# 89: Everybody: A Book About Freedom, by Olivia Laing

A few years ago I read about something called ASMR: “autonomous sensory meridian response.” Wikipedia defines it as “the subjective experience of low-grade euphoria characterized by a combination of positive feelings and a distinct static-like tingling sensation on the skin…. most commonly triggered by specific auditory or visual stimuli….” If you search for ASMR on youtube, you can find thousands of videos, the majority featuring some attractive young woman speaking in a low, solicitous voice as she rattles jewelry or pretends to perform an eye exam or give a haircut. The common denominators are soft, sibilant sounds and close proximity. One ASMR video reenacts a TSA patdown.

These videos are intended to provoke an ASMR reaction in the viewer. They suggest something midway between a paid fetish experience and a mother putting her child to bed. But when I first read about ASMR, I knew that I had experienced it. Yes, reader, I have experienced low-grade euphoria. My ASMR experiences have been brief and unremarkable, to the extent that I never paid them any mind except while they were happening. For me, ASMR is sensual, but not sexual, so the gender of the person causing it is not significant. The videos don’t work for me both because I find them ridiculous and infantilizing, and because the person is not actually interacting with me. The sensation is as Wikipedia describes: a pleasant tingling on the skin, encircling the head like a wreath.

Science can do little with ASMR because it’s evanescent and impossible to measure, a physiological will-o’-the-wisp. That elusiveness would not have fazed Wilhelm Reich, who would have understood ASMR to be a manifestation of what he called orgone energy: the life force. Reich’s life and work are discussed at length in Olivia Laing’s Everybody: A Book About Freedom.

Reich ‘discovered’ orgone energy during the summer of 1940, as he vacationed in Maine:

Gazing at the sky over the lake one night, he thought he saw something flickering between the stars. Suddenly, he realized that the life force he’d been searching for was everywhere, a radiant energy that hummed and buzzed amid the grasses and flowers, the colour of St Elmo’s fire. He’d been standing in it all along, ‘at the bottom of an ocean of orgone energy.’

In the 1920s and 30s, Reich had been a leader of the psychoanalytic community in Vienna and Berlin, a favored protégé of Sigmund Freud. Over time he diverged from Freudian orthodoxy on two points. First, through his interaction with working people at a free clinic, he determined that societal conditions played as much of a role in psychic health as family history. He joined the communist party and proposed that psychoanalysis and communism were complementary:

Both psychoanalysis and communism were full of potential for understanding human unhappiness and expanding human freedom, Reich thought, but each had major blind spots. The problem with psychotherapy was that it insisted on treating the individual as if their pain occurred in a vacuum, unmediated by the society they inhabited or the politics that governed their lives. As for Marxism, it failed to recognize the importance of emotional experience, not least the trouble caused by shame and sexual repression, especially to women.

If psychic health was a societal matter, that made it a political matter as well, and Reich’s convictions led him to play an increasing public role in 30s Berlin, even as the Nazi regime was expanding its reach to control all aspects of public life. He founded the very unlikely sounding “German Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics” and became “a prominent, passionate figure in the city, lecturing crowds of thousands.”

The Freudian orthodoxy was to steer clear of politics. In retrospect, not the right choice, though it doesn’t seem there was any right choice available under the circumstances.

The other point on which Reich diverged from Freud had to do with pleasure. In Berlin between the wars there was much sexual pleasure of all kinds to be had. But Reich, by touching his patients (something Freud had avoided since early in his psychoanalytic career) noticed a different kind of physical pleasure that seemed to serve a therapeutic purpose:

Over the next decade, he developed a revolutionary new system of body-based psychotherapy, drawing attention to the characteristic ways each patient held themselves. ‘He listened, observed, then touched, prodded and probed,’ his son Peter later recalled, ‘following an uncanny instinct for where on one’s body the memories, the hatred, the fear, were frozen.’ To Reich’s surprise, this emotional release was often accompanied by a pleasurable rippling sensation he called streaming…

Sounds a lot like ASMR.

