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The real 'hamnet' died centuries ago, but this novel is timeless.

Heller McAlpin

In the 20 years since the publication of her first novel, After You'd Gone, Irish-born Maggie O'Farrell has wooed readers with intricately plotted, lushly imagined fiction featuring nonconformist women buffeted by the essential unpredictability of life, which can turn on a dime. O'Farrell's last book, I Am, I Am, I Am (2018), was a nonfiction account of her own unpredictable life, filtered through 17 dramatic, near-death experiences, from her hair-raising childhood through her middle child's harrowing, periodic anaphylactic attacks brought on by a life-threatening immunological disorder.

With her eighth novel, O'Farrell brilliantly turns to historical fiction to confront a parent's worst nightmare: the death of a child. Set in Stratford, England, in the late 16th century, Hamnet imagines the emotional, domestic, and artistic repercussions after the world's most famous (though never named) playwright and his wife lose their only son, 11-year-old Hamnet, to the bubonic plague in 1596. Four years later, the boy's father transposes his grief into his masterpiece — titled with a common variant of his son's name — in which the father dies and the son lives to avenge him.

O'Farrell's narratives are rarely straightforwardly chronological. In Hamnet, she toggles between two timelines, one beginning on the day the plague first afflicts Hamnet's twin sister Judith, the other circling back to the beginning of their parents' passionate relationship some 15 years earlier.

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In this telling, the woman we know as Anne Hathaway is called Agnes, pronounced Ann-yis, which O'Farrell explains is how her name appeared in her father's will. She's a wonderful character, a free spirit and healer who, like her late mother, is most at home in the woods. But she's also a Cinderella in her nasty stepmother's household, in which the future playwright — still in his teens with an uncertain future — is indentured as a Latin tutor to help settle a debt incurred by his errant father.

The two abused misfits recognize something special in each other, and the chemistry between them is palpable. A first kiss, later followed by sex that literally rocks and upends the apples in the storage shed, would be heavy-handed in its biblical overtones were it not so beautifully written. Hamnet is, among other things, a love story about a sorely tested marriage.

But before we meet his parents, we meet Hamnet, a smart but easily distractible boy, as he desperately seeks help for his twin sister, who has suddenly taken ill. With rising panic, he checks upstairs and down in his family's small apartment and his grandparents' adjacent house, and is anguished to discover that his mother, grandmother, aunt, and older sister are nowhere to be found. His father is off in London staging his plays. The only one home, drinking ale in the off-bounds parlour, is his irascible grandfather, from whom Hamnet has been warned to keep his distance.

As in her earlier novels, O'Farrell seeds her tale with dark forebodings. Agnes, off tending her bees during Hamnet's frantic search, will come to rue her absence that day:

Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother's: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry ... It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.

Hamnet vividly captures the life-changing intensity of maternity in its myriad stages — from the pain of childbirth to the unassuagable grief of loss. Fierce emotions and lyrical prose are what we've come to expect of O'Farrell. But with this historical novel she has expanded her repertoire, enriching her narrative with atmospheric details of the sights, smells, and relentless daily toil involved in running a household in Elizabethan England — a domestic arena in which a few missing menstrual rags on washday is enough to alarm a mother of girls.

About halfway through this tour de force, there's a remarkable 10-page passage in which O'Farrell traces how the plague reached Agnes' children. It's a sequence that would stand out even in more salubrious times, but which holds particular resonance in light of the current global Covid-19 pandemic.

"For the pestilence to reach Warwicksire, England, in the summer of 1596," O'Farrell writes, "two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet." The unwitting conduits are a master glassmaker in Murano, who in a moment of inattention burns his hands while blowing glass beads, and a cabin boy on a merchant ship, who becomes enchanted with an African monkey in Alexandria and picks up a stowaway infected flea in his red neckerchief. With the tenaciousness of a forensic viral chaser, O'Farrell charts the flea and its progeny's deadly path, through cats, rats, midshipmen, officers, glassmaker, and into the boxes of glass beads, one of which Hamnet's sister Judith excitedly unpacks when it is delivered to a Stratford seamstress who has been eagerly awaiting them for a client's fancy gown.

Unaware of the source of her children's illness, poor Agnes is left to suffer the consequences. O'Farrell writes, "There is a part of her that would like to wind up time, to gather it in like yarn. She would like to spin the wheel backwards, unmake the skein of Hamnet's death." But of course she realizes, "There will be no going back. No undoing what was laid out for them. The boy has gone and the husband will leave and she will stay and the pigs will need to be fed every day and time runs only one way."

Although more than 400 years have unspooled since Hamnet Shakespeare's death, the story O'Farrell weaves in this moving novel is timeless and ever-relevant.

Maggie O'Farrell

372 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2020

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

“The moment she has feared most, the event she has thought about, mulled over, turned this way and that, rehearsed and re-rehearsed in her mind, during the dark of sleepless nights, at moments of idleness, when she is alone.”

“She grows up with a hidden, private flame inside her: it licks at her, warms her, warns her.”

*(No offense meant to my vegetarian brethren. I blame the metaphor.)

“They beg her to stop, not to touch people’s hands, to hide this odd gift. No good will come of it, her father says, standing over Agnes as she crouches by the fire, no good at all. When she reaches up to take his hand, he snatches it away. She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.”

“She is rarely wrong. About anything. It's a gift or a curse, depending on who you ask.'

* Almost every page is like this: “Several streets away, the owl leaves its perch, surrendering itself to a cool draught, its wings silently breasting the air, its eyes alert. To it, the town appears as a series of rooftops, with gullies of streets in between, a place to be navigated. The massed leaves of trees present themselves as it flies, the stray wisps of smoke from idle fires. It sees the progress of the fox, a man, sleeping in the doorway of a tavern, scratching at a fleabite on his shin; it sees coneys in a cage at the back of someone’s house; horses standing in a paddock near the inn; and it sees Judith, stepping into the street.”

