Are there any descendants of William Shakespeare today? The answer is no. It is known that the family endures through another line, that of his younger sister Joan, but the famous playwright’s line has died out. This is because, despite having three children with his wife Anne Hathaway, two were girls and thus took their husbands’ surnames upon marriage (losing track of their descendants), and only one was a boy; the problem is that he died at eleven years of age. His name was Hamnet, a name that inevitably has led to speculation about whether it inspired the title of his famous play Hamlet.
Hamnet was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1585, the same year England signed an alliance with the United Provinces of the Netherlands to fight Spain, and Miguel de Cervantes, sometimes linked to the Bard by literary genius and the date of their deaths (both died in 1616), published La Galatea. Hamnet was not born alone but with his twin sister, Judith; the firstborn, Susanna, had arrived in 1583. The two babies were baptized on the same day of their birth in the local parish church, the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity (where their father had been baptized and where his tomb is located).
It is believed that both received their names in deference to a couple friends of their parents: the baker Hamnet Sadler, who would later witness Shakespeare’s will, and his wife, Judith. Hamnet (or its variants Hamnett and Hannett) is a name whose origin dates back to the Middle Ages, derived from the Old French Hamunet and the toponym Hampnett (a village in Gloucestershire). Nowadays it is very rare, and in fact, there are just over half a thousand people with that name in Great Britain and Ireland; it appears more as a surname, but in the Early Modern period it was not uncommon.
After the birth of Hamnet and Judith, there is a gap in the biography of William Shakespeare, known as the lost years, spanning from 1585 to 1592. Many apocryphal stories are framed in that period, but it is known that around 1587 he moved to London, according to one legend escaping a complaint for poaching, according to another to care for the horses of theatergoers; it has also been theorized that he was a schoolteacher. The most probable, however, is that he moved in search of a job in the theater to support his family.
The fact is that by 1592 he already had plays performed, while Anne and his children continued living in Stratford-Upon-Avon without joining him. That, along with some elements of the writer’s will that seem to imply a certain disdain towards her, has led to the assumption that the marriage was in crisis, although it is also possible that the success he achieved prevented him from visiting them as often as desirable. In any case, Hamnet was raised by his mother; it is unknown if in a house on Henley Street owned by his paternal grandfather, or in a small rural or rented house in New Place which they would later buy.
It is possible that Hamnet attended primary school, something common then, completing his studies at eleven years of age, just before death reached him in August 1596. The causes are unknown (plague? sweating sickness?…), as parish records usually did not note them, although in England at that time a third of children did not survive past ten years. The boy was buried in the same church where he was baptized while his two sisters continued to grow and lived reasonably long lives.
The eldest, Susanna, married the physician John Hall, with whom she had a daughter named Elizabeth, living until 1649. Judith married the vintner Thomas Quiney, to whom she bore three children she outlived, dying in 1662. Anne Hathaway had died in 1623, seven years after being widowed. As we mentioned at the beginning, the family line continued thanks to Joan, the writer’s sister, whose husband was a hatter named William Hurt with whom she had four children: William, Mary, Thomas, and Michael. The first had no descendants, so everything traces back to the others.
Returning to Hamnet, there is debate about the possible influence he had on his father’s writing; not only in Hamlet but also in other works. Unlike other contemporary writers like Ben Jonson, a London poet and playwright—initially a rival and later a friend—who left a heartfelt testimony about the death of his son, Shakespeare never explicitly referred to Hamnet’s death. In fact, it occurred during a period when he was mainly publishing comedies; the tragedies would come a few years later.
“Grief fills the room up of my absent child”. Some see an allusion to Hamnet in these lines from King John spoken by Lady Constance, widow of the Duke of Brittany. However, it is believed that Hamnet was still alive when his father wrote it. But it is common to try to relate passages from literary works to the life experiences of the author, and in Shakespeare, this has been taken to the extreme, especially during the Romantic period: critics like Coleridge, Dowden, or Dover Wilson thought they found references to the lost son, with Hamlet being the most notable, partly due to the similarity of the names and partly because, in his will, Shakespeare called his mentioned friend Hamnet Sadler “Hamlett”.
Hamlet was written between 1599 and 1601, and today no expert believes it had anything to do with Shakespeare’s personal tragedy beyond the formal similarity in the title. It is possible that Hamlet was a fashionable name, and in any case, the work was not entirely original because it was based on two sources. The first is an Elizabethan play titled Ur-Hamlet (“Original Hamlet” in German), attributed by some to the English playwright Thomas Kyd and others to Shakespeare himself; no copy has been preserved, so it could have been an early version of the final Hamlet or simply provided some ideas.
The other source, generally more accepted, is the legend of Amleth, a character from the Germanic Iron Age who appears in a Latin work titled Vita Amleth and was recorded by the Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum (though it also appears in the 12th-century Chronicon Lethrense). Amleth, prince of the Jutes, pretends to be mad to save himself from his father’s murderers and is sent abroad, returning a year later to avenge his father. Of course, Shakespeare could have been influenced by this legendary story affected by his son’s death; one does not necessarily exclude the other. But it’s not just Hamlet.
Indeed, many proposals exist in various other works, such as Twelfth Night, in which a girl believes her twin brother has died; or Julius Caesar, where the protagonist adopts Mark Antony as a replacement for his deceased son; or Romeo and Juliet, sometimes interpreted as a reflection of the pain of losing a child; or The Tempest, where Alonso’s guilt is related to Hamnet’s death; or King Lear, with the king’s bitter laments over his daughter Cordelia’s corpse: “No, no, no life! / Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never!”
And it’s not just the major works. This also happens in shorter poems, such as the one hundred and fifty-four sonnets in iambic pentameter published throughout his life and collected under that common heading with a dedication to an anonymous recipient nicknamed Fair Youth and whose initials would be W.H. There are several candidates for this, and it is considered that this young man might have been the object of Shakespeare’s sexual desire or perhaps a platonic love, so they would actually have nothing to do with Hamnet. But since there is no shortage of theories on the subject, let’s look at the most notable cases.
In sonnet number thirty-three, a metaphor for the fleeting life of the unfortunate boy and the sorrow left by his absence is believed to be seen: “Even so my sun one early morn did shine / With all triumphant splendour on my brow; / But out, alack, he was but one hour mine, / The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now”. The thirty-seventh is also often attributed to the tragic impression suffered by the author, although this time expressed more vaguely: “As a decrepit father takes delight / To see his active child do deeds of youth / So I, made lame by fortune’s dearest spight / Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth”.
Was Hamnet then Hamlet, or was the name just similar? Did his father write verses mourning his memory, or did he never pay much attention to him? Was he subtly omnipresent in his works, or is there an excess of enthusiasm among some scholars on the subject? The answers to this vary over time, depending on the type of critical analysis prevailing. During Romanticism, the answer was positive; modernism and the New Criticism (the American formalism) changed that perception and resisted the parallels between the author’s life and work; now it seems that the former view is being revisited…
This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on July 11, 2024: Hamnet, el hijo de Shakespeare cuya muerte de niño pudo influir en su padre para la concepción de Hamlet y otras obras
SOURCES
William Shakespeare, Las obras completas de Willian Shakespeare
Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare. A compact documentary life
Edmund Kerchever Chambers, William Shakespeare. A study on facts and problems
Elizabeth Winkler, ‘Hamnet’ Review: Shakespeare & Son
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Hamnet Shakespeare
Wikipedia, Hamnet Shakespeare
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