Book of the Week

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Recommended by Mr Hager

It is relatively well known that Shakespeare had a son, called Hamnet, who died just a couple of years before he wrote his most famous work, Hamlet. 

It is a staple of literary biographies, and has inspired speculation from critics and authors, notably James Joyce in both Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses as to what the relationship is between Shakespeare’s art and his life. O’Farrell’s sense is that, for the most part, Hamnet the boy is little more than an interesting footnote to history, and that his identity and significance has been 'lost in the genius of his father'. This novel sets about trying to correct how underwritten Hamnet has become in biographies and studies of Shakespeare by putting him at the novel’s centre.

It is not only Hamnet for whom perspective is altered. Shakespeare himself recedes, or perhaps occupies a more human place in relation to the people of the world of this novel. He is never named, and it is his wife who comes to the fore. She is another historical figure that O’Farrell was interested in rethinking, firstly by asserting her identity as Agnes, the name her father calls her in his will, instead of the Anne Hathaway who O’Farrell believes has been largely vilified and marginalised by history. She is a fiery, strong, enigmatic woman whose perspective dominates the novel when it is not driven by Hamnet’s presence

The novel is far more than an intellectual exercise in reclaiming marginalised historical figures, nor is it weighed down by its research. Instead, it is a thoughtful and moving account of a couple in love, juxtaposed with chapters poignantly celebrating the magic of a child, and heartbreakingly lamenting an unthinkable loss. O’Farrell has no time for the common conceit that Elizabethan child mortality rates would have somehow lessened the impact of the death of a child. The ending divides readers, and you will perhaps get more out of the final pages if you know Hamlet well enough to decide whether O’Farrell’s conceit works, but this book is well worth a read even if you have never had any time for Shakespeare.

The novel has one final thing to say about the interaction of life and art, in that O’Farrell’s chapter on the plague painstakingly imagines how disease can be spread across the planet. She said in an interview that the charts of Elizabethan trade routes were remarkably similar to the charts that were shown on the news in 2020. The novel, then, accidentally becomes a meditation upon the ways in which our lives collide with those of others, both locally and internationally, and offers us an unexpected way to connect to events of the past.