The following version of this book was used to create the guide: O’Farrell, Maggie. Hamnet. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020. Kindle edition.

Hamnet is a historical novel chronicling the lives of two families before and after the untimely death of a young boy in the late 1500s. Told through an omniscient narrator and rotating third-person perspectives, the novel anchors the family’s struggles and triumphs with historical facts detailed in an epigraph preceding the first chapter. The epigraph establishes the titular character Hamnet’s death before the narrative begins.

The focal characters are Hamnet and Agnes, though an ensemble of characters feature throughout the novel. The narrative is set in various locations in England during the late 1500s, alternating between two timelines. The first chronological timeline begins when the unnamed father meets Agnes, and the second begins fifteen years later, when Hamnet’s twin sister Judith becomes ill. The novel is divided into two parts.

Part 1 begins when Judith, eleven-year-old Hamnet’s twin sister, becomes ill at the house on Henley Street in Stratford. Hamnet’s family members are all absent except his grandfather, John. John strikes Hamnet in the face for startling him and does not help Hamnet locate his other family members. Hamnet calls on the physician’s wife, who promises to send the physician to check on Judith after a brief conversation reveals Judith’s diagnosis: the bubonic plague.

As Judith suffers her illness, the novel alternates between the past and present. In the past, a young Latin tutor meets Agnes, a woman with a strange reputation from a prominent farming family. The Latin tutor and Agnes develop a romantic relationship to the dismay of both their families. The Latin tutor proposes to Agnes, but Agnes’s stepmother Joan refuses the engagement. The couple forces the marriage with a premarital pregnancy, which the tutor’s father works to his financial advantage, negotiating the terms of the union to save the farming family from scandal. After a secret wedding ceremony, the couple moves into an apartment adjacent to the Latin tutor’s family home. Agnes becomes comfortable in their new home, establishing her own apothecary business through a window in the house at Henley Street. Eventually, Agnes gives birth to their first child, Susannah, in the woods beneath a fallen tree.

From Susannah’s birth through the rest of the novel, the Latin tutor is called the father. The father struggles with depression after Susannah’s birth, growing distant from Agnes as she cares for their infant daughter. Agnes senses her husband’s unhappiness and encourages him to move to London to extend the family glove business. London revitalizes the father and introduces him to his new passions, writing and theater. Agnes eventually gives birth to unexpected twins while her husband is away. The younger twin, Judith, is too sickly to withstand the harsh conditions of the city, so the family never joins the father in London.

Back in the present, Hamnet alerts Agnes to Judith’s illness. Agnes attempts to heal Judith with the natural remedies, but the remedies do not work. Judith’s condition becomes dire. While the rest of the family is asleep, Hamnet decides to trick Death by disguising himself as Judith. Agnes awakes to find both twins in bed, but quickly discovers that Hamnet is now suffering the symptoms of plague while Judith rests in perfect health. Hamnet dies.

Part 2 begins immediately after Hamnet’s death. Agnes struggles with grief while preparing Hamnet’s body for burial, bonding with her mother-in-law, Mary, who has also lost children to the plague. The father returns from London but departs again right after the funeral, creating a rift in his marriage. The father makes amends for his absence by purchasing a new home for his family to start fresh after Hament’s tragic death.

Joan, Agnes’s stepmother, intrudes on the family’s newfound peace to deliver a playbill to Agnes. The father’s newest play is titled Hamlet, after their late son. Agnes is furious and embarks to London with Bartholomew to confront her husband. Instead, she marvels at her husband’s tender resurrection of their son in the play’s main character.