Hamnet
Most students of Shakespeare know that he had a son named Hamnet who died at the age of eleven. As you can imagine, that detail has led some scholars to significant biographical readings of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, Hamlet. Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020) opens with an epigraph quote from one such scholar, Stephen Greenblatt. Her novel centers on Will Shakespeare’s courtship with the woman O’Farrell calls Agnes (as her father names her in his will the year before), their early married life, and the tragedy that strikes when their eleven-year-old twins become ill with the Black Death. While William Shakespeare is one of the most famous characters among the pantheon of English language writers, this book centers on his wife, his children, his home town. In fact, O’Farrell never writes the name “Shakespeare” in her novel. Hamnet includes some of the most moving fictional explorations of courtship and childbirth, maternity and pandemic, grief and loss, that I have read. Ultimately, this novel grapples with the ways that parents can move on after the unthinkable happens and they lose a child to illness; a part of that story, O’Farrell’s novel argues, as literary critics before her have, is William Shakespeare’s penning of his famous tragedy Hamlet, an act that may provide healing for both himself and his relationship with Agnes.
After reading this brilliantly poignant novel, I listened to Maggie O’Farrell discuss her artistic project, and even read a passage from the novel, at Aukland Writers Festival this summer (winter in New Zealand). In this virtual panel she describes the blatant misogyny of Anne Hathaway’s historical reputation, which seems to be conceived entirely by the conjecture of literary critics in the four centuries that separate Shakespeare’s wife from today’s readers. As a student of Shakespeare in my undergraduate and graduate days, I too was troubled by the ways that scholars often condemned Will and Anne’s marriage as an unhappy one, and attempted to paint Anne as a wife from which Will fled. Yet, as O’Farrell states during this festival, the historical record shows a different story: William Shakespeare spent little money on his life in London while buying his wife and daughters the equivalent of a mansion in sleepy Stratford, and he retired to live with his wife at the end of his life. Perhaps my favorite detail from O’Farrell’s novel, in response to the literary critics who have likely slandered Anne/Agnes all these years is her romantic explanation for Agnes’s preference of the “second best bed” (which she historically inherited in Shakespeare’s will). Hamnet presents a fierce, independent, even second-sighted woman who chooses to bind herself to the man who would make much of himself and shift the English language forever more. It also explores the connection between Shakespeare’s private life and the subjects of some of his plays. Again, at the Aukland Writers Festival, O’Farrell discusses the connections between not only Hamlet and Shakespeare’s son’s death, but also Twelfth Night, which was first performed on the anniversary of the Shakespeare twins’ birth (and, of course, includes a brother-sister set of twins who are separated and the brother presumed dead). In both Hamlet and Twelfth Night, then, Shakespeare manages to resurrect his dead son. O’Farrell’s novel only mentions Hamlet and the impact its performance has on the family, but I appreciate noting, as O’Farrell herself does, that there are many layers to the literary scholarship that might examine the impact of this real-life tragedy on the creative work Shakespeare produced in its aftermath.
Reading Hamnet in 2020 amidst a global pandemic also conjures a fascinating fictional lens through which to observe contagion. In the case of this novel, the pandemic is the Black Death, but obviously it is a theme with which all grapple this year. While the historical record does not determine Hamnet Shakespeare’s cause of death, O’Farrell lays the blame at the feet of the Black Death that did run rampant during Shakespeare’s working life. The reader follows the vectors and their points of contact across the globe that lead to a little girl contracting the plague in Stratford. I found this account both moving and terrifying, particularly in the midst of our current situation; but I appreciate the reminder that global pandemic is by no means a new experience for humanity.
Agnes, the wise woman who, unlike her fellow sixteenth-century neighbors, is unafraid of the wilder places, provides an inspiring portrait of a strong woman as she faces the challenges and tragedies of life from maidenhood to middle age maternity. O’Farrell transports her reader to Elizabethan Stratford in marvelous ways, and as I read there were times I wanted to lose myself among Agnes’s herb gardens or under the red glow of the Rowan tree’s berries. A mother myself, this book triggered many tears as I read through the gut-wrenching grief the Shakespeare family experiences following Hamnet’s death. The human experience at the heart of this book—the role of outsider, the daughter’s shame for her mother, the grief and heartache following a loved one’s death, the fierceness of a mother, the loss of a sibling, the magical and inexplicable, the carrying on—makes it wildly powerful. And O’Farrell’s mastery of descriptive writing makes the pages fly by. I read this book in a few days, as I didn’t want to put it down, and I shed many tears as I did so. This is certainly a well-crafted and affecting book; it is one that any fan of Shakespeare, historical fiction, and/or Elizabethan England will likely adore.
A Few Great Passages:
“’Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.’
Steven Greenblatt, ‘The death of Hamnet and the making of Hamlet’, New York Review of Books (21 October 2004).”
“She feels another pain coming, driving towards her, getting closer, like thunder over a landscape. She turns, she crouches, she pants through it, as she knows she must, holding tight to a tree root. Even in the throes of it, when it has her in its clutches, when it drives everything from her mind nut the narrows focus of when it might end, she recognises that it is getting stronger. It means business, this pain. It will not leave her be. Soon it will not let her rest or gather herself. It means to force her out of herself, to turn what is inside outside” (155).
“She knows that for the girl child, the door leading out of the room of the living is ajar; she can feel the chill of the draught, scent that icy air. She knows that she is meant to have only two children but she will not accept this. She tells herself this, in the darkest hours of the night. She will not let it happen; ot tonight, not tomorrow, not any day. She will find that door and slam it shuts” (239).
“Death is violent, death is struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight” (250).
“The grave is a shock. A deep, dark rip in the earth, as if made by the careless slash of a giant claw” (275).
“She is hollowed out, her edges blurred and insubstantial. She might disintegrate, break apart, like a raindrop hitting a leaf. She cannot leave this place, she cannot pass through this gate. She cannot leave him here” (276).
“They made him together; they buried him together. He will never come again. There is a part of her that would like to wind up time, to gather it, like yarn. She would like to spin the wheel backwards, unmake the skein of Hamnet’s death, his boyhood, his infancy, his birth, right back until the moment she and her husband cleaved together in that bed to create the twins. She would like to unspool it all, render it all back down to raw fleece, to find her way back, to that moment, and she would stand up, she would turn up her face to the stars, to the heaves, to the moon, and appeal to them to change what lay in wait for him, to plead with them to devise a different outcome for him, please, please. She would do anything for this, give anything, yield up whatever the heavens wanted” (287).
“He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live” (366).
Bibliography:
O’Farrell, Maggie. Hamnet. Tinder Press: London, 2020.