‘Someone who knows everything about you, before you even know it yourself. Someone who can just look at you and divine your deepest secrets, just with a glance. Someone who can tell what you are about to say – and what you might not – before you say it. It is,’ he says, ‘both a joy and a curse.’

“He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live. She will say all this to her husband, later, after the play has ended, after the final silence has fallen, after the dead have sprung up to take their places in the line of players at the edge of the stage.”

It is to him she speaks in her disordered mind, not the trees, not the magic cross, not the patterns and markings of lichen, not even to her mother, who died while trying to give birth to a child. Please, she says to him, inside the chamber of her skull, please come back. I need you. Please. I should never have schemed to send you away. Make sure this child has safe passage; make sure it lives; make sure I survive to care for it. Let us both come through this. Please. Let me not die. Let me not end up cold and stiff in a bloodied bed.

Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?

[She] refuses to give up her bed, saying it was the bed she was married in and she will not have another, so the new, grander bed is put in the room for guests.

For the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet. The first is a glassmaker on the island of Murano in the principality of Venice; the second is a cabin boy on a merchant ship sailing for Alexandria on an unseasonably warm morning with an easterly wind.

It’s like a mirror, he had said. Or that they are one person split down the middle. Their two He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him. How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain. Tears are appearing on her cheeks now, like silver seeds, as if by magic. He knows they are his, falling from his eyes on to her face, but they could just as easily be hers. They are one and the same. ‘You shall be well,’ she murmurs. He grips her fingers in anger. ‘I shall not.’ He passes his tongue over his lips, tasting salt. ‘I’ll come with you. We’ll go together.’

Then the idea strikes him. He doesn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. It occurs to Hamnet, as he crouches there, next to her, that it might be possible to hoodwink Death, to pull off the trick he and Judith have been playing on people since they were young: to exchange places and clothes, leading people to believe that each was the other.

The fleas that leapt from the dying rats into their striped fur crawl down into these boxes and take up residence in the rags padding the hundreds of tiny, multi-coloured millefiori beads (the same rags put there by the fellow worker of the master glassmaker; the same glassmaker who is now in Murano, where the glassworks is at a standstill, because so many of the workers are falling ill with a mysterious and virulent fever).

It is tall, cloaked in black, and in the place of a face is a hideous, featureless mask, pointed like the beak of a gigantic bird. ‘No,’ Hamnet cries, ‘get away.’ .. Then his grandmother is there, pushing him aside, apologising to the spectre, as if there is nothing out of the ordinary about it, inviting it to step into the house, to examine the patient. Hamnet takes a step backwards and another. He collides with his mother, ‘Don’t be afraid,’ she whispers. ‘It is only the physician.’ ‘The . . .?’ Hamnet stares at him, still there on the doorstep, talking with his grandmother. ‘But why is he . . .?’ Hamnet gestures to his face, his nose. ‘He wears that mask because he thinks it will protect him,’ she says. ‘From the pestilence?’ His mother nods. ‘And will it?’ His mother purses her lips, then shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

The spectre is speaking without a mouth, saying he will not come in, he cannot, and they, the inhabitants, are hereby ordered not to go out, not to take to the streets, but to remain indoors until the pestilence is past.

If the plague comes to London, he can be back with them for months. The playhouses are all shut, by order of the Queen, and no one is allowed to gather in public. It is wrong to wish for plague, her mother has said, but Susanna has done this a few times under her breath, at night, after she has said her prayers. She always crosses herself afterwards. But still she wishes it. Her father home, for months, with them. She sometimes wonders if her mother secretly wishes it too.

‘Madam,’ the physician says, and again his beak swings towards them, ‘you may trust that I know much more about these matters than you do. A dried toad, applied to the abdomen for several days, has proven to have great efficacy in cases such as these.

She thinks of her garden, of her shelves of powders, potions, leaves, liquids, with incredulity, with rage. What good has any of that been? What point was there to any of it? All those years and years of tending and weeding and pruning and gathering. She would like to go outside and rip up those plants by their roots and fling them into the fire. She is a fool, an ineffectual, prideful fool. How could she ever have thought that her plants might be a match for this?

What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.

It is even more difficult, Agnes finds, to leave the graveyard, than it was to enter it. So many graves to walk past, so many sad and angry ghosts tugging at her skirts, touching her with their cold fingers, pulling at her, naggingly, piteously, saying, Don’t go, wait for us, don’t leave us here.

And Agnes finds she can bear anything except her child’s pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusion, but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief.

‘the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child. I see this,’

It is also plague season again in London and the playhouses are shut. This is never said aloud. Judith notes the absence of this word during his visits.

What is the word, Judith asks her mother, for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin?

Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. ‘O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!’ murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.

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A Fictional Book About Shakespeare's Son Helped Me Grieve the Loss of Mine

How one writer overcame the grief of losing his son while reading Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet.

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Books have seen me through the pandemic. It’s almost a cliché among bibliophiles, but each week I run across this sentiment on Twitter and Facebook, in long-distance phone chats, over brie and bottles of chardonnay in nearby Prospect Park. And then there’s the novel that sees you, almost literally, in this unprecedented year, plots mirroring the trajectory of your life, reversals of fortune identical to your own. Characters who glide off the page and sit on the edge of the bed, soothing your anxiety with whispered confidences―they complete your sentences, complete you.

Imagine my surprise when an Elizabethan odyssey became a roadmap through a year like no other.

In January I lost my 18 year old son, Owen, to sepsis; the infection swept in like a wildfire, ravaging his body and snuffing him out in under forty-eight hours. The previous week Covid-19 cases had peaked in the U.S. while violent insurrectionists had flooded into the nation’s capital. Grief–my grief–felt like a footnote to a vast malevolence, a ripple in a hurricane. The best way to mourn, I vowed, was to go off grid. I hunkered down in my Brooklyn apartment, throwing myself into a skeleton list of tasks: indulging my wife and two other teenagers with Indian take-out, double-masking at the gym, grooming the cats, hauling out garbage and recycling bins. And I read books—not only for work, but also for nourishment I craved but couldn’t quite understand. The less my mind rested, I figured, the less restlessness would surge through me, like a virus.

