Gerhard’s Reviews > Hamnet > Status Update

It is good, it is bad, it is somewhere in between. How does a person ever tell? All he can do is inscribe strokes on a page...

At night, she rises from her bed and goes outside. She sits between the woven, rough sides of her skeps. The humming, vibrating noises from within, beginning just after dawn, seem to her the most eloquent, articulate, perfect language there is.

The house has no mice. Even the cook has to admit that there are advantages to living alongside a dynasty of cats.

She will not, she tells herself, be the first to speak. Let him decide what should be said, since he is so skilled with words, since he is so fêted and celebrated for his pretty speeches

Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as ‘slipping away’ or ‘peaceful’ has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight.

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.