Reich came to America in 1940 and the remaining 17 years of his life were a disaster. He invented something he called the orgone accumulator, which was essentially just a windowless box with a chair in it. His idea was that if you sat in an orgone accumulator, you’d receive a therapeutic dose of orgone energy. Laing does not explain whether Reich tried to offer any scientific evidence for how the orgone box was supposed to work or if he proposed any mechanism for measuring orgone energy. What’s remarkable is how a parade of prominent mid-century cultural figures became orgone enthusiasts, at least for a time: J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer. As late as 1993, Kurt Cobain was photographed sitting in William Burrough’s personal orgone accumulator.

Reich became a kind of cult leader, albeit not one bent on amassing personal power. He also became increasingly detached from reality, doing nighttime battles with flying saucers in the New Mexico desert and inventing a cloudbuster, a machine that purportedly shot some sort of energy into the sky to produce rain. He died in prison in 1957 after the Food and Drug Administration decided he was peddling quack cures. They rounded up every available copy of his many books and burned them: “the only nationally-sanctioned book burning in American history.”

Laing’s book is not a biography of Reich, though he is the most prominent of a collection of writers and artists that she uses to make her argument, which is that the human body, as it experiences sex, illness, or imprisonment, can be used to trace the histories of various liberation movements in the 20th century. She notes that the specific characteristics of the body you’re born with, such as its sex organs and the color of its skin, go a long way toward defining the parameters of the life you will lead:

To be born at all is to be situated in a network of relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed. We’re all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they’re capable of and what they’re allowed or forbidden to do. We’re not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types, subject to expectations, demands, prohibitions and punishments that vary enormously according to the kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting.

Laing describes herself as “nonbinary” (though she is married to a man and uses she/her pronouns), and she seems exceptionally receptive to artists and writers who share her sense of the body as a decisive factor in either their imprisonment, be it literal or psychic, or their liberation. In Reich’s case, it was both. Laing looks for a way to integrate the insightful thinker and reformer of Reich’s European years with the unbalanced visionary of his final decades in America. It’s an Icarus-like story—someone who dared so much, ventured so far beyond the safe limits of an established school or discipline then being broken on the limits of his own psychic endurance and on the forces of cultural repression, which were considerably more potent in 1950s America than they were in 1920s Berlin. The US Government prosecuted Reich for making claims about the therapeutic value of orgone therapy—that it could cure everything from cancer to the common cold, as one magazine article claimed—but Reich’s undisguised belief that orgone energy was also sexual energy undoubtedly contributed to the ferocity of the government’s campaign.

The ideas in Everybody are Laing’s own, yet she ingeniously develops them out of biographical snapshots of various writers and artists that have influenced her. She introduces them one by one, and then continues to call on them throughout the book. The ability to orchestrate so many voices so artfully is worthy of a skilled dramatist. The list includes Susan Sontag, Malcolm X, Christopher Isherwood, Angela Carter, Andrea Dworkin, and the Marquis de Sade. What’s remarkable about the book is not so much what she has to say about any one of these figures, so much as the way she blends and recombines her ideas about them to make her points. Particularly interesting is the way she includes visual artists—Ana Mendieta, Philip Guston, and Agnes Martin—in her exposition. What is often challenging about visual art is grasping the ideas and emotions that propel it, but Laing is utterly convincing as she integrates her understanding of the work with what she has learned about the artists’ lives and struggles and with the times and places where the work was created.

Everybody is a difficult book to describe or summarize, maybe because it looks at relatively familiar people from a completely unique angle, always brimming with insight and empathy.

One final curious fact about Wilhelm Reich: British pop star Kate Bush found a copy of the book that Reich’s son Peter had written about his father in a bookstore and was so taken with the story that she wrote a song about Reich, called Cloudbusting. She even made a video of the song, with Donald Sutherland as Reich and herself (in short hair and overalls) as Peter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pllRW9wETzw

It’s strange and lovely, just like Olivia Laing’s book.

#88: Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk

Flights is an enigmatic book. It’s quite readable and even rather charming, and yet when you finish it you’re not quite sure what you just read. If you turned it upside and shook out its contents, you’d find about 10 longer stories, embedded within a substrate of shorter meditations, anecdotes, and philosophical reflections. What you would not find is a plot.

