Review: “Hamnet” by Maggie O’Farrell

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🧚 O’Farrell takes us into the painfully ordinary life of the Bard, before he became the Bard. This novel is about those who undoubtedly influenced Shakespeare. O’Farrell allows us to imagine the insights we could gain if we just knew more tangible details about them all.

🧚 Literacy, and the special secrets open to the literate few, is very important. It runs throughout the story as a driver of the plot. Historically, we know this to be true. I appreciate how O’Farrell shows us the harsh realities of accessibility. 

🧚 The plague plays a crucial part in this tale. There are unmistakeable parallels between the plague and Covid; over two years into our modern pandemic, we have reached a point where we are now existing alongside the virulent disease, finding ways for life to move forward. In “Hamnet” we observe villages creating their own quarantine and burial rules to contain the transmission of the plague and cope with its coming and going.

🧚 Interestingly, the name “William Shakespeare” is never uttered in this novel. He is always  the son/husband/father/Latin tutor. This novel, is about his family. The Bard plays more of a supporting role even though the trajectory of the novel traces his eventual departure from Stratford.

🧚 Agnes (Anne), Shakespeare’s wife, is portrayed as an intuitive sprite who communes with the spirits of the dead, can prophecize, and is gifted in herbal remedies. Her husband is shown to respect her “otherworldiness” unlike the rest of the clan who regard her as an oddity. O’Farrell seems to foreshadow the numerous supernatural elements in his plays. It is Agnes who intuits that her husband is stifled in Stratford, and she is the catalyst for sending him to London.

🧚 “Hamnet” is gut-wrenching in places. At its core, it is about the impact on a marriage of the loss of a child. Hamnet’s death, and Agnes’ grief, brought tears to my eyes. I wasn’t prepared for it. I happened to be reading in public, and definitely needed a minute to process. This book is wonderful, but it’ll hit you hard.

🧚Book recommendations:

“Buried Giant” - Kazuo Ishiguro (magical realism, loss of child, set in 15th century Britain)

“The Paris Wife” - Paula McClain (I found traces of Hadley in Agnes: both are married to creative geniuses residing as much in their own minds as the real world).