The beguiling Hamnet is historical fiction at its best: set solidly in 1500s England, beautifully detailed so that the reader can appreciate every aspect of the characters’ distant lives, and yet written so that the same modern reader can identify with the human emotions and interactions of those characters.
William Shakespeare, it is generally known, lived and worked in London, but had a wife and three children who lived in Stratford-upon-Avon. One of his children, Hamnet, died as a child; some time thereafter, Shakespeare the struggling playwright wrote a play called Hamlet. Meanwhile, waves of the Black Plague swept across Europe from the 1300s through the 1600s.
Maggie O’Farrell takes these facts and weaves them into a marvellous tale about the family who are normally seen only as an appendage to the Bard.
The most casual descriptions in Hamnet are morsels to be savoured:
This house whistles with draughts and eddies of air, with the tapping and hammering of his grandfather’s workshop, with the raps and calls of customers at the window.
[..] where Ned works with bent head and curved shoulders and anxious, nimble fingers.
[…] the kitchen cat’s kittens. Small creatures they are, with faces like pansies and soft pads on their paws.
Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, is Agnes in this book:
Said differently from how it might be written on a page, with that near-hidden, secret g. The tongue curls towards it yet barely touches it. Ann-yis. Agn-yez. One must lean into the first syllable, then skip over the next.
Agnes’ mother was a healer, one who knew herbs and made poultices, and in the manner of those times, was both a help to the villagers and feared as a witch of sorts. She died in childbirth, leaving behind the children Agnes and Bartholomew. When the father remarried, these two became step-children to an unsympathetic new wife, and Agnes’ inheritance of her mother’s healing gifts did not endear her to her stepmother.
When young Will (Shakespeare, although his last name is never mentioned) is first captivated by Agnes, both families are horrified by their liason because she is older than him and because of her eccentric reputation. She is a resourceful woman and decides that pregnancy is the way out: the families can not deny the marriage if she is with child. Her stepmother discovers Agnes’ pregnancy in a woman-centric, practical, period-specific (ha!) way that I found charmingly appropriate:
It is almost three months before [Agnes’ stepmother] notices that a number of monthly cloths are missing from the wash.
Some years later, Agnes and Will are the parents of Susanna and the twins Hamnet and Judith. When the twins are eleven, Judith falls sick.
There is, the boy sees, a swelling at the base of her throat. And another where her shoulder meets her neck. He stares at them. A pair of quail’s eggs, under Judith’s skin. Pale, ovoid, nestled there, as if waiting to hatch.
[…] He thinks of the word ‘buboes, its vaguely vegetal overtones, how its bulging sound mimics the thing it describes. A cold fear rinses down through his chest, encasing his heart in an instant, crackling frost.
Judith’s illness progresses, and it is touching to see how her mother and grandmother, who normally “gripe and prickle and rub each other the wrong way”, can in a crisis such as this, “operate like two hands of the same person”.
The two women look at each other and Agnes sees that Mary is thinking of her daughter Anne, who died of the pestilence, aged eight, covered with swellings and hot with fever.
The novel switches back and forth between the present, when Judith and later Hamnet fall ill, and the past of Agnes’ childhood and marriage. A major digression describes how the plague got to little Stratford.
For the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people.[…]
The first is a glassmaker on the island of Murano in the principality of Venice; the second is a cabin boy on a merchant ship sailing for Alexandria on an unseasonably warm morning with an easterly wind.
Fanciful, but fascinating.
I found myself unmoved by a few of the more emotional paragraphs:
Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicenter, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns […]
It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.
and the occasional bit of magical realism was a little over-the-top, like the rowan berries that fall onto Agnes before her wedding which are taken as a sign from her mother. Perhaps this is not unreasonable for the time and the place, but I mention it as a caveat for readers who dislike this style.
We all know how this story ended: the death of a child, and the writing of a play that lives on. So I’m not giving away any spoilers with this last quote:
The young Hamlet onstage is listening as old Hamlet, the ghost, is telling a story about how he died, a poison coursing through his body “like quicksilver”, and how like her Hamnet he listens.
A beautifully imaginative novel that transported me pleasurably into 1500s England, it has both an obvious literary aspect as well as being a very topical story of a plague.
For another take on this book, see Lisa’s review.
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