What holds the book together in lieu of a plot is a set of themes, subjects, and preoccupations, as well as a distinct personality, a hyperaware, mildly ironic, playful tone. Some of the shorter sections are in the first person, and so it’s easy to think you’re getting to know Olga Tokarczuk as you read the various meditations and anecdotes. I think it might be unwise to make such an assumption. What I know about Tokarczuk is that she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018, also that Flights won the International Booker Prize. Her latest novel, just published in English this year (2022) is titled The Books of Jacob—it’s a 900-page affair depicting the life of an 18th century Polish Jew who claimed to be the messiah.

One of the longer stories in Flights is about a man who loses his wife and child while vacationing on a Croatian island. The two get out of the car for a bathroom break in the middle of nowhere and just disappear. He looks near and then far, eventually calls the authorities who comb every inch of the island, but they find nothing. Days pass. There is no logical explanation. Either they fell into a hole somewhere or managed to cross the island on foot and escape on the ferry. Or maybe they were abducted, or swam away and drowned. The man’s experience is akin to what it feels like to lose your keys and then search you house, checking the likely places multiple times and the unlikely places at least once. Your logical mind tells you they must be in one of these places, but nevertheless they are not.

Much further on in the book we find the sequel to this story: the man is now back home in Poland, and his wife and child are with him. We don’t learn exactly how or where they eventually showed up, but we understand that the wife has offered no explanation for their absence, refusing even to acknowledge that something extraordinary has happened. This proceeds to drive the man mad; he believes she knows exactly what happened to her and is just concealing this information from him. He tries haplessly to discover the truth—asking a child psychologist to hypnotize his three-year-old son, for example, or following his wife while wearing a disguise. This ends badly when she recognizes him as she turns an aisle in a clothing store. He has a hoodie pulled up over his head:

“What are you doing here?” she says. “Do you have any idea what you look like?”

Then her eyes soften, a moment later a kind of haze comes over them, and she blinks. “Jesus,” she says, “what is going on with you? What is wrong?”

Eventually the wife and child leave (this time in a more conventional way) and the man sets out to return to the island, his only clue the Greek word Kyrios (κύριος), which he had found scribbled in his wife’s notebook.

He looks the word up in a Greek-Polish dictionary. He believes it must hold a key to the mystery because what has happened must have a meaning, and it must be possible for him to discover that meaning by sifting through the available evidence.

The various definitions of Kyrios that he finds are vague and non-overlapping. For example: “in good measure, moderation, correct relations, attain an aim, overmuch, the appropriate moment, a suitable time, a nice moment, a convenient occasion, …” The list goes on and on; we read over the man’s shoulder, trying like him to find relevance.

The English-language Wikipedia entry for Kyrios is similarly long, complex, and multifarious. At one point is says that “Kyrios defined the relationship between Jesus and those who believed in him as Christ.” Does that help? No.

The word appears in another of the stories, in this case the final one, about an elderly scholar of Ancient Greek history and literature and his younger wife. They are touring the Greek Isles by ship. They have gone on this tour for five years running; the man is paid to deliver daily lectures on the places they visit. He is becoming senile but can still pull himself together to deliver rousing lectures. It’s a poignant and rather tender story. The wife is a scholar as well, and muses that she might take over the lecture gig after her husband passes:

Karen had come up with the idea, to talk about those gods who didn’t make it into the pages of the famous, popular books, those not mentioned by Homer, then ignored by Ovid; those who didn’t make names for themselves with drama or romance; who weren’t terrifying enough, cunning enough elusive enough, who are known only from fragments of rock, from mentions, from the little extant from burned-down libraries. But thanks to that they’ve preserved something the well-known gods have lost forever—a divine volatility and ungraspability, a fluidity of form, an uncertainty of genealogy. They emerge from the shadows, from formlessness, then succumb once more to looming darkness. Just take Kairos [i.e., κύριος], who always operates at the intersection of linear, human time and divine time—circular time.

This is all very provocative, and as we read it we think back to the poor husband riffling his wife’s purse and finding this word scribbled in her notebook. But is there a deeper mystery to uncover here? I don’t know, but the implication is that to work too hard to solve the mystery is a fool’s errand.

Several of the stories deal with scientists who specialize the preservation of human tissues, in recent centuries through plastination, which is “a technique for the preservation of biological tissue that involves replacing water and fat in tissue with a polymer (such as silicone or polyester) to produce a dry durable specimen for anatomical study.” (Stay with me here.) Tokarczuk does make the interesting point that the exploration of inner space, the identification of the various organs and the ways they work together, has been as important as the exploration of our planet’s nether regions, or of the stars and galaxies. It obviously has less appeal for most people because it involves the dissection of corpses. In Flights, this is not a problem.

