Hamnet: A Breathtaking Elegy For A Boy Lost in The History of Plague and Poetry
Written by Amelia Cropley
Upon seeing this book proudly displayed in my local Waterstones, I was first enticed by the beauty of the cover, the deep blues, royal font, gold owls symbolising death. And then upon seeing the title I embarassingly thought to myself “They got the title wrong!” Thinking surely this is a modern adaptation and it’s Hamlet they meant. And oh just how mistaken I was. Placing the book on the counter, I was on the brink of uncovering forgotten history – a truth lost between the lines of the greatest plays.
Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, combines literary fiction with a lesson in Shakespeare I could never have prepared myself for. With the beauty of O’Farrell’s eloquence, her exploration of love and loss is incomparable – a pure and profound reflection of life and death. Just by the delicacy of her writing, it’s apparent O’Farrell handpicked the small number of facts we know about William Shakespeare and his family and centred her own stage around them. The rest of the book is a work of fiction, but a type of fiction I personally think shouldn’t be called fiction – because it has more of a chance of being real than just some made up story.
”He is dead and gone, lady.
Hamlet, William Shakespeare [Act IV, scene V]
He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone.”
An important note is that O’Farrell begins Hamnet with a foreward that is just as important as the plot itself. The first being these four lines from Hamlet, arguably one of the most well-known Shakespeare plays. Beneath, O’Farrell gives the historical commentary that in sixteenth and early seventeenth century Stratford records, the names Hamnet and Hamlet are interchangeable, the exact same name – merged from history. The page before, sets the scene that in the 1580’s a couple lived in Stratford-Upon-Avon with their three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. What should not be a spoiler – for it is history – states that their only son, Hamnet, died in 1596, at only eleven years old.
Four years later, Hamlet was first performed in London.
Without even properly sinking my teeth into this book, I was already gripped, entranced. Only a perfect book can give you goosebumps before beginning the book itself. And suddenly, Hamlet became a whole new play to me, one I couldn’t wait to find out about. About how the Shakespeare family coped with their loss, even at a time in history when loosing young family members and children was sadly very common. How this forgotten boy secretly changed literature.
In historical records, two records exist about Hamnet Shakespeare; that he was born 1585, and died 1596. That is it. And knowing this before even imagining a small child running down the stairs in Henley street searching for help, creates an emotional grip to last the entire novel. Running down the stairs as children often do, I was, from the get-go plunged into the writing where a feeling almost maternal over Hamnet is inevitable – because you know from the start, this child is going to die.
“He can feel Death in the room, hovering in the shadows, over there beside the door, head averted, but watching all the same, always watching. It is waiting, biding its time. It will slide forward on skinless feet, with breath of damp ashes, to take her, to clasp her in its cold embrace, and he, Hamnet, will not be able to wrest her free.”
From the novel’s get-go, O’Farrell throws readers head-first into the panic of the plague. A deadly desease entering the house, a feeling we today can vividly recall, and Hamnet searches for someone to help his twin sister. Even delving into the chain of infection, the plague is a constant background force, presenting how fragile life is. With the eleven years of fill-in fiction, O’Farrell builds a strong foundation of familial connection in her work, not seen before in history. As William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway lived in the apartment of Shakespeare’s parents house, family will have always been present in their lives. From the relationship of twins and twin flames, to sibling-hood, maternal and paternal love, grandparents and in-laws, Maggie O’Farrell does not miss a beat.
With it, Hamnet births a family we know hardly anything about, in such a vivid way it’s like they breathe through the pages with you despite being gone for centuries now. Maggie O’Farrell curates a household that surely must have grieved their son, brother, nephew, grandson, and with it she brought such a death to life. O’Farrell has single handedly given us all the knowledge of the Shakespeare’s our history books could not.
“Maggie O’Farrell gives Hamnet Shakespeare something no other historian has done before, not even Shakespeare himself – she gives life to Hamnet. Presenting him, not as a passed child, but writes a boy who was once alive…”
Most extraordinary to me is this novel is not about the playwright that will of course be the reason most readers pick up this book. In fact, the Bard remains unnamed, always a husband, father or son, never William Shakespeare. To defamous Shakespeare is a big action, but in Hamnet he is just a husband, son and father providing for his family away in London. At the end of the day, O’Farrell makes Hamnet not about him, but his wife and son; the Shakespeare’s that lay unremembered. With the absence of Shakespeare, readers are turned away from him and turned towards his family instead, exploring the emotional costs of his ingenuity and ambition.
After a misleading title and opening chapters focusing on Hamnet, after it is Agnes that takes centre stage for the remaining time. Agnes is the name that appears in her father’s will, not Anne Hathaway, and so naturally, it is about Agnes we learn. By reimagining Anne Hathaway, Agnes is a mystical, herbalist figure with a spiritual, almost otherworldly connection to nature and those around her. Affiliated with witchcraft, nature and earthly healing that history cannot prove nor deny, a beautiful, love-filled mother feels alive to us now, thanks to O’Farrell, who gives her the interiority and agency of the novel, turning her into the emotional centrepiece of the novel, rather than a passive and secondary role.
But mostly, this is a book about death. If you live for the poignancy of words, Hamnet is for you, by O’Farrell’s use of rich, delicate and sensory language to illustrate the sorrow in which consumes Agnes – and likewise, readers. We wrap Hamnet in funeral cloths, walk down the street behind him to his burial, weep with his mother and travel across London with the news to his father. Before Hamnet’s death there are chapters and structures, after it is a long chapter-less reflection on death, loss and how the family’s domesticity shifts with the lingering presence of death that never subsides for the remaining time.
“The leaves crisping on their edges. Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him.”
And yet, despite this being a novel about death, it bursts with life. This immersively Shakespearean novel brings life to a boy that once played games, probably went to school, lived, loved and breathed, in Hamnet, he lives as well as dies. Maggie O’Farrell gives Hamnet Shakespeare something no other historian has done before, not even Shakespeare himself – she gives life to Hamnet. Presenting him, not as a passed child, but writes a boy who was once alive, someone who lived not just died. It is less an elegy, but a beautiful celebration of the life he must have lived. With every single line a work of art.
This luminous portrayal of a child lost between the history of plague and the celebration of his father’s plays and poetry is endless. Its presentation on Elizabethan marriage, motherhood, death and the fragility of life and plague should be put on a pedestal. Most tear-inducing, we see how art can be a response to grief when Hamlet takes to the stages, and the familial reaction to the Bard’s memory of his son. Like his Sonnet 18, “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”, a father immortalises his son in writing one of the most famous plays in literature. Maggie O’Farrell explores Hamnet’s presence in Hamlet, and Shakespeare’s own involvement, but this I’ll let readers find out themselves, weeping in its final pages.
All in all, Hamnet is a novel I bring up very occasionally, between friends, in literature classes or just in outburst. To take on the life of the Shakespeare’s is no easy feat, but O’Farrell completed it faultlessly, rightfully earning her success of winning the 25th Women’s Prize for Fiction. It is completely, whole-heartedly, faultlessly and will continue to be, a five star masterpiece of literary fiction.
“Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.”
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In-article image courtesy of Waterstones. No changes were made to this image.
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