Hamnet

Maggie O’Farrell

Tinder Press, £20

Review: Rosemary Goring

Moments before his death, Hamlet says to Horatio: “I am dead: Thou livest; ... draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story”. Shakespeare’s dark and chilling play about the tormented Danish prince was written four years after the death of his 11-year-old son Hamnet. This name, writes Maggie O’Farrell, was interchangeable in the 16th century with Hamlet, and her novel is an imagining of the effect of Hamnet’s death upon his father, and its haunting emergence in his work.

The historical setting is a great leap backwards for O’Farrell, much of whose work is set in modern times, but in its easy, flowing style, its emotional rawness and the author’s fascination with death and calamity, Hamnet will be very familiar to readers. From her debut novel, After You’d Gone, in which the central character lies in a coma, to the mother who almost lost her life giving birth in The Hand that First Held Mine, to her recent memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, O’Farrell has explored mortality from many angles.

Hamnet is the latest addition to this portfolio. Although it is overtly an exploration of the private sorrow that lies behind one of Shakespeare’s best-known plays, the bard plays a surprisingly minor part. This is the story above all of his wife Agnes Hathaway.

It is said that there are only seven verifiable facts about Shakespeare’s life, so perhaps it is fitting that O’Farrell chooses to focus on Agnes. Yet as the novel unfolds, it is clear that her interest in mothering, rather than lack of historical information, is the shaping force behind the book.

Hamnet died in 1596, the cause unknown. He left an older sister Susannah, and a twin called Judith. By the time of his death, Will Shakespeare was absent for most of each year, writing, directing and performing his plays. If not much is known of Shakespeare, even less is certain about Anne or Agnes Hathaway. Her life is fertile territory for a novelist, and O’Farrell takes full advantage of the artistic licence this allows, creating an eldritch spirit with echoes of the Brothers Grimm.

When Agnes’s mother dies in childbirth, leaving her farmer husband heartbroken, she and her brother Bartholomew became unwanted burdens for their stepmother. The girl “grows up watching the mother with the shoes hug and pet her fair, chubby children. She watches her place the freshest breads, the choicest meats on their plates.... She is the one who must sweep the floors, change the babies’ napkins, rock them to sleep, rake out the grate and coax the fire to life.”

Agnes is a decidedly weird child. She has second sight and a sixth sense. Like her mother, she runs barefoot through the woods, collecting herbs and turning them into healing potions. In town they say she is peculiar, but when Will meets her, he is entranced. O’Farrell’s description of when they first have sex, a new experience for Agnes, strives for effect: “It makes her think of a hand drawing on a glove, of a lamb slithering wet from a ewe, an axe splitting open a log, a key turning in an oiled lock.” Not good.

Hamnet jumps between Will and Agnes’s childhoods and early marriage and the harrowing time when Hamnet’s sister Judith falls ill with “a pair of quails’ eggs” under her skin. The jump-cutting is carried off effortlessly, O’Farrell’s skill allowing her to dart between scenes and time, expertly building and layering tension.

The structure works, but the prose is often forced. Yet while she does not always avoid the archness and clumsiness that bedevils historical fiction, by sticking to a small canvas O’Farrell manages to convey a vivid domestic portrait of Jacobean England, from household chores to pig pen, milking stool and hen-run, from laundry and needlework to childbirth and cooking. Early on she offers a peek into the workshop of Will’s glovemaker father: “a tray of abandoned gloves, like handprints, left out for all to see”. Images such as this are memorable, but others are overworked, perhaps in the effort to avoid anachronisms.

Agnes knows little of the Shakespeare family when she and Will marry but, like the author, she is a keen observer: “In the early weeks of her marriage, Agnes collects impressions as a wool-gatherer hoards wool: a tuft from here, a scrap from there, a few strands from a fence, a bit from a branch, until, until, until you have a whole armful, enough to spin into yarn.”

The heart of the novel, however, has nothing to do with its historical setting, or even the literary giant that is Shakespeare. It is a story as old as the hills but also still relevant. As her children sicken, Agnes is beside herself with fear. All her remedies are as nothing in the face of plague: “It is an enemy too powerful for her. It has wreathed and tightened its tendrils about her son, and is refusing to surrender him. It has a musky, dank, salty smell. It has come to them, Agnes thinks, from a long way off, from a place of rot and wet and confinement.”

The author is unsparing in showing Hamnet’s passing, laying-out and burial. There is a morbid intensity to these descriptions, an uncomfortably unflinching and overwrought imagining of the worst that can befall a parent. Despite their pathos, these scenes are overdone, the language and tone clamorous and self-conscious, like an orchestra with too many cymbals.

The centre piece of this story takes the form of a pieta. What is missing is the father. In part this is a reflection of Shakespeare’s constant absences, but he is absent in the early scenes too, even when he is present. Agnes, and to a lesser extent Hamnet, are the characters around which the novel revolves. The others are satellites. Will’s writing is barely mentioned, except in Agnes’s awe that her grammar-school educated husband can wield a quill. There is no sense whatsoever of the man capable of creating Hamlet, or Macbeth or his mirthful jeux d’esprit.

In fact, whenever Will appears the story flattens, as if he remains unfathomable, even as a fictional creation. Nor is there any revelation or insight when O’Farrell does enter his mind. After Hamnet’s burial, he throws himself into new plays: “He can manage these: histories and comedies. He can carry on. Only with them can he forget who he is and what has happened. They are safe places to stow his mind...” Does this sound the way Shakespeare would think?

Whether he ever explicitly wrote about his son remains a subject of debate. If he did, some point as evidence to King Lear rather than Hamlet, with Lear’s agony at his daughter’s death: “No, no, no life! / 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!”

It doesn’t matter, of course, where Shakespeare’s work found its source, or whether he immortalised Hamnet in print. What is not in doubt is that his son’s death would have been grievously felt. In showing its effect upon a mother, Hamnet offers a heartfelt reminder that our forebears were no different from us. Children and loved ones mattered as much in 1596 as they do in 2020. But in O’Farrell’s hands, the man whose genius inspired this story remains as much a ghost as his son.