Which led me to Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet , published last year to universal acclaim and named one of 2020’s five best works of fiction by the New York Times Book Review. I was late to this stunning beauty, but in this case tardiness was a virtue: I picked up Hamnet at the moment I needed it most.

Knopf Hamnet

In precise, lavish detail, O’Farrell recreates the story of Shakespeare’s only son (also known as Hamlet), who succumbed to bubonic plague in 1596 at the age of eleven. She shifts between decades flawlessly, braiding the foreground narrative with the personal history of the enigmatic Agnes Hathaway, the Bard’s wife and mother of his three children. The abrupt subtraction of one. In O’Farrell’s telling the boy slips away fast. His father is summoned from the London stage and dashes back to the homestead in Stratford-upon-Avon but is too late. Agnes leans into her final maternal duty: she stitches Hamnet’s shroud, washes and dresses his body for burial.

“She begins at the face, at the top of him. He has a wide forehead . . . She dips the cloth, she washes, she dips again . . . The third finger of his right hand is calloused from gripping a quill. There are small pits in the skin of his stomach from when he had a spotted pox as a small child . . . Agnes looks at her son. The birdcage ribs, the interlaced fingers, the round bones of his knees, the still face, the corn-coloured hair, which has dried now, standing up from his brow, as it always does. His physical presence has always been so strong, so definite.”

I lacked Agnes’ resolve. After Owen passed away that bright cold January morning–measured in minutes, the stutter of alarms, ICU doctors yelling across a carousel of CPR–I came to his bedside. The tumult had ebbed away; there was a hush in the room. The physicians disconnected his ventilator and dimmed the monitors. His breathing tube stubbed out a few inches like a lopped umbilical cord, a smear of blood and gauze around the stoma. I touched his curls. He seemed himself, just asleep. Pink-cheeked, slack-jawed, lips a rosebud. Later his complexion would ashen, his tongue loll, slug-like, from his mouth.

Two nurses nudged me aside and asked whether they could clean him up before my wife arrived at the hospital. Fresh linens, a starched gown. I said yes, but that I wanted to wait out in the lobby, where for an hour I huddled over my cell, scrolling through contacts, veering from call to call. I must have spoken, in nervous fragments, to at least a dozen family members and friends, but I can’t say for sure. In Agnes O’Farrell captures that sense of light-headed disbelief, an instinct to connect what just happened with a larger story: there’s a global pandemic on and my son just died.

After Hamnet’s funeral, a torturous affair–Agnes is “hollowed out, her edges blurred and insubstantial”—her husband once again heeds the siren call of the theater. He can only mourn by going on with the show; he’s already mulling a new piece, a ghost haunting a disaffected Danish prince. The Bard’s daughters act out: Susanna tantrums while Judith, Hamnet’s twin, weeps in silence. Agnes hobbles around in a daze, immersed in country life, tending gardens, keeping bees in a skep. Only in the novel’s last pages when, years later, Agnes journeys to the Globe Theater to watch a performance of Hamlet , can she reconcile her tragedy with an art that transcends and sustains. The play’s the thing, with many allusions to her son. “The knowledge settles on her like a fine covering of rain,” O’Farrell writes. “Her husband has pulled off a manner of alchemy.”

We seek that alchemy from our masters, Shakespeare to O’Farrell and beyond. We seek to be seen in our most private, stripped-down moments. Recently I was having drinks with an acquaintance, a writer, in a garden tucked behind a trattoria in Greenwich Village, when he asked how many children I had, boys, girls? I fumbled the tense— I have . . .uh . . . had three boys, but now only two —before segueing into a précis of my loss. He sat across a rickety table, eyes glistening with tears, but the moment wasn’t heavy, far from it—I’d learned a thing or two about subtraction from O’Farrell. Just now I’m holding the novel in my hand, flipping it open, and finding my reflection there.

A former book editor and the author of a memoir, This Boy's Faith, Hamilton Cain is Contributing Books Editor at Oprah Daily. As a freelance journalist, he has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, Men’s Health, The Good Men Project, and The List (Edinburgh, U.K.) and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. He is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle and lives with his family in Brooklyn.  

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A Wisewoman in Stratford

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Maggie O’Farrell’s moving historical novel Hamnet is a story of deep loss—the death of a child, struck down by an incomprehensibly virulent epidemic—and its impact upon a marriage that was already buckling under almost intolerable strain. The story’s surprise turn is that, though the grief-stricken wife succumbs for years to crippling depression and though the husband absconds and disappears into his work, the marriage miraculously survives, recovers, and becomes stronger. The wife and husband in question are Anne Hathaway (or Agnes, as she was named in her father’s will and as O’Farrell calls her) and William Shakespeare.

The novel begins in the provincial market town Stratford-upon-Avon, where the eleven-year-old Hamnet, the Shakespeares’ only son, is alarmed by the sudden eruption of strange symptoms on the body of his twin sister, Judith: “He stares at them. A pair of quail’s eggs, under Judith’s skin. Pale, ovoid, nestled there, as if waiting to hatch. One at her neck, one at her shoulder.” The swollen lymph nodes, or buboes—the dread signs of bubonic plague—seem to have come from nowhere, but in a tour de force of contact-tracing O’Farrell reconstructs the chain of random events and haphazard encounters that could have led the fatal bacterium Yersinia pestis to the Shakespeare house on Henley Street:

The flea that came from the Alexandrian monkey—which has, for the last week or so, been living on a rat, and before that the cook, who died near Aleppo—leaps from the boy [in Murano] to the sleeve of the master glassmaker, whereupon it makes its way up to his left ear, and it bites him there, behind the lobe.

And so it goes, on and on along trade routes by land and by sea, until it reaches Warwickshire in 1596.

