes after she denied them the right to marry. Joan storms into the house. She gathers every last one of Agnes’s belongings and ties them into a bundle which she hurls at Agnes’s feet, banishing her from the house forever. Bartholomew intervenes again; over Joan’s furious, impotent protests, he asserts that the house belongs to him, and he will not cast Agnes out, no matter what disgrace she may bring the family. But Agnes puts a hand on her brother’s arm and after a moment of deep, wordless communication between the two, she picks up the bundle, collects her kestrel from the apple store, and turns her back on the farm.

The tutor is languidly minding John’s market stall when Eliza materializes with an urgent summons for him to return home. When he arrives, his father isn’t in the workshop. Ned looks up with scared eyes and points toward the parlor. There, the tutor finds a sight so unexpected, it takes him a minute to understand: a bruised and bloodied Agnes sits on a low stool with a bundle at her feet, the kestrel perches on the top rung of a ladderback chair, and his parents John and Mary stand at opposite ends of the room. He crosses to Agnes, demanding to know who hurt her. Before she can answer, Mary says that Agnes’s mother banished her from her house. Agnes asserts that her stepmother couldn’t banish her from her brother’s house; she left of her own free will.

Mary fixes her glare on her son the tutor, asking if he fathered the child with which Agnes is pregnant. At first, he does not answer; he’s too busy working out how to avoid the inevitable violence he expects from John, how to protect Agnes from it, and how he will face her after she sees how his father always traps and humiliates him. But then, he realizes what this all means: he and Agnes must marry now. The baby in her belly will allow him to escape the house, his parents, and the drudgery of his small life. He admits to fathering the child.

Mary launches across the room at the tutor, raining down weak blows on his chest and shrieking angrily. John turns and from the window with a smile on his face—an expression so unfamiliar that the tutor struggles for a moment to identify it. He’s all for the match, he says, since the promises the tutor and Agnes made to each other make their sexual liaison licit. He and Mary must ensure that their grandchild is born in wedlock. If the boy and the girl want to marry, who are they—or the girl’s guardians—to disagree? He’s sure that the two families can come to an agreement. With growing horror, the tutor realizes that he and Agnes have unwittingly played into his father’s hands; John is busy figuring out how to turn their situation into an advantage for himself.

Having settled the affair to his satisfaction, John beckons the tutor to come with him for a private conversation. In the hallway, he drops his genial attitude, pressing his son against the wall and promising that he—or Agnes’s family—will kill him if it turns out that he’s been impregnating other county “floozies.” The tutor wants to protest that Agnes isn’t a floozy, that he loves her; he wants to ask how his father dares to insult her. But John’s arm presses so firmly against his windpipe that he cannot utter a sound. John stalks off. Ned stares from the workshop.

John walks immediately to Hewlands, almost as if he’s afraid that Agnes will ruin his chance to strike an advantageous bargain by delivering her baby (months early) before he arrives. He feels very, very pleased. After all, he has the upper hand. The family needs the girl married to avoid scandal, and the tutor needs his parents’ permission to wed, as he’s not yet of age. At the farm, John finds Bartholomew in a distant field. Bartholomew waits calmly as John struggles through the filth and muck to reach him. He regards John with cold, distant eyes for a long moment. He never warms to the glovemaker, no matter how jovial he tries to be. The rest of the children watch from a distance as John, Bartholomew, and Joan haggle and debate for a long time, then shake hands. The deal is struck.