One of the tissue preservation stories is told from the perspective of Philip Verheyen, who was an actual 17th century Flemish surgeon, anatomist and author. Tokarczuk highlights one of Verheyen’s claims to fame, which was the discovery and naming of the Achilles tendon. She also makes much of the fact that he lost part of one leg in early adulthood, and experiences severe “phantom pain” in this missing extremity. His anguish is both physical and metaphysical; he has preserved the amputated limb and in his desperation takes it out of its liquid preservative, lays it below the remaining part of his leg, and sticks pins in it to see if there is any correspondence with the sensations he feels. There is not.

As in the story of the Polish tourist, there is something missing which must be accounted for, but which nevertheless cannot be accounted for. There is also Greece again, in the person of Achilles. Various such threads are woven throughout Flights. The ship that the Polish tourist and his family take to the Croatian island is named Poseidon; so is the tour boat that the elderly professor and his wife are on. The word panopticon appears multiple times in the book. This word can be defined either as “a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed” or as “an optical instrument combining the telescope and microscope.”

Flights is the opposite of an Agatha Christie mystery, where the details are marshalled toward a specific revelation. The details here are like ants in an ant colony, each seeming directionless but forming a definite pattern. If you enjoy the journey—the wit, the erudition, the excursions into odd moments in scientific history, the weaving together of coincidence and paradox—then you will enjoy Flights, though there is, for me at least, a faint aftertaste of exasperation. Tokarczuk has a way of approximately juxtaposing details, characters, or events in such a way that the reader's mind tries to bridge the gap, the way an electrical pulse jumps from one neuron to another. Tokarczuk is interested in what meaning feels like, not in a particular meaning.

In closing, I would like to mention that one of the stories is about a ferryboat captain named Eryk who seems to speak entirely in quotations from Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab; the one that tipped me off was “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.” One morning Eryk veers from the monotony of his twice-daily crossing route and points his boat toward the open sea. The passengers are irritated at first, but then bemused. As the story ends, the narrator informs us that she herself was “on the deck of that ferry.” Call her Ishmael.

#87: Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell

I might never have picked this book up if it hadn’t been for the title. Hamnet was the name of William Shakespeare’s only son, who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1585 and died there eleven years later. Nothing is known of Hamnet Shakespeare beyond these dates; indeed, little is known about the life of his father, either, beyond such administrivia as deeds, real estate purchases, and a lawsuit or two. We know that in his will he left his “second-best bed” to his wife, Anne Hathaway. We pick over these scant details because of the extraordinary impact of his writings—we speculate and extrapolate compulsively, and have been doing so for centuries. But the man himself is completely absent from his work. He creates people, inhabits them, but they are not him. This drives us a bit mad because we’re not comfortable with writers unless we can see the life and the work as two halves of a whole.

Maggie O’Farrell has written a book that plays off this unsatisfiable curiosity in a striking way. It fills the void, creating a story for the Shakespeare family in Stratford, but for the most part avoids the trap of trying to bridge the gap between Shakespeare’s works and his life.

The playwright is a secondary character in O’Farrell’s book, and neither his first nor his last name is ever mentioned. She designates him at various points according to his function in her story: first he is “the Latin tutor,” later he is “Agnes’s husband.” Shakespeare’s wife is in fact identified as Agnes in her father’s will, and O’Farrell might prefer this name because it disconnects her in the reader’s mind from the (presumably) older wife of the standard narrative.

Agnes is, in fact, the central character in the story. She comes from a prosperous family that owns a large farm just outside of town. The Shakespeares, by contrast, are a family in decline, owing to the disagreeable temper and unscrupulous dealings of the family patriarch, one John Shakespeare, a glovemaker. Agnes, with her “sizeable dowry,” might otherwise be beyond the reach of John Shakespeare’s son, except that she has a kind of taint, inherited from her deceased mother:

She has a certain notoriety in these parts. It is said that she is strange, touched, peculiar, perhaps mad. He has heard that she wanders the back roads and forests at will, unaccompanied, collecting plants to make dubious potions. It is wise not to cross her for people say she learnt her crafts from an old crone who used to make medicines and spin, and could kill a baby with a simple glance. It is said that the stepmother lives in terror of the girl putting hexes on her, especially now the yeoman is dead. … She is said to be too wild for any man. Her mother, God rest her soul, had been a gypsy or a sorceress or a forest sprite.

