Hamnet tells the story of the family of a boy who perishes in the horrible plague year in England of 1596. We readers know a lot of science that the characters couldn’t have known, which might have saved young Hamnet. We have means of communication – of bodies as well as of information – unavailable to these personages. We have knowledge of language – reading and writing – that many of the people of that age lacked and might have helped them to communicate over distances and time. But they too had books and (physical) bookshelves, though fewer in number and more precious than mine, or ours.
But not more precious than life itself, in this case the life of the eleven-year-old Hamnet. …
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