HAMNET by the
Irish author Maggie O’Farrell is, among other things, an imaginative recreation
of the emotional stress caused by the death of a child. It is historically pinned
to the real death of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway’s only son of the
bubonic plague in 1596. Even though the
mother is called Agnes in the narrative (because that was the name on her will)
and Shakespeare’s surname is never mentioned (though the husband in the novel has
a career in the London theatre), it is perfectly clear who the main players
are.
I am not quite
ready to echo the sky high jacket superlatives about this novel, but there is
no question that O’Farrell can hold her own when it comes to writing evocative
English prose. When she writes about childbirth,
the mysterious ambiance of an English wood, or the raw streets of London, she demonstrates
absolute control of sight, sound, and emotion. Here are just two passages of the many that
grace this book.
“In the countryside there was a
forest. . . . And what a forest it was. Dense, verdant, crazily cross-stitched with brambles and ivy, the
trees so closely packed that there were whole
swathes, it was said, that received no
light at all. Not a place to get lost then. . . .There were creatures in there who resembled
humans—wood dwellers they were called—who
walked and talked . . . had lived all their lives in its leafish light, its encircling branches, its wet and
tangled interior.”
"Agnes
cannot believe the noise and the stench. All around are shops and yards and taverns and crowded doorways.
Traders approach them, holding out their wares—potatoes,
cakes, hard crab-apples. People shout and yell at each other across the street. Agnes
sees, she is sure, a man coupling with a woman in a narrow gap between buildings. Further on, a man relieves himself into a
ditch.”
Her sentences
may run on too long for some, but then again mine do too.
Let’s now turn
back to the Shakespeare connection. Hamnet
was Shakespeare’s only son and about all we know about him is his recorded
birth and death in the annals of Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church. O’Farrell takes
this snatch of biography and weaves it into a moving tapestry of the life and inner
souls of the entire Shakespeare family. This includes the families on both sides, his
wife, and their three children—Susannah and the twins Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet gets the nod for the title since a few
years after his passing the absent father gives a variant of his name to his
famous play. Scholarship over the years has attempted to tie the play Hamlet
and others of his later plays to the dead son, but has been hampered by the
fact that there is no real proof to back any of it up.
Hamnet is
the lynchpin of this story, yet he is not its central subject. O’Farrell appears more interested in the inner
life of Agnes(Anne) and how she tries to deal with her blended families, her
long distance marriage, the death of her son, and her own sanity. Her husband’s
absence is perfunctory until it explodes
in the text into an astonishing reversal in the pages of the play that makes a
character called Hamlet into a household word for a tortured young man who is dealing, not with the death
of a son, but with the death of a father. I admit to a bit of confusion here.
There is one
final historical note that gives me pause. There are repeated mentions that the
physical theatre and the acting company of our absent London husband and parent
was “his.” This exaggerates the status of playwrights in
the Elizabethan period. The theatre Shakespeare wrote for did not belong to him
nor was the company he acted in “his.” The
chief player in the company as well as the property owners were named Burbage.
The shareholders, one of whom was Shakespeare, were certainly consulted about how
to run the operation, but they were never the boss.
Some readers
may be slowed down by the non-linear time shifting that O’Farrell uses. She jumps
back and forth between the early romance of the couple, the arrival and growing
up of the children, and the aftermath of the death of Hamnet rather arbitrarily.
A final positive
note is that there is a fairly long semi-chapter that imagines how the bubonic
plague was transmitted over months throughout the ancient world from a market
in Alexandria, Egypt to a small town in England. I don’t know if this was inserted in the last
edits before publishing or was a fine piece of super clairvoyance, but it sure
hammers home the point that our current Covid pandemic bears many similarities
to the plague of old.
In sum this
novel does stimulate the mind, does a masterful job of lushly portraying a
particular historical period, and brings any reader into confronting one of the
most searing experiences that any parent can ever know—the death of one of
their children.
P.S. One of my relatives was employed as the nanny
for the children of a professional couple in Newtown, Connecticut. My wife
and I happened to be at a family reunion where this woman was present and was called
by her employer to summon her back to Connecticut from Arizona to help deal
with the tragedy of losing their son to a hail of bullets. There was no happy
ending there either. The family she worked for was destroyed. The marriage dissolved
and the husband went into a mental decline that ultimately ended with his suicide.
But for the grace of God!
