A Shakespearean backdrop that’s plagued by tragedy
FICTION Hamnet Maggie O’Farrell Tinder Press €16.99
To find oneself reading a novel about a child who died of the plague while under lockdown oneself during a pandemic (or plague; you know, a rose by any other name etc) is quite the experience, and obviously not one the author could have foreseen. Hamnet was published in the middle of lockdown and despite O’Farrell being asked, in every single interview, about the ominous parallels between the bubonic plague that raged through Elizabethan England and the current virus that rages through… well, Elizabethan England (and everywhere else), she’s been infinitely patient and gracious in her responses.
She’s also been quietly upbeat. “The whole of society will be reconfigured,“she told the Irish Times. “We have to adapt and survive. And we will.” Her highly praised 2017 memoir I Am, I Am,
I Am, which explored her numerous close shaves with death along with those of her daughter, suggests that O’Farrell is more qualified than most to make such a hope-filled evaluation.
Hamnet Shakespeare was the only son of William Shakespeare and Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway. He died when he was just 11 years old. The couple’s two daughters, Susanna and Judith, survived. Four years after his death, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, about a young prince who would have been roughly Hamnet’s age by then. Most of O’Farrell’s novel, however, concerns itself much less with Shakespeare himself than with Hamnet’s mother, the enigmatic Agnes, who, in O’Farrell’s imaginative flights, cured the sick with her herbal potions, who kept honey bees and wandered the forest for hours, who could read people’s minds and tell people’s futures, a woman who could “tell if a soul is restive or hankering… what a person hides.”
Despite the scant historical facts about Anne Hathaway beyond dates of birth, marriage and death, history seems to have maligned her. Either Shakespeare ‘hated’ her — although there’s nothing to support this allegation anywhere — or she’s the hussy who tricked him into a shotgun wedding. The shotgun wedding appears to be true, yet Shakespeare, when he became successful, sent all the money he made in London home to Stratford. Hathaway and her two surviving children lived in the finest house in town, and it appears they founded a successful brewing business there.
Shakespeare’s assurance of his family’s security and comfort is hardly the evidence of a dead marriage, nor of children long forgotten. O’Farrell’s reasoning for his move to London and his family’s remaining in Stratford is merely a matter of necessity. Would an ambitious playwright living in Tullamore or Clifden not have a better chance of progress in Dublin, even now? Or in London?
And would that playwright be willing to have their family move to a city riddled with plague, where playhouses and large social gatherings were regularly shut down? (How eerily topical all this is.) It could be speculated, especially given our current crisis, that this is precisely why the Shakespeare family remained where they were. And that speculation lays a significant part of the groundwork for O’Farrell’s novel.
The story opens with Hamnet discovering his twin sister Judith is sick, with lumps (the tell-tale sign of bubonic plague) appearing in her neck. Hamnet desperately searches for an adult to help. His mother is tending bees in a field over a mile away, his father is in London, his grandmother next door is not at home. He finds his grandfather in his workshop, drunk as usual, and Hamnet endures a vicious blow for disturbing him. He runs through the town to find the local physician, also not at home. From the outset, the tension is immense. Eventually, though, Judith will recover. We discover later in the book that Hamnet, who also gets sick, is the child who won’t.
The storyline moves from Judith’s emergency to the past, to Agnes’s first meeting with the Latin tutor who has been engaged to teach her stepbrothers, and to their subsequent romance, disapproved of in all quarters. Agnes at this stage is 26, the tutor merely 18 and still, therefore, a minor. A passionate encounter in the apple shed is of particular note, and not without its humour. This encounter is, we’re told, the one that leads to the couple marrying ‘in haste’.
Agnes’s dowry provides for the building of an apartment beside Shakespeare’s father’s house, and the intention is for Shakespeare to join his raging, drunken father in the family’s glover business. As her husband grows more despondent with his new job, Agnes realises he must go to London to follow his acting and writing dreams. The couple convince William’s father that his move is to expand the business. When he arrives in London, however, he proceeds to write prolifically and soon becomes a noted theatre producer. The
Bard is born.
O’Farrell’s story uses Shakespeare’s biography almost as a backdrop to the imagined story of Agnes. For all her psychic powers, Agnes has not foreseen the death of her own child and, for all her medicinal knowledge, she can’t save him. She will survive this awful tragedy, because people do, but she is altered, embittered, suspicious of her husband, numbed in the paralysis of her grief.
This exquisitely beautiful and lyrical novel has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, alongside the likes of Anne Enright, Hilary Mantel and Ann Patchett. It will be a tough call but winning it would put Coleraine-born O’Farrell front and centre in a place where she deserves to be. She is an astounding literary talent.