Agnes does, indeed, possess special gifts. She is able to look into the soul of a person by taking their hand and pressing her fingers into the muscle between the thumb and the forefinger. She can also see into the future, both her own and others’, though not flawlessly or in detail. She might know how a person’s story, or her story, will end, without know how the end will come about. These gifts do not make her fantastic or all-powerful, they just make her a bit different, a bit dangerous. She also has medical talents of a more conventional nature, being proficient in the use of herbs and plants.

In a way, we share Agnes’ gift of foresight, because we, too, know how the story will end, but not how this end will come about.

When Agnes first takes her future husband’s hand, she sees

…something of which she had never known the like. Something she would never have expected to find in the hand of a clean-booted grammar-school boy from town. It was far-reaching: this much she knew. It had layers and strata, like a landscape. There were spaces and vacancies, dense patches, underground caves, rises and descents. There wasn’t enough time for her to get a sense of it all—it was too big, too complex. It eluded her, mostly. She knew there was more of it than she could grasp, that it was bigger than both of them.

So there they are, the collected works, seen through a glass, darkly. By endowing Agnes with certain gifts, and by allowing this vague glimpse into the destiny of her future husband, O’Farrell has levelled Agnes up, made her as interesting and as powerful a character as the glover’s son. She is at the center of Hamnet, and holds the reins of the narrative. Her husband, of course, has an equal importance, an equal gravity, but it is occluded, present in the narrative largely by implication.

The fame and mystery of Shakespeare has allowed Maggie O’Farrell to write a book about an otherwise unremarkable family in small-town England in the latter part of the 1500s. She could have written about such a family without invoking Shakespeare, but it is unlikely that as many readers would have been drawn to it. And though O’Farrell doesn’t try to bring Shakespearean language into her story, or to draw parallels between events or themes in the plays and events and themes in her story, we are inevitably more curious about Agnes and her family than we would be if we didn’t know she was Shakespeare’s wife. It makes me think of certain Bible “epic” movies from the 1950s, like 'The Robe,' where Jesus is implied but never brought into view. I remember a scene where the main character, maybe Victor Mature or Charlton Heston, finds himself in a crowded street scene where we see the sandals of a man passing by, dragging a cross.

But while we at least we know some details of Jesus’ life and of what you might call his frame of mind, Shakespeare could have been any kind of person. O’Farrell’s Shakespeare is a decent, rather ordinary husband and father. The central event of the book is the death, from plague, of his son Hamnet. By this point, about two-thirds of the way through the book, we have come to know Hamnet as a lively, curious, but unremarkable 11-year-old. We have also come to know his twin sister Judith, his older sister Susanna, his grandparents, and his uncles and niece. These people are all in the historical record, but O’Farrell fills in their outlines, making them all unique and interesting.

Hamnet’s death is doubly a shock, both because it happens so suddenly and because it had been Judith who had first been stricken by plague, and thus had been the focus of everyone’s concern. For Agnes there is the further shock that she had not had any premonition of the event.

O’Farrell renders all the characters and events in Hamnet in simple, elegant language that evokes the everyday world of 16th century town life in England. She is particularly effective in rendering the effect of Hamnet’s death on the various family members:

The younger uncle, Edmond, had wept, tears blurring his sight, which was, for him, a relief because he found it too painful to look into the still features of his brother’s dead son. This is a child whom he has known and seen every day of his short life, a child whom he taught to catch a wooden ball, to pick fleas from a dog, to whittle a pipe from a reed. The older uncle, Richard, did not cry: instead his sadness passed over into anger – at the grim task they had been bidden to do, at the world, at Fate, at the fact that a child could fall ill and then be lying there dead. The anger made him snap at Edmond whom he thought wasn’t taking enough of the boy’s weight, not holding the legs as firmly as he should have done, by the knees and not the ankles, fumbling the job, messing it up.

