Family Resilience

Family resilience is the most pervasive theme throughout Hamnet and characterizes the novel’s overall tone. Resilience is a shared trait the family uses to overcome devastating obstacles or events, such as the loss of children Agnes and Mary both suffer. Mary’s ability to help Agnes prepare Hamnet’s body for burial is evidence of her resilience, since “she has done it before, many times” for her own daughters that she lost to the plague (206). Mary and Agnes display similar resilience often in their relationship, in spite of their fluctuating aversions to each other at different points in time.

Judith in particular embodies this theme from her birth. Born with “no noise, no cry, no flicker of life,” Judith is diminutive and weak from the start (122). Mary and the midwife think Judith is stillborn until she rebounds from the trauma of birth with a...