“Hamnet” by Maggie O’Farrell

review by MEREDITH MCKINNIE

“Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.”

O’Farrell’s historical fiction novel revisits the tragic tale of Shakespeare’s loss of his 11-yr-old son Hamnet during the late 16th century. In a reclaiming of character, O’Farrell reimagines Shakespeare’s wife Agnes, whom the history books recognize as Anne Hathaway. In this story, Agnes’s father’s death has left her in the care of a wicked stepmother who thrives on misery. Along with her brother Bartholomew, Agnes is relegated to the background, forced to isolate herself in the forest and find comfort in nature. When the quirky intuitive Latin tutor William is charmed by Agnes’ unique perspective on the world, the twosome falls in love and marry against their parents’ wishes.    

O’Farrell weaves a beautiful love story in the cracks of history’s telling. Though illiterate (as most women were at that time), Agnes’ intuition and uncanny ability to see the future mean she is sensitive to her husband’s need to go out on his own and make a creative living. Much of their marriage is spent with the budding playwright in London while Agnes raises their three children: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. When the plague reaches rural Stratford, Agnes cares for her ailing twins and holds Hamnet during his last breath. O’Farrell’s meditation on parental grief, told in the frame of a literary icon’s marriage, possesses a palpable heartbeat throughout its telling. Told in tandem chapters between Agnes and William’s courtship and Hamnet’s diminishing health, O’Farrell creates a rebellious heroine who lives for her children and is willing to love her husband from a distance. The author shows the limited options for women, that they were often vilified for playing their parts too well, for loving too much, for giving to those they loved in socially-unacceptable ways. O’Farrell shows the varying faces of grief, of those who lean in and those who lean back, and what happens when threads untangle.     

O’Farrell writes emotion in a saturated, yet satisfying manner, digging into the push and pull of love, the frustrations that endear another to us. This exploration extends to sibling relationships, the love of knowing another from the first breath, of the shared experiences that bind us together. The theme of family is unearthed on all levels, the expectations of parents, the children who dazzle and disappoint, the children who meander in unformed identities. O’Farrell allows her characters to roam, to weave in and out of the story at their own pace. As a literature teacher and lover of historical fiction, I adore this telling and imagine you will too. 

“And there, by the fire, held in the arms of his mother, in the room in which he learnt to crawl, to eat, to walk, to speak, Hamnet takes his last breath. He draws it in, he lets it out. Then there is silence, stillness. Nothing more.”