Novel about Bard’s family garners prize
LONDON — Maggie O’farrell won the Women’s Prize for Fiction on Wednesday for “Hamnet,” a novel that explores the lives of William Shakespeare’s often-maligned wife and lost son.
O’farrell’s novel beat finalists including Hilary Mantel’s Tudor saga “The Mirror and the Light” and Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker Prize winner “Girl, Woman, Other” to the $39,000 award.
Northern Ireland-born O’farrell said she had long been fascinated by Hamnet Shakespeare, who died at 11 in 1596 — likely from the plague. His name is echoed in the playwright’s great tragedy “Hamlet,” first performed several years later.
“You only have to read the first act of ‘Hamlet’ to realize that it is all about this deep undertow of grief,” O’farrell said.
Yet Hamnet is “lucky if he gets two mentions in those huge, brick-like biographies of Shakespeare.”
“His death is all too often wrapped up in statistics of infant mortality in the Elizabethan age, which, of course, was very high. But almost as if the implication, unspoken, was that it wasn’t really that big of a deal,” she said.
Shakespeare is never mentioned in “Hamnet,” which centers on his children and wife Anne Hathaway, called Agnes in the book.
O’farrell said Hathaway has been portrayed as “an illiterate strumpet” because she was uneducated and eight years older than Shakespeare.
“She’s always been treated with such hostility and suspicion and actually just barefaced misogyny for the last 500 years,” O’farrell told The Associated Press from her home in Edinburgh, Scotland.