I don’t consider myself a soft touch, but I felt a strong emotion as I read about how Agnes washed her son’s body and sewed him in a shroud (that is, bedsheet).

Inside Agnes’s head, her thoughts are widening out, then narrowing down, widening, narrowing, over and over again. She thinks, This cannot happen, it cannot, how will we live, what will we do, how can Judith bear it, what will I tell people, how can we continue, what should I have done, where is my husband, what will he say, how could I have saved him, why didn’t I save him, why didn’t I realise it was he who was in danger? And then, the focus narrows, and she thinks: He is dead, he is dead, he is dead.

I don’t know if O’Farrell was thinking of King Lear when she wrote this—I’ve been claiming that she doesn’t draw parallels between events or themes in the plays and events and themes in her story—but it’s hard not to think of Lear’s last speech, where he is trying to comprehend the death of his beloved daughter Cordelia:

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.

Agnes’s husband is away with his acting company when Hamnet dies, and his return, early one morning as the family is preparing the body for burial, is another affecting scene. Because O’Farrell has presented the author’s marriage as a happy one (contradicting the conventional wisdom suggested by the “second-best bed”), she must give us a reason why the husband and wife have lived apart for so many years. For this, she invests her Shakespeare with a kind of claustrophobia of small-town life and family matters:

And the smell of leather, of whittawing, of hides, of singed fur: he cannot get away from it. How did he spend all those years in this house? He finds he cannot breathe the sour air here, now. The knock at the window, the demands of people wanting to buy gloves, to look at them, to try them on their hands, to endlessly discuss beading and buttons and lace. The ceaseless conversation, back and forth, over this merchant and that, this whittawer, that farmer, that nobleman, the price of silk, the cost of wool, who is at the guild meetings and who isn’t, who will be alderman next year.

It is intolerable. All of it. He feels as though he is caught in a web of absence, its strings and tendrils ready to stick and cling to him, whichever way he turns. Here he is, back in this town, in this house, and all of it makes him fearful that he might never get away; this grief, this loss, might keep him here, might destroy all he has made for himself in London.

And so, a few days after his son’s funeral, he returns to London. Agnes stays in Stratford. But this is hardly a satisfying way to end a novel, and so O’Farrell invents a final episode, which finds Agnes traveling to London for the first time in her life after she hears that her husband has had the temerity to write a play whose title is nearly the same as her deceased son’s name. She arrives at her husband’s lodging, but is told to look for him at the theater. There she joins the crowd entering the theater. The performance begins. She recognizes her husband through his disguise as the ghost of Hamlet’s father:

She thinks: Well now, there you are. What are you up to?

As if her thoughts have been beamed to him, from her mind to his, through the crowds – calling out now, shouting warnings to the men on the battlements – the ghost’s head snaps around. The helmet is open and the eyes peer out over the heads of the audience.

Yes, Agnes tells him, here I am. Now what?

Because of the circumstances of her arrival, she had not even known up until this point that the play she was watching was, in fact, Hamlet. Then the title character appears:

It is him. It is not him. It is him. It is not him. The thought swings like a hammer through her. Her son, her Hamnet or Hamlet, is dead, buried in the churchyard. He died while he was still a child. He is now only white, stripped bones in a grave. Yet this is him, grown into a near-man, as he would be now, had he lived, on the stage, walking with her son’s gait, talking in her son’s voice, speaking words written for him by her son’s father.

…

He has found this boy, instructed him, shown him, how to speak, how to stand, how to lift his chin, like this, like that. He has rehearsed and primed and prepared him. He has written words for him to speak and to hear. She tries to imagine these rehearsals, how her husband could have schooled him so exactly, so precisely, and how it might have felt when the boy got it right, when he first got the walk, that heartbreaking turn of the head. Did her husband have to say, Make sure your doublet is undone, with the ties hanging down, and your boots should be scuffed, and now wet your hair so it stands up, just so?

It's a brilliant and affecting scene, like so many in Hamnet. While still under its spell, I went and found my old Riverside Shakespeare and sat down with the text of the play, and was almost surprised to discover that Hamlet was about a million and one things, but that a father’s love for his dead child didn't seem to be one of them. It’s not that O’Farrell has given us a faulty interpretation of the play; rather, it’s that she’s given us an alternate universe where her interpretation is the only one that matters.