To readers living in the shadow of a virus that made its way from a wet market in Hubei province to the nursing home around the corner, the story has a ghastly timeliness, though it is some consolation to note that the bubonic plague that struck Europe repeatedly from the fourteenth century onward was far more lethal than what we have been experiencing, and that, unlike Covid-19, it attacked the young and the old with equal ferocity.

O’Farrell brilliantly conveys the horror and devastation the plague brought to individual households—such as Shakespeare’s, as she imagines it—and to entire communities. There is no evidence of what actually killed Shakespeare’s son in 1596, but plague is a reasonable hypothesis. An outbreak in Stratford in 1564, the year of Shakespeare’s birth, took the lives of around a fifth of the population, and the disease recurred throughout the century with nightmarish frequency.

The surviving records of Shakespeare’s life are scanty; those of his wife still scantier. At the age of eighteen he married a woman eight years older than he, and by the time he reached twenty-one, he had fathered three children. This much is clear. And then he evidently abandoned them, leaving them in Stratford, where he was born, and heading off to the capital to write or to act or to do whatever it was that he imagined he was going to do. True, as the years passed, he returned from London from time to time, presumably to visit his wife; his eldest daughter, Susanna; the twins Judith and Hamnet; and his aging parents. And, as his wealth increased, he sent money back to Stratford, resettled his family in a very large brick-and-timber house, and made a succession of local real estate and commodity investments.

To that extent he remained connected. But it is telling that there were no more children born to Agnes and Will, and there is no evidence that the busy playwright shared his rich inner world with his wife or that he involved himself in the daily lives of his offspring.

Archival records suggest that actors who came from the provinces more typically brought their families to London and settled them there. And if the sonnets have any autobiographical truth to them, his most intense emotional and sexual interests lay outside the bounds of his marriage. Between the family in the house on Henley Street in Stratford and the poet in his rented rooms on Silver Street in London, there seems to have been an almost unbridgeable distance.

Biographers presume that Shakespeare must have rushed home in 1596 when his eleven-year-old son Hamnet fell gravely ill from unknown causes, but even that is by no means certain. The boy died in August and Stratford was a two-day ride from London, so it is possible that when word reached the playwright it was already too late. Had there been any warning signs? Did he get the news by letter? Or did someone speak some such words as are heard in a brief exchange in The Winter’s Tale : “Your son…is gone.” “How, ‘gone’?” “Is dead.”

If these words from a late play are somehow linked to what Shakespeare actually experienced in 1596, they are displaced from autobiography and absorbed into someone else’s story; this is how the terrible news reaches a character named Leontes. There was no general inhibition in this period from writing directly from personal experience; quite the contrary. When an outbreak of bubonic plague took his seven-year-old son Benjamin, Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson gave voice in an exquisite twelve-line poem to his bitterly painful leave-taking:

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;   My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy. Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,   Exacted by thy fate, on the just day. O, could I lose all father now! For why   Will man lament the state he should envy? To have so soon ’scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,   And if no other misery, yet age? Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, “Here doth lie   Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.” For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,   As what he loves may never like too much.

It is striking that Shakespeare, as far as we know, left nothing comparable to so direct an expression of parental grief. Though this is the same author who wrote startlingly intimate poems to the young man and the dark lady and, in the words of a contemporary, circulated these “sugared sonnets among his private friends,” Shakespeare seems to have drawn an impenetrable curtain around his feelings, whatever they were, for his family.

In 1616, as he lay dying at the age of fifty-two, Shakespeare signed, in a shaky hand, a will that made many bequests, sentimental and otherwise. To his younger sister Joan he bequeathed £20 “and all my wearing apparrell,” along with the right to live in part of the house on Henley Street—the house in which she and her brother had grown up—for a nominal rent. To John Heminges, Henry Condell, and Richard Burbage, fellow actors and shareholders in the Globe Theater, he bequeathed twenty-six shillings and eightpence each to buy mourning rings, and he gave the same sum to his lifelong friend Hamnet Sadler “to buy him a ringe.” To Thomas Combe, the twenty-seven-year-old relative of a business associate, he left the sword that likely would have gone to his son Hamnet, had he lived.

These provisions—including the sum of £10 to “the poore of Stratford”—are the record of a thoughtful man who has accumulated a great deal of property to dispose of, from the “broad silver gilt” bowl in his grand house to the “barnes, stables, orchardes, gardens, landes, tenementes” that he owned throughout Stratford-upon-Avon and its surrounding villages. He was explicitly concerned to keep Thomas Quiney, the husband of his daughter Judith, from getting his hands on the money she would inherit. And he was equally explicitly concerned to settle most of his substantial estate on his elder daughter, Susanna, married to Dr. John Hall, and on her male heirs.

What is famously notable is the apparent absence of any significant bequest to his wife of thirty-four years. Various explanations have been offered, most plausibly that by custom and perhaps by law she would, as his widow, have been entitled during her lifetime to enjoy a portion of his estate. Still, a glance at comparable wills drawn up by people in Shakespeare’s milieu calls attention to what seems to be missing. From the will of his friend Henry Condell: “I give devise and bequeath all & singuler my freehold Messuages landes Tenementes and hereditamentes whatsoever…unto Elizabeth my welbeloved wife.” From the great actor Richard Burbage: “He the said Richard, did nominate and appoint his welbeloved wife Winifride Burbage, to be his sole Executrix of all his goodes and Chattelles whatsoever.” Likewise the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe: “I give and bequeath unto Agnes Henslow my loving wife, all and singuler my Landes, Tenementes, hereditamentes and Leases whatsoever.” William Bird, the lead actor in the Earl of Pembroke’s Men: “All other of my goods and chattells whatsoever…I give and bequeath unto my dearly beloved wiefe Marie Bird.” And the actor Thomas Downton, also of Pembroke’s Men: “I do make & Constitvte Iayne my welbeloved & Constant wife my sole Exectatrixe of all my personall Estate.” The list could go on.

