hamnet book review guardian

By Maggie O’Farrell
Reviewed by Robert Allen Papinchak
August 22, 2021

A masterful reimagining of the life — and death — of the Bard’s only son.

If Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize in fiction) were simply a captivating love story about a “falconer girl” and a “Latin tutor,” it would be compelling enough to hold a reader’s attention. However, when the tutor turns out to be William Shakespeare and the girl his wife (here known not as Anne, but Agnes), it becomes a brilliant historical novel steeped in the heady atmosphere of the 16th century.

With the little that is known about the playwright’s personal life and the even less that is known about his only son, O’Farrell has taken what she calls “idle speculation” and “scant historical facts” and transformed them into a spectacular narrative. She reconstructs the life and times of the Bard of Avon, his wife, and his children. And she makes the story her own.

Hamnet opens with a boy “coming down a flight of stairs…He takes each step slowly, sliding himself along the wall, his boots meeting each tread with a thud.” As he reaches the bottom, he pauses a moment, “looking back the way he has come. Then, suddenly resolute, he leaps the final three stairs…He stumbles as he lands, falling to his knees on the flagstone floor.”

He is greeted by an unexpected, unusual silence. It is a profound quiet that dominates his short life and provides the emotional center to the entire exceptional novel. With a foregone sense of foreboding, it is not a spoiler to reveal that this 11-year-old boy never becomes a man.

But this is not just a book about Hamnet’s death. It is also a startling revelation about the crippling effects of grief and the arcane sources of creativity. It is about the mystery and magnificence of the family bond. Not just any family — the family Shakespeare.

In the disconcerting stillness, Hamnet is searching for someone, anyone to help him with his “unwell” twin sister, Judith. No one seems to be around. Not his grandparents next door; not his older sister, Susanna; and, most importantly, not his mother. His famous father is “miles and hours and days away, in London, where the boy has never been.” There is only the “indefinable noise of a house at rest, empty.” He is disconsolate, “utterly confounded to be so alone.” He lurches about, wondering, “where is everyone?”

Eventually, after rambling through the village, he stops at the physician’s house, where he discloses that Judith has a fever, along with “buboes [and] lumps. Under the skin. On her neck, under her arms.” He returns home, unwilling to name her illness: “He will not name it, he will not allow the word to form, even inside his head.”

It is, of course, the plague, one that has shuttered all the playhouses in London “by order of the Queen, and no one is allowed to gather in public.” The great misfortune may be the family’s good fortune. It means his father may be able to return home for months.

O’Farrell gives vivid dimension to the story by flashing back to the time William and Agnes met. Eighteen-year-old Will is paying down his father’s debt to a yeoman who owns acreage in Hewlands by teaching Latin grammar to the farmer’s sons. Even there, his creative mind wanders. From a window, he watches trees:

“lined up as they are, fringing the edge of the farm, bring[ing] to his mind the backdrop of a theatre, the kind of painted trickery that is unrolled, quickly, into place to let the audience know they are now in a sylvan setting…on wooded, uncultivated, perhaps unstable ground.”

He also notices what he at first thinks is a young man “wearing a cap, a leather jerkin, gauntlets…[with] some kind of bird on his outstretched fist.” He is instantly drawn to the falconer, but then discovers it is the farmer’s eldest daughter. Thinking of her, of “her braid, her hawk,” lightens his “indentured” visits. She, too, is immediately taken with him.

What he doesn’t know is that she has a reputation for being “strange, touched, peculiar, perhaps mad.” She is known to carry a bag of “curses and cures.” In fact, she has psychic powers, “fascinated by the hands of others.” She finds the “muscle between thumb and forefinger…irresistible.”

When she takes hold of Will’s skin, an “oddly intimate” gesture, she senses greatness. He has a future that is “far-reaching [with] layers and strata, like a landscape…too big, too complex…more than she could grasp…bigger than both of them.” He is enamored of her because he thinks she “see[s] the world as no one else does.” Her paranormal skills match his imagination.

There are several memorable set pieces in the novel. The first, in 1583, is the couple’s initial lovemaking, a breathtaking scene set in an apple-storage area of the farm. Visually and aurally stimulating, it is vigorous enough to make a “tapping, rhythmic, rocking sound,” enough to “rotate and jostle [apples] in their grooves.”

The result is their firstborn, Susanna, who arrives in a captivating labor sequence in a forest where the “branches are so dense you cannot feel the rain.” It is there Agnes foresees that Will and she will have “two children and they will live long lives.” When she later bears twins, she is unsettled by what the earlier premonition must mean.

What no one knows is that, in 1596, there is a pestilence making its way from Alexandria, Egypt, via fleas, a monkey, cats, rats, and a cabin boy to infected rags wrapped around a glass necklace from Murano, Italy. The trail of disease ends in England when young Judith receives the millefiori beads. The heart-stopping description of the journey is one of O’Farrell’s most astounding narrative sequences.

Another remarkable one is the death of Hamnet at the end of the first part of the novel. Judith has been spared, but in an alarming, disconcerting way. A “great soundlessness” descends into the room where Hamnet lies. The hush that opened the book returns. There is only “silence, stillness. Nothing more.”

