4 ideas
In 1596 Judith falls sick with the plague first. Her twin Hamnet, who had once swapped clothes and places with her to fool the household, lies down beside her and wills death to take him instead. The loss rests on a mother's certainty breaking at the exact point where she was most sure of herself.
Tracking one flea turns a catastrophe usually read as fate or divine judgment into a sequence of ordinary, unconnected transactions across a continent. The death then has causes and no one to blame, and this makes the grief harder to settle, not easier.
Agnes grieves by staying in place, keeping the body, the house and the ritual, while her husband grieves by leaving for London and working. Each partner reads the other's way of coping as betrayal: to her, his absence looks like abandonment, and to him, her stillness is a place he cannot stand to be. The marriage cracks because they grieve in opposite directions, not because either of them grieves less.
Agnes goes to London and sees Hamlet, and at first it is a violation because her son's name has been handed to a stranger on a stage. She then realizes the father has put himself in the role of the ghost, the dead one, so that the son can go on living. She reads the play as an exchange he could not make in life, and she forgives him through it. Creative work here is not a record of grief but a symbolic trade of places with the dead.