Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell

Reviewed by Jane Weingarten

Acclaimed novelist Maura O’Farrell has created an absorbing fictionalized account of Shakespeare’s family life, based on what little is actually known.  Her novel is set in the lively, toil-driven atmosphere of an English country village where the family lived at the end of the sixteenth century.  It follows the dates of Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway’s courtship and marriage, the birth of their three children and the tragic death of their young son in1596.  

O’Farrell’s extensive research on the culture of the times and on Shakespeare’s plays add rich overlay to her captivating tale.  She ties eleven-year-old Hamnet’s death to the black plague that had been rolling across England, taking children’s lives.  In a brief novella she imbedded into the middle of Hamnet, a flea carries the illness across faraway land and sea in a package that arrives at Stratford-Upon-Avon, falling into the hands of Hamnet’s sister Judith and into the family.  The chilling link to the global travel of disease is not lost on contemporary readers.

This story of love and grief is told with subtle finesse through a third-person narrator, who  gets into the minds of the untamed herbalist Agnes (another name for Anne), her son Hamnet and others.  The reader is able to dwell in their thoughts and feelings, even accompanying Agnes through her self-delivery of her first child alone and at home in the wilds of nature, and following her total immersion in the healing power of plants. 

The depth of Agnes’ pain at the unbearable loss of her intelligent, creative, sensitive and nature-loving son takes over her life.  “Every life has a kernal,” Agnes believes, hers is an obsession with her absence.   “If only,” she muses… if only she hadn’t been away tending her bees, if only she had not been absent at a critical moment, had seen the signs of his suffering…if only she hadn’t thought her son too strong to die. 

“It would be presumptive to call Shakespeare by name,” O’Farrell said in an interview.  In Hamnet she calls him the Latin tutor, husband and father.  He left right after his son was lowered into the ground to return to his life writing and producing plays in London.   Did he escape the overwhelming grief that bedeviled Agnes?   Was Hamlet, first produced four years after his son’s death, an expression of a legacy to keep his son living on?

O’Farrell opens part two of the novel with a quote from Hamlet, Act 5, scene ii  I am dead:

              Thou livest;

              …draw thy breath in pain,

             To tell my story. 

O’Farrell won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Fiction Prize at the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Awards for this stirring novel.  Called “a tour de force,” “all too timely” and “fully engrossing,” the rave reviews for Hamnet attest to its brilliance.