But O’Farrell is not quite finished with the boy, his mother, his father, or history (living and literary). The boy may be gone, but he is not forgotten. His memory lives on in the play that becomes Hamlet .

As the epigraph to the second part of the novel, O’Farrell quotes the prince’s dying words to Horatio: “I am dead:/Thou livest…draw thy breath in pain,/To tell my story.” She then explores the possibility that Agnes made her way to London and saw her husband appear at the Globe as Hamlet’s father’s ghost.

This closing sequence is the ultimate, gut-wrenching scene. Agnes realizes the emotional toll their child’s death has taken on Shakespeare. It has been four years. She has “looked for [him] everywhere, ceaselessly…and here he is.”

“[Her] Hamnet is dead…yet [this Hamlet] is him, grown into a near-man, as he would be now, had he lived, on the stage, walking with her son’s gait, talking in her son’s voice, speaking words written for him by her son’s father.” Her husband has “pulled off a manner of alchemy.”

Ghosts of all kinds prevail. They populate the stage; they embrace everyone’s thoughts. The Hamlet on the boards is “two people…both alive and dead.” A “final silence” descends at the end of the play, after “the dead have sprung up to take their places in the line of players at the edge of the stage.”

What O’Farrell has done is incredible. She has memorialized a family. The novel is the thing in which she catches the conscience of the reader. This is the kind of dazzling novel to put in everyone’s hands, to tell everyone to read. It is a flawless achievement. Every sentence is silk; every detail vibrant; every character pulsates.

In the overwhelming, heartbreaking conclusion of Hamnet , the author collects all the silences, all the sufferings, all the ghosts into a compelling resolution to tell the Shakespearean story. She breathes life into the boy who fell down the stairs.

[Editor's note: This review originally ran in 2020.]

Robert Allen Papinchak is a former university English professor whose reviews and criticisms appear in newspapers, magazines, literary journals, and online, including Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, On the Seawall, World Literature Today, and elsewhere.

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As overrated as Shakespeare himself? Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

By Aileen Loftus

Article Summary

As overrated as Shakespeare himself? Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 , was the Waterstones Book of the Year 2020 and was the winner of the British Book Awards Fiction Book of the Year 2021 . More importantly, people just can’t stop talking about it, recommending it and sharing it online.

I’m not usually drawn to historical fiction, but the lauding of Hamnet made me feel like I had to give it a go. It was perhaps the novel’s high praise that meant, ultimately, I was disappointed by O’Farrell’s book, despite my open-minded approach.

O’Farrell says that it is a book she has wanted to write for years. It was through reading biographies of Shakespeare that she learned of the existence of Shakespeare’s son, while studying English at Cambridge University. She outlines in her note on the text that the brevity of the mentions Hamnet is afforded in such biographies shocked her.

I’m not giving you spoilers by saying that Hamnet dies, age 11. His cause of death is unknown, but is imagined in the novel to be, realistically, plague. Hamnet is a reimagining of the short life of Shakespeare’s son, and the impact of his death on the rest of the family. In that respect, the novel is as much about grief as it is about Hamnet.

The facts known are roughly that, in 1596, William Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died in Stratford-upon-Avon and four years later, Shakespeare wrote his renowned play, Hamlet . The similarity in the name is more than just that, and, as O’Farrell specifies, Hamlet and Hamnet are just variations of the same name, and can be used interchangeably. The link between son and play seems indisputable and the book is in part a fictional attempt to face the disparity between how little is known about the real Hamnet and the immense fame of the play Hamlet .

Hamnet is clearly well researched and as accurate as is realistically possible. O’Farrell also weaves aspects of Shakespeare’s plays into the story. For example, Hamnet and his twin sister, Judith, trick people: “to exchange places and clothes, leading people to believe that each was the other”. It is a clear link to the number of twins and preoccupation with gender switching and trickery that we see in the plays of their father.

Despite such allusions, the most famous character in the novel remains unnamed. He is merely referred to as “her husband”, “the father” and “the Latin tutor” and is allowed very little direct speech. The main character in the novel, it soon becomes apparent, isn’t Hamnet or his father, but Agnes, Hamnet’s mother.

Agnes’ relationship with the natural world is beautiful, and within the world of the text she is more well known than her husband, for her ability to grow and mix plants to heal others. The novel is lyrically written, which seems a fitting tribute to the work of the playwright, but is much more closely associated with the voice and life of Agnes in the book.

While I liked this slight mocking of the fame of the Bard, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the novel is somewhat overrated. It is already sacrilege to say something bad about Shakespeare and his pervasive influence, and it feels like the same taboo has been applied to Hamnet . I found the time switches and diversions following far removed characters whimsical and distracting, and wasn’t moved by a death that the entire text builds towards.

I did find the second half of the novel more compelling than the first, and, after talking to others, can understand that reading it from the perspective of a parent would be a very different reading experience. I have never had a twin and never had a child, and so my relationship to the experiences of the story are more distant.

The success of Hamnet proves that you can retell incredibly well known stories and still offer a new perspective. For me, however, that doesn’t mean this story was one that had to be written. If anything, its success only seems to continue the myth of Shakespeare, instead of giving space to entirely new voices from history.