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.