The sense of something missing is heightened rather than relieved by a single line evidently inserted, after the document was already drawn up, into Shakespeare’s will: “I gyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture.” That’s it. No “loving,” no “dearly beloved,” no “well-beloved and constant,” let alone any hint of the sentiment that led his friend John Heminges to direct that he be buried as near as possible “to my loueinge wife Rebecca.” When Shakespeare contemplated his final resting place, he wanted only to lie undisturbed: “Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones.”

Maggie O’Farrell constructs a very different story from the unhappy marriage suggested, to me at least, by these scattered archival traces. To be sure, in her telling, the absent father does not return to Stratford in time to witness the terminal illness of Hamnet. He arrives in time only for the laying out of the corpse and the bleak funeral. Then, to the intense distress of his wife and muttering something inadequate about his theater company, his season, and his preparation, he soon leaves again for London. But that apparent abandonment is folded into what O’Farrell imagines as a story of deep, enduring love.

Though she is in a distinct minority, O’Farrell is not the first to imagine it so. Already in the nineteenth century some biographers suggested that the best bed would have been reserved for visitors and that the second-best bed must have had sentimental value. Hence, in Hamnet , Susanna takes over some of the household tasks from her grieving mother and, at her father’s bidding, buys new furniture for the house, but Agnes “refuses to give up her bed, saying it was the bed she was married in and she will not have another, so the new, grander bed is put in the room for guests.”

As for the absence from the will of terms of endearment, these are mere conventions, and the most eloquent writer the world has ever known would hardly have needed or welcomed recourse to such trite phrases. The deepest emotional bonds may be precisely those that are literally inexpressible. Within his own family O’Farrell’s Shakespeare—who is never referred to in the novel by name but only as “he” or “her husband” or “the father” and the like—is a man of conspicuously few words. Even his courtship of Agnes, as O’Farrell depicts it, is a string of monosyllables and silences: “‘I…’ he begins, without any idea where that sentence will go, what he wants to say. ‘Do you…’”

As O’Farrell acknowledges, her vision of the Shakespeare marriage is indebted to a 2007 book by Germaine Greer, Shakespeare’s Wife. In Greer’s account Agnes Hathaway Shakespeare was an impressive person who has been dismissed, belittled, and slandered by centuries of misogynistic male historians and critics. “The Shakespeare wallahs”—among whom, I regret to say, I prominently figure for Greer—

have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women, and have then vilified the one woman who remained true to him all his life, in order to exonerate him.

Speaking for myself, I never thought that Shakespeare was “incapable of relating to women,” only that he seems to have been incapable of relating to his wife. And I have never been inclined to vilify Agnes or to blame her in any way for her husband’s neglect or aversion.

With considerable energy and resourcefulness, Greer combs the surviving records for signs that Agnes was an accomplished and steadfastly loyal wife. Shakespeare scholars have not, so far as I know, embraced her suggestion that Agnes was responsible for the creation of the First Folio or that she may have written a still-undiscovered will leaving money “in trust to be spent on further publishing of her husband’s work,” but O’Farrell, for one, has been inspired by Greer’s effort to imagine a wife more substantial than the one James Joyce described as a “boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.” And the result is a satisfying and engaging novel that conjures up the life of a strong, vulnerable, lonely, and fiercely independent woman.

O’Farrell does Greer one better by depicting Agnes as what the Renaissance would have called a “wisewoman,” that is, a healer with special powers. Those powers derive for the most part from a deep understanding of the medicinal properties of plants, but there is something uncanny about what she can do. The first time Agnes and Shakespeare meet—at the country farm where the teenage Shakespeare is tutoring her stepbrothers in Latin—Agnes takes his hand and, gripping the flesh between his thumb and forefinger, mysteriously divines his inner nature. She discovers

something she would never have expected to find in the hand of a clean-booted grammar-school boy from town…. It had layers and strata, like a landscape. There were spaces and vacancies, dense patches, underground caves, rises and descents…. She knew there was more of it than she could grasp, that it was bigger than both of them.

It is easy to forgive O’Farrell the shopworn phrase “bigger than both of them” since it gestures toward what must have seemed, to anyone capable of perceiving it, indescribably strange about Shakespeare’s inner landscape.

The magnitude of that landscape, in O’Farrell’s account, is what drew Shakespeare to Agnes but what also drove him to leave her and their three children and the rest of his family, including his parents, and head off on his own to London. As the novel depicts them, Shakespeare’s mother was narrowly conventional and his father, a glover, was a drunken, irascible brute. To escape from them was a necessity. But the budding playwright wanted his beloved Agnes to join him. It was she, in O’Farrell’s reckoning, who always found a reason to delay: “Until spring comes. Until the heat of summer is over. When the winds of autumn are past. When the snow has melted.” Her motive was to preserve the lives of their precious children, to guard them from the hazards of the disease-ridden city. To this end she was willing to subordinate her deep love for her husband. And it is here, in her predominating maternal solicitude, that the novel finds its real life.

For disease and death haunted not only the crowded cities of Tudor England but also its country towns and leafy rural settlements. Given the general state of Renaissance medical knowledge, a sick person stood a better chance with the plant-based cures of a wisewoman such as O’Farrell’s Agnes than with the hideous cuppings and purges of the best Padua-trained physician. Little Hamnet, frightened by the sudden illness of his twin sister, is right to be desperately seeking his mother. But she is out in the fields, more than a mile away, collecting herbs for her healing practice. By the time she returns home, the symptoms on the little girl’s body of bubonic plague are unmistakable, and with every passing moment they are getting worse.

Narrating severe illness is for O’Farrell a personal specialty. In her 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death , she describes a childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year and from which she was not expected to recover, and, still more harrowing, she depicts in excruciating, searing detail her infant daughter’s immune-system disorder:

Her skin is bubbling and blistering, each breath a struggling symphony of whistles and wheezes. Her face, under the scarlet hives, under the grotesque swelling, is ghastly white.

I think: she cannot die, not now, not here. I think: how could I have let this happen?

O’Farrell brings this direct personal experience to bear as she imagines all of Agnes’s frantic efforts to save her daughter and her irrational but unbearable feelings of responsibility. Ultimately, as we know, it was not Judith who died but her twin brother. (Judith in historical fact lived to the age of seventy-seven, dying in 1662.) Here the novel has recourse to the occult forces that had earlier accounted for Agnes’s prescient reading of her young suitor’s hand. Hamnet silently and mysteriously wills himself to take his sister’s place in the clutches of death, leaving Judith to recover as if her mother’s herbal remedies had saved her.

The recovery only intensifies Agnes’s tormenting guilt, for she feels that she somehow failed to focus her attention adequately upon the boy, and she plunges into a grief that is not unmixed with anger at her husband for not being there when she most needed him. Her anger intensifies when, having laid his son in the ground, Shakespeare announces his intention to return to London. But even in the midst of her anger, Agnes, as O’Farrell suggests, must have understood what was impelling him to leave. “You are caught by that place, like a hooked fish,” she tells him:

“What place? You mean London?”

“No, the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child.”

After her husband leaves, Agnes succumbs to what we would now call clinical depression. And lest we think that such depression is a novelist’s historical anachronism—that parents in the early modern period must have been hardened to the death of children, since it was so terribly common—we might consider the diary of Richard Napier, a seventeenth-century Buckinghamshire astrological physician. The historian Michael MacDonald, who deciphered Napier’s voluminous notes and analyzed them in a remarkable 1981 book called Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England , found that the physician treated numerous parents, and especially mothers, who were “ever leaden with grief” after a child’s death. As William Paulet, the Marquis of Winchester, had written in 1586, “The love of the mother is so strong, though the child be dead and laid in the grave, yet always she hath him quick in her heart.”

Such is the burden, brilliantly depicted, of O’Farrell’s Agnes. Her depression lasts for years, and, though it feels as if it could never get worse, it is intensified when she learns, to her horror, that her husband has written a play that bears her son’s name. (The names Hamnet and Hamlet in this period were interchangeable.) How, she asks herself, could he have been so callous as to exploit for mass entertainment his family’s intimate tragedy?

In the novel’s climactic scene, Agnes travels to London to confront her husband. There, in the midst of the general urban filth and confusion, she has two revelations. Her first comes when she rushes to his rooms. She does not find him there, but, crucially, she finds no sign that anyone besides the playwright has been there. This is the room of a solitary writer—no trace of a lover, male or female. On his desk there is a letter to her that he has begun but left unfinished. The second and still greater revelation comes when she pays her penny, thrusts herself amid the heaving crowd, and enters the wooden O of the Globe. There on the raised stage she sees her husband, his face made up in ghastly white, playing the part of a ghost, the ghost, as the characters around him say and the crowd repeats, of Hamlet:

To hear that name, out of the mouths of people she has never known and will never know, and used for an old dead king: Agnes cannot understand this. Why would her husband have done it?

Thoroughly disgusted, she is readying herself to leave when she is transfixed by the appearance on stage of another character, a boy, or rather a young man, with the precise mannerisms of the dead Hamnet—“walking with her son’s gait, talking in her son’s voice”—and at just the age he would have been, had he lived. For a moment she is utterly baffled, and then the meaning of it all comes over her: “Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can.”

To perform this extraordinary feat, she suddenly understands, her husband, in taking on the role of the ghost, has taken his child’s death and made it his own: “He has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place.” The reader of the novel also knows, as Agnes cannot, that in offering himself in place of the other, Shakespeare has in effect done for his son what his son did for his gravely ill sister. What Agnes can and does know is that through the power of art her husband has redeemed himself and saved whatever he could of his lost son.

Did it actually happen this way? Almost certainly not. Was the moribund marriage saved? I doubt it. But I too am convinced that Shakespeare drew upon his grief and mourning to write the astonishing, transformative play that bears his son’s name. With her touching fiction O’Farrell has not only painted a vivid portrait of the shadowy Agnes Hathaway Shakespeare but also found a way to suggest that Hamnet was William Shakespeare’s best piece of poetry.

January 14, 2021

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Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet: a brilliantly observed historical novel

O’Farrell’s remarkable novel about Shakespeare’s son is both painful and satisfying.

By John Mullan

We know the bare facts. At the age of 18, William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, a woman in her mid-twenties from a family of affluent yeoman farmers. When they wed, she was pregnant. Six months later, she gave birth to their daughter Susanna. Less than two years after this, she gave birth to twins, a boy and girl, named Hamnet and Judith. Hamnet Shakespeare died, of causes unrecorded, aged 11 and a half. His sisters lived on into old age.

Hamlet and Hamnet. It has always seemed extraordinary that Shakespeare’s most famous protagonist almost shares a name with his dead son. The Shakespeare twins were named after their parents’ close friends and neighbours, Hamnet and Judith Sadler. Meanwhile, the source story for Shakespeare’s tragedy, François de Belleforest’s 16th-century version of a Norse legend, has a protagonist called “Hamblet”. Yet it seems hard to believe that the coincidence of names was not in Shakespeare’s mind when he was writing his tragedy, only three years or so after the death of his son. Maggie O’Farrell’s novel is written with the conviction that it was entirely in his mind.

The foreknowledge of Hamnet’s early death weighs on the reader of this novel; the novelist makes it do so. Its opening sequence has Hamnet running through Stratford to find a physician. His twin is sick; we know that she has the plague. We also know that she will live and he will die. The book moves back and forth between this time and the Shakespeares’ courtship and early years of marriage. The teenage son of a brutish Stratford glover has become a Latin tutor. On one of his visits to teach the children of an upwardly mobile local family, he encounters their eldest daughter, a wild young woman first seen with a falcon on her fist. Anne has been renamed Agnes, on the authority, an Author’s Note tells us, of her father Richard Hathaway, who so named her in his will. The unexpected name suits O’Farrell, who wants to make her a stranger character than any existing legend. Agnes is imagined here as some kind of wise woman, who sells potions and herbal remedies to the locals, brings animals into the house and gives birth in the forest that begins at the edge of her brother’s fields. The narrative dodges deftly from one character’s point of view to another’s, but it is Shakespeare’s wife who dominates.

Her husband is never named. Until the very end of the book, the playwright’s creativity is an off-stage mystery. He travels to London to expand his father’s glove business and ends up in a theatre company. For much of the book, he is absent, up to making money and who knows what else. By the end, the mother and daughters are in their enormous new house, bought with the huge profits her husband has made from his theatre company, the envy of their tattling Stratford neighbours. All are mystified as to how the wealth has come about.

[see also: Shakespeare in disrupted times ]

The Saturday Read

Morning call.

Pushing the playwright to the edges of the novel is what makes it work. Hamnet , which was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction, was a fitting winner for the sheer quality of the writing, and also because it is a novel about wifehood and motherhood. Agnes is the rival of other wives and mothers. Early on, there is her resentful stepmother Joan; she has taken the place of her own sister, Agnes’s mother, who has died in childbirth. After marriage, Agnes lives with her in-laws John and Mary (her husband builds a kind of extension to the family home).

O’Farrell narrates in the present tense that Hilary Mantel has made irresistible for serious historical fiction, restoring, as it does, contingency and uncertainty to the past. O’Farrell’s last book, I Am, I Am, I Am , was a memoir dedicated to the precariousness of life – a catalogue of the author’s “brushes with death”. The body’s vulnerability is compellingly reimagined in this novel. How precarious is life in this world: “Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat.” Agnes believes she has a kind of foresight, dreaming that she will die with two children at the end of her bed. She is fighting her own premonitions when she finds that, for one of her children, “the door leading out of the room of the living is ajar; she can feel the chill of the draught, scent that icy air”. Like the twins in Twelfth Night , Hamnet and Judith could almost be mistaken for each other. The boy is a substitute for his sister, offering himself to Death in her place.

Infants die. Mary Shakespeare herself had three daughters who died. Were people in the past more stoical about infant mortality, when it was such a frequent fact of life? The question has often been posed by social historians and O’Farrell has a very clear answer to it: no, no, no. The core of her novel is a gruelling, brilliantly observed account of the sickness of Agnes’s children, the pre-ordained death of her son and the aching aftermath. You might think it could be set at any time, yet there is a difference between now and then that intrigues the novelist: Hamnet’s mother has no reason to expect her children to live, no right to feel appalled if any of them die. Yet incredulous and desolate she feels. O’Farrell’s research into Elizabethan funeral rituals has been turned into an agonisingly exact description of the laying out of the boy’s body, the mother noticing the soles and nails of his bare feet carry “grit from the road, soil from the garden, mud from the riverbank, where he swam not a week ago”.

The plague was an intermittent reality for Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Ironically, the disease that kills Agnes’s son is also, whenever it flares up in London, what sends her husband back to her. One bravura chapter, weirdly prescient in our pandemic days, imagines how the disease that will kill Hamnet manages to reach him in his small town in Warwickshire. In Alexandria, a cabin boy sent on shore to buy food and beer for his shipmates is captivated by a tame monkey. A flea leaps from monkey to boy, then later to one of the ship’s cats. Before long, the cats are dead and the rats onboard are infected. Some of the sailors begin to sicken. At Venice, they take on Murano glass, packed in rags, where some of the fleas take up residence. One package reaches Stratford. Renaissance globalisation.

The novel has two epigraphs: one, the fragment of a mourning lyric sung by Ophelia in Hamlet ; the other, Stephen Greenblatt’s assertion that Hamnet and Hamlet were “entirely interchangeable” names in Stratford records of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Nearly the whole novel passes without mention of a single detail – not even a title – of any of Shakespeare’s plays (Agnes knows that her husband is a successful dramatist, but is apparently incurious about what he writes or performs in). So, you know where you must be headed. The novel ends with some revelation, to her and to us, of how Hamlet is connected to Hamnet. It is painful and satisfying at once, like this remarkable novel as a whole. 

John Mullan’s most recent book is “The Artful Dickens” (Bloomsbury)

Hamnet Maggie O’Farrell Tinder Press, 384pp, £20

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This article appears in the 18 Nov 2020 issue of the New Statesman, Vaccine nation

Bookshelf Fantasies

A life amidst books.

Book Review: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Title: Hamnet Author: Maggie O’Farrell Publisher: Tinder Press Publication date: March 31, 2020 Length: 372 pages Genre: Historical fiction Source: Purchased Rating:

Drawing on Maggie O’Farrell’s long-term fascination with the little-known story behind Shakespeare’s most enigmatic play,  Hamnet  is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child. Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet. Award-winning author Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel breathes full-blooded life into the story of a loss usually consigned to literary footnotes, and provides an unforgettable vindication of Agnes, a woman intriguingly absent from history. A  New York Times  Notable Book (2020), Best Book of 2020:  Guardian ,  Financial Times ,  Literary Hub , and  NPR .

Hamnet is a powerful, emotional, beautifully written story about grief, mourning, and sorrow. Also, Shakespeare.

In Hamnet , the main point-of-view character is Agnes, although we do get passages from the perspectives of Agnes’s children and husband too. Agnes is gifted with sight and special powers. A talented healer, she can also see people’s futures simply by touching them. About herself, she has one clear vision: She will be the mother of two children.

When Agnes meets her husband, the son of a disreputable glovemaker and Latin tutor to her stepbrothers, they’re immediately drawn to one another, and eventually marry. Agnes can see her husband’s unhappiness casting a shadow over their lives. He lacks purpose, a means of fulfilling his own pursuits — so she sends him off to London, ostensibly to further his father’s business interests there. They plan for him to get settled, then send for Agnes and their children.

But all does not go as intended. Already the parents of a healthy girl, Agnes soon delivers not the 2nd child she expects, but a 2nd and 3rd. The twins are a girl and a boy, the girl born so weak and fragile that she was not expected to survive. She names the babies Hamnet and Judith, and they are inseparable. It soon becomes clear that moving to London will never be an option for Agnes and her children — Judith’s health is too delicate to allow her to live in a crowded, dirty city. And so Agnes and her husband live apart, with him returning for visits when he can, although he’s achieving success as a playwright and creating a separate life for himself in the world of theater.

But Agnes can never quite forget her own vision, of herself as the mother of two children.

She fears her foresight; she does. She remembers with ice-cold clarity the image she had of two figures at the foot of the bed where she will meet her end. She now knows that it’s possible, more than possible, that one of her children will die, because children do, all the time. But she will not have it. She will not. She will fill this child, these children, with life. She will place herself between them and the door leading out, and she will stand there, teeth bared, blocking the way. She will defend her three babes against all that lies beyond this world. She will not rest, not sleep, until she knows they are safe. She will push back, fight against, undo the foresight she has always had, about having two children. She will. She knows she can.

When “pestilence” — the Black Death — reaches the family’s home in Stratford, it’s Judith who is stricken. But Hamnet will not abide the idea of losing his twin, and eventually, he is lost while Judith survives. Agnes and the family are plunged into the horrors of loss, the devastating death of a child punching a hole through the fabric of their lives.

In Hamnet , Shakespeare himself is never named (he’s always the husband or the father or the son), but we know who we’re reading about. It feels appropriate for him to be presented in this way — if the story were about him, his life and career would overshadow all the rest. Here, though, it’s a story about a family, and especially about a mother, trying to find a way to live in the shadow of unbearable grief. The father’s way of dealing with the loss, through the power of his words, is just one aspect of what the family experiences.

The writing in Hamnet is absolutely gorgeous. I’m not usually a fan of “literary” fiction, but this novel is an exception for me. The carefully constructed characters, the lyrical descriptions of their world and their lives, and even the passages describing the transmission of the plague are all presented in a way that’s beautiful and haunting and powerful.

Hamnet is a special book, and I’m so glad my book group chose it for this month’s discussion. Once again, thanks to the group, I’ve read an excellent book I might otherwise have missed!

Very highly recommended.

To read more about Hamnet :

New York Times review (written by Geraldine Brooks) NPR review Washington Post review

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18 thoughts on “ book review: hamnet by maggie o’farrell ”.

Great review, thanks for sharing your thoughts

What a memorable and emotional read!

Agree 100%!

I could not agree more. I adored this book and it was my favorite of the year. Now I’m reading her newest work – The Marriage Portrait – and… yeah… we’ve got another winner here for sure!

That’s awesome to hear! I’ll look forward to your review of her new book. Based on my taste of her writing here, I’m sure anything this author writes will be worth reading.

I’ve read ALL of her books, including her memoir! She was more romancy in some of her earlier works, but Hamnet really was a turning point for her.

Great review, Lisa. Now that I know what it’s about, I’m going to read it!

I think this is one you’d really appreciate!

Yes, I think so too! 🙂

Awesome review! I have had my eye on this since it was released, and now you’ve pushed me to buy a copy😁

That’s great! I’m not sure I’d have gotten to this if I didn’t have an actual date to finish by — I’m so glad I did!

Lisa, this was a beautiful review. I am even more eager to read this book now.

Thank you! I hope you check out the book!

Nice review! I liked the book, too.

Thank you! Now off to look for your review…

This was actually the first of her novels that I have read, I bought it after reading her excellent memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am, Seventeen Brushes With Death.

I found the novel to be quite a different story than what is often written about it. I found it easier to relate by forgetting about Shakespeare and the son and seeing it more as a portrait of Agnes, and how the lives of others were formed as a result of her special gifts, even the passing of Hamnet, for he too had something of the magic about him, making the ultimate self-sacrifice for his sister.

Lovely review, I’m happy you delved into this one and enjoyed it so much.

Thank you! I’ll definitely want to read more by this author.

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• 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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Migrations: A Novel

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A moving meditation on our connection to nature and our relationships with others.

By Bryan Washington

In this multilayered tale about a frayed same-sex couple in Houston, the quiet moments ring loudest.

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Book review: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

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With eerie timing, Maggie O'Farrell's new novel about the death of Shakespeare 's 11 year old son Hamnet in 1596 from bubonic plague arrives just as the country finds itself mired in pandemic panic.

Those even faintly squeamish about coronavirus might find themselves particularly traumatised to read Farrell's extraordinary description of how, in the summer of that year, the virus travels from the Mediterranean to a house in Warwickshire after a flea lands on a cabin boy in Alexandria and a Venetian glassmaker packs a box of beads bound for Stratford. A few months later young Hamnet is dead, after contracting the disease from his twin sister Judith, who survives. To Hamnet's father, arriving too late from Kent where he has been overseeing rehearsals for a play, his son's lifeless face looks like a “blue-white lily flower”.

O'Farrell has written about death before: her 2017 memoir I Am I Am I Am recounted the 17 times she herself has swerved it through illness and youthful misadventure. She's a writer of rare emotional intelligence whose personal intimations of mortality bear rich fruit in this, her eighth novel which is not really about Shakespeare at all but his wife, here named Agnes and about whom almost no facts are known.

In O'Farrell's supple hands Agnes becomes a woman of formidable instinctive gifts, who can cure the sick and sense the future and who, in a canny act of self determination, ensures a marriage must take place with the lowly tutor with whom she has fallen in love by making him get her pregnant (in a marvellous scene set in an apple barn).

Like Hilary Mantel, O'Farrell uses a disconcertingly intimate present tense but where Mantel's Thomas Cromwell novels have a snapping clