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| William Shakespeare, Hamnet's father. (Hamnet died 420 years ago.) |
Hamnet Shakespeare (baptised 2 February
1585 – buried 11 August 1596) was the only son of William Shakespeare and Anne
Hathaway, and the fraternal twin of Judith Shakespeare. He died at age 11. Some
Shakespearean scholars speculate on the relationship between Hamnet and his
father's later play Hamlet, as well as on possible connections between Hamnet's
death and the writing of King John, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and
Twelfth Night.
Little is known about Hamnet. Hamnet and
his twin sister Judith were born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised on 2
February 1585 in Holy Trinity Church by Richard Barton of Coventry. The twins
were probably named for Hamnet Sadler, a baker, who witnessed Shakespeare's
will, and his wife, Judith. According to the record of his baptism on 23 March
1560 in the Register of Solihull he was christened 'Hamlette Sadler', and
Shakespeare himself spelled Sadler's first name as "Hamlett" in his
will.
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A 19th-century engraving imagining
Shakespeare's family life. Hamnet stands behind Shakespeare, left of centre. |
He was probably raised principally by
his mother Anne in the Henley Street house belonging to his grandfather.
By the time Hamnet was four, his father
was already a London playwright, and as his popularity grew, he was probably
not regularly at home in Stratford with his family. American biographer Park Honan
believes that Hamnet may have completed Lower School, which would have been normal,
before his death at the age of eleven (possibly from the Bubonic Plague). He
was buried in Stratford on 11 August 1596. At that time in England about a
third of all children died before age 10.
