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Meanwhile Will plucked Hamnet now blubbering on his stool, by the doublet. But Hamnet, turned sullen, shook him off. Perhaps he did not know that Will and Judith had not laughed. But since Hamnet saw fit to shake him off, Will was glad that just then, with a rush of cold air and a sprinkling of snow upon his short coat, Dad came in.
Father, mother, one brother, Edmund, and the little son Hamnet had gone before him "to that bourn from which no traveller returns," but there were two loving daughters and a granddaughter waiting to welcome him home, one sister, Joan, and two brothers, Gilbert and Richard.
But the poet saw little of his family or of the three children of his union, and at the time of his public return to Stratford little Hamnet Shakespeare died, in his twelfth year. Susanna married, in 1607, the Puritan physician John Hall. Judith the twin married Mr. Thomas Quiney in the year of her father's death.
Will Shakespeare, with heart a-still, clutches at Gammer's gown as there follows a crash against the oaken panels. But as the door bursts open, it is Hamnet, head-first, sprawling into the room, the pippins preceding him over the floor. "It were ahind me, breathin' hoarse, on the cellar stairs," whimpers Hamnet, gathering himself to his knees, his fist burrowing into his eyes.
"I'll come some day," Master Shakspere would say; "give him my love"; and his mouth would smile, though his eyes were sad, for his own son Hamnet was dead. Then, when the house was still again, and all had said good-by, Nick doffed his clothes and laid him down to sleep in peace. Yet he often wakened in the night, because his heart was dancing so.
He has come, then, in time to hear the tale? "An' the man, by name of Gosling," Gammer is saying, "dwelt by a churchyard " Will Shakespeare slips to his place on the stool. Hamnet is next to him, Hamnet Sadler who is eight, almost a man grown. Hamnet's cheeks are red and hard and shining, and he stands square and looks you in the face.
And singular enough it is, as well as interesting, that Shakspeare had so entirely superseded to his own ear and memory the name Hamnet by the dramatic name of Hamlet, that in writing his will, he actually mis-spells the name of his friend Sadler, and calls him Hamlet. His son, however, who should have familiarized the true name to his ear, had then been dead for twenty years.
I had forgotten that you hate to touch my hands. I know they are too moist and flabby. I always knew that you thought that. Well! Hamnet died. I grieved. That is a trivial thing to say. But you also have seen your own flesh lying in a coffin so small that even my soft hands could lift it. So you will comprehend. To-day I find that the roughest winds abate with time.
As for his family, Stephen said, his mother's name lives in the forest of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in Coriolanus. His boyson's death is the deathscene of young Arthur in King John. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the girls in The Tempest, in Pericles, in Winter's Tale are we know.
Judith was ten, and Hamnet's sister, and her black eyes flashed around on them all for laughing, and her cheeks were hot. Judith flung a look at Gammer, too, her own Gammer. And Will's heart warmed to Judith, and he went too when she sprang to help Hamnet.
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