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The Power of Love
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Hamnet, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Deep in his grief over the loss of Hamnet, the father looks at Hamnet’s twin sister, Judith, and remembers a moment from their childhood. The twins ate apple slices in perfect unison, as if they were one child reflected in a mirror, or two sides of one creature. This image is but one of many in the book that plays with the idea of doubling and reflection, of one thing split into two. These moments of splitting always create—or represent—a conflict that must be resolved for life to flow onward. And this, in turn, suggests the contingent nature of life and selfhood: no matter how many possibilities there are, a person can choose only one. But the novel suggests that the ghost of the alternative will always remain, carried along into the future as an echo.
The birth of the twins is itself a moment of splitting that contradicts Agnes’s certain feeling that she will have two children. Hamnet’s death, which he frames as the gift of his future to his dying sister, resolves this conflict. In sacrificing himself, he doesn’t disappear; rather, he gives his sister the gift of the future he was meant to have. Agnes constantly searches Judith’s face for Hamnet’s features, because in a way, his potential still exists in her. The identical cats which trail Judith following Hamnet’s death metaphorically suggest a similar conclusion. Likewise, Agnes and her husband both feel themselves split in two at various points, each representing the juncture of two mutually exclusive choices. These include obeying Joan’s wishes or taking life into one’s own hands, and staying in Stratford or going to London. Identity, the book thus suggests, isn’t static. Instead, each split and reintegration a person faces changes them in vital ways that give meaning to the chaotic nature of existence.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Identity, Choice, and Sacrifice ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Identity, Choice, and Sacrifice appears in each chapter of Hamnet. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Identity, Choice, and Sacrifice Quotes in Hamnet
Below you will find the important quotes in Hamnet related to the theme of Identity, Choice, and Sacrifice.
Chapter 17 Quotes
Judith, her child, her daughter, her youngest born, is seated in a chair. Agnes still cannot believe it. Her face is pallid but her eyes are bright and alert. She is thin and weak, but she opens her mouth for broth, fixes her gaze on her mother.
Agnes is pulled in two, as she sits beside her son, holding on to his shivering body. Her daughter has been spared; she has been delivered back to them, once again. But, in exchange, it seems that Hamnet may be taken.
She has given him a purgative, she has fed him jelly of rosemary and mint. She has given him all that she gave Judith, and more. She has placed a stone with a hole beneath his pillow. Several hours ago, she called for Mary to bring the toad and she has bound it to his stomach with linen.
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208
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Last night, Hamnet switched places with his sister Judith. Now, in the morning, Agnes struggles to adjust to this change of events. On one level, the sensation of splitting Agnes experiences in this moment points toward the competing emotions she feels: since she loves both of her children, there is no difference in intensity between her gratitude for Judith’s recovery and her fear and sorrow over Hamnet’s illness. Yet, gratitude and fear cannot easily coexist, hence the sensation of being divided.
But ideas about splitting in half or reintegrating two halves into one entity abound at important turning points in the book. These are often moments where fate intervenes or something unexpected happens. The birth of the twins themselves created one of these rifts, splitting Agnes’s expected second child into two halves. From the moment they were born, then, their existence contradicted her foreknowledge of two children at her deathbed in a way that can only be resolved through the death of one of them. Agnes has fought against this moment for years, expecting that weak and sickly Judith would be the one to die and going out of her way to keep Judith well. And Judith has, in this case, recovered yet again. But the fact that Judith’s recovery comes at the cost of Hamnet’s health indicates the ultimate futility of Agnes’s efforts to contradict fate.
Hamnet, in this place of snow and ice, is lowering himself down to the ground, allowing his knees to fold under him. He is placing first one palm, then the other, on to the crisp, crystalline skin of snow, and how welcoming it feels, how right. It is not too cold, not too hard. He lies down; he presses his cheek to the softness of the snow. The whiteness of it is glaring, jarring to his eyes, so he closes them, just for a moment, just enough, so he may rest and gather his strength. He is not going to sleep, he is not. He will carry on. But he needs to rest, for a moment. He opens his eyes to reassure himself the world is still there, and then lets them close. Just for now.
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Chapter 18 Quotes
When the twins were very small, perhaps around their first birthday, he had turned to his wife and said, Watch.
Agnes had lifted her head from her workbench.
He pushed two slivers of apple across the table to them. At exactly the same moment, Hamnet reached out with his right hand and gripped the apple and Judith reached out with her left.
In unison, they raised the apple slices to their lips, Hamnet with his right, Judith with her left.
They put them down, as if with some silent signal between them, at the same moment, then looked at each other, then picked them up again, Judith with her left hand, Hamnet with his right.
It’s like a mirror, he had said. Or that they are one person split down the middle.
Their two heads uncovered, shining like spun gold.
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