Hamnet

"Yes. I first read this during lockdown, and late last year saw the Royal Shakespeare Company’s theatrical adaptation , which I thought was fantastic. It prompted me to reread and reexamine the book after a period of some years, and it floored me. I read it so greedily, and it absolutely brought me to tears. It reexamines the life and legacy of Shakespeare’s wife Agnes. O’Farrell has spoken about how Shakespeare’s many historians have, in the past, ridiculed Agnes. She’s been much maligned. O’Farrell’s book is all from Agnes’s perspective. It’s about her life as a woman and her particular skillset. I mean, she’s illiterate, but she has extraordinary gifts that her husband cannot understand. It also examines her as a mother—the title, is derived from the name of her and Shakespeare’s only son, who died from the plague. O’Farrell writes so deeply movingly about grief. Hence the tears."

"If I’m absolutely honest, I initially avoided this book because I was worried I would find it too upsetting. I have a son, and I’ve never written about bereavement as a parent—I think because I’m so scared of it. But I know what a courageous writer she is, having heard her interviews and read some of her other books. I thought: she will get to the heart of this. So, it came out in 2020, but I put off reading it for a while. But I also wrote my PhD thesis on invented versions of Shakespeare. So I was very interested to hear that this book was about Shakespeare’s family. The real point of departure, the centre of the book, is not, in fact, Hamnet, but Agnes—the wife, who is quite an elemental, witchy kind of character with knowledge of folk medicines. Shakespeare is never named. He’s the slightly miserable and then absent husband. He’s a loving dad, but he doesn’t know what to do. I just loved that. It’s beautifully evoked. It makes his working life as a writer both ordinary and extraordinary. Obviously, someone with the talent that he has is frustrated and unhappy when he can’t express it. So it’s her idea that he goes off to London. She knows he’ll be more fulfilled in the biggest city, and that’s where he started writing plays. But you don’t see much of that. You mainly see the domestic life around Stratford. Moving to and fro in time among the characters in the Shakespeare family. At the climax she goes to London, angry that he has written this play. She’s thinking: is he writing about our son? But, of course, it’s Hamlet . So there’s a clue. Writing Hamlet is sort of giving Hamnet his life back. I puzzled over it a bit. I think that, in creating a character who is the most psychologically rounded character in Shakespeare, an extraordinary character, he has almost given Hamnet his adulthood. Hamlet the adult man makes choices that Hamnet the child didn’t get to make. And it’s a beautiful book to read, with a true evocation of place. This is not a National Trust version of history. Yes. That was something I studied, these different versions of Shakespeare. And the fact that Maggie O’Farrell doesn’t name him feels significant, because in a way he is only a name to us. At the start, she has a tiny intro about a couple who lived in Stratford. We see him as a family man, or a man frustrated by his family. That’s who he is. What’s important in this story is his relationship to Agnes and his children, not to his public. In the mythology of Shakespeare, Anne Hathaway gets a bad press. She’s an older woman. They say that she wasn’t intellectual enough for him, he had to get away from her to do his thing. But this shows her as a powerful woman of her own agency, who actually says to him: ‘You should be in London.’ There’s no way in which she isn’t a good match."

"It’s a great story, isn’t it, and beautifully told. Maggie O’Farrell’s prose is smooth as silk. You can almost run your hand over it. But what readers experience is the top of the writerly iceberg, the visible peak below which, unseen by the reader, pulses the solid, confident and inventive technical skill of the true novelist. Look at how deftly Maggie O’Farrell deals with time. Back we go, and forward, but we’re never lost. And see how she ensures that Shakespeare’s wife and children are never overshadowed by their father. In less skilled hands, not naming Shakespeare would grate and fail. With Maggie O’Farrell, this not-naming seems effortless and natural. As we said in our judge’s quote, a bravura performance."