Hamnet too is showing symptoms of illness, but no one notices these. The family is unaware that the origin of Judith’s sickness was the faraway meeting of a Venetian glass merchant with a flea that fell off the back of a monkey in Alexandria, Egypt. Agnes, who is a more successful healer than the physician, attempts all the cures she knows in order to heal her daughter. When Agnes and the physician arrive, the latter expects that Judith will die. His grandparents are too distracted while his father, a playwright, is away in London. He tries to find the physician and his mother Agnes, who is a healer, but both are absent. The first narrative of the novel opens with eleven-year-old Hamnet discovering that his twin sister Judith is ill with a fever and buboes, egg-shaped bulges, under her skin. The first begins with the events leading up to Hamnet’s death in 1596, while the second describes the events between Hamnet’s parents’ meeting and his birth. The novel comprises two alternating narratives.
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