Purchase a copy for yourself here!
“Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry … It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life”, writes Maggie O’Farrell in Hamnet, her novel that centers around the death of it’s titular character, the eleven year old son of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway (in this book referred to as Agnes, as she was named in her father’s original will). The novel is a work of historical fiction, incorporating the sparse facts available about Shakespeare’s family life: Hamnet was buried at the age of eleven, survived by his twin sister and older sister, and both parents. O’Farrell imagines that he succumbs to the bubonic plague, based on the fact that it was ravaging the English countryside in those years, and the conspicuous absence of a plague mention or reference in any of Shakespeare’s plays. This novel is a breathtaking account of the short life of Hamnet Shakespeare, the namesake of one of the most celebrated plays in history, who is often left out of the historical narrative.
The novel does not follow a linear timeline, but instead travels back and forth between the minutiae of the last days of Hamnet’s life, and the history of his parents courtship and marriage. The novel goes into great detail about both William and Agnes’ family life, their whirlwind courtship, and the early challenges of their marriage. Agnes is a beautifully drawn out character, a woman connected to nature and the mystical through her own mother, who died early in her life, but infused her with the power to connect to her world through energy and nature. Agnes is a free spirit who quickly falls in love with this younger man, William Shakespeare, in whom she perceives a layered and magnificent mind. Agnes bears three children, first Susannah, and then the twins Hamnet and Judith. These children are also lushly drawn out, each one innocent and fragile, but deeply devoted to each other member of their family.
While the novel does offer some consideration of how his son’s untimely death affected his work, this book turns its focus mostly away from William Shakespeare, in favor of his fascinating wife and children. This novel is not really a work of Shakespeare fan service, he is never even mentioned by name, but rather an exploration of family trauma and a straining marriage. Most of the grief that O’Farrell describes is that of Agnes, the parent who stayed at home after her son’s death, forced to constantly confront his loss, while her husband escaped to London where he could turn his grief into a work of art. Agnes is perhaps the most flushed-out character in the novel, and O’Farrell’s centering of her grief at the loss of her son and the strains placed on her marriage feels like the emotional center of this story.
Hamnet is a brilliantly crafted and devastating novel about a child whose life and death has been largely left out of considerations of Shakespeare’s life. Perhaps the most touching scene in the novel comes at its conclusion, when Agnes herself travels to see a performance of Hamlet, written four years after the tragic death of its namesake. Hamnet imagines the ways in which this child’s life figures into the canonical play, and the connections that the young Hamlet has with Shakepeare’s son. O’Farrell has penned a heartbreaking family story that deals with the trauma of losing a child, the trials of marriage, and the ability to transmute grief into art. This is a lush and atmospheric novel, whose emotional weight is bolstered by the realness and nuance of the characters that populate it, and the place it is set in. A brilliant and vivid portrayal that transcends boundaries of time and place, at once feeling deeply relevant and timeless.
Further Reading: Maggie O’Farrell’s excellent memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. If you enjoy this type of historical fiction, you may enjoy Hilary Mantel’s trilogy that follows Thomas Cromwell’s ascendance to power: Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light.