At Home with Hamlet

Hamnet, is Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel. The title refers to the name Shakespeare and his wife gave their only son. In the late 1500s in England, Hamlet was an equivalent spelling This work of historical fiction re-creates the life of Shakespeare’s family.

With William Shakespeare away in London so often for his theatre work, Anne Hathaway and her three children create their own world at home in Stratford, a world brought vividly to life by Maggie O’Farrell.

Written before the COVID-19 crisis began, the novel pivots on the death by plague of Hamnet at the age of eleven. The plague is something we can connect with now, not just a distant historical event. This elevates the novel’s punch and poignancy. 

In an interview during the online Hay on Wye Festival in May, Maggie O’Farrell said it took her a long time to summon the courage to write of Hamnet’s death when she herself had an eleven-year-old son. Even then, confined to her London home by the COVID lockdown, she could not write those scenes in her house. She went outside to her children’s cubby house where she crouched with her laptop and wrote the powerful scene of Agnes laying out her son’s body for burial.

The link to the interview is https://www.hayfestival.com/p-16757-maggie-ofarrell-talks-to-peter-florence.aspx?skinid=16

Despite this harrowing central event, the novel is not a bleak one. It teems with the life people led in those times and provides interesting domestic insights into William Shakespeare and his writing, particularly of the play, Hamlet.

The beautifully realised characters in Hamnet carry the story. Maggie O’Farrell creates the characters of Hamnet, his twin sister Judith, older sister Suzanna and, centrally, Hamnet’s mother with such warmth and immediacy, that Hamnet’s death and its aftermath are heart-breaking. William Shakespeare is almost a secondary character as are his parents, brothers and sisters who live next door in Stratford, although each of these characters is also fully developed and interesting in their own right.

Written in the first person from Hamnet’s mother’s point of view, it is an easy book to read with a rich use of sensory detail which serves to immerse the reader in this fascinating historical time. For word lovers, the novel offers the added pleasure of a scattering of intriguing archaic words. I took to reading it with the Oxford English Dictionary at my side to check the meaning of words like girtle, coney  and skep. On the other hand, there is no need to disrupt your reading in this way if you don’t wish to. The meaning of these words is easy to discern from the context.

Once the action started, I found Hamnet hard to put down and its scenes and characters stayed with me for days afterwards. If you enjoy a good historical novel, this one is for you.