Gerhard’s Reviews > Hamnet > Status Update

All Agnes wants is the green of a forest. She craves the dappled, animate pattern of light on ground, the merciful shade of a leaf-canopy, the not-quite-quiet, the repeating seclusion of trunks, disappearing into the distance.

...she can feel him switch from one character to another; she can sense that other, big-house, self melt off him, like wax sliding from a lit candle, revealing the man within.

How baffling the adult world seems to Hamnet at that moment, how complex, how slippery. How can he ever navigate his way in it? How will he manage?

How frail, to Agnes, is the veil between their world and hers. For her, the worlds are indistinct from each other, rubbing up against each other, allowing passage between them.

'Agnes will marry a farmer, by and by – someone with prospects, someone to provide for her. She’s been brought up for that life. Her father left her a dowry in his will – I’m sure you know that, don’t you? She’ll not marry a feckless, tradeless boy like you.'

Erm, Shakespeare.

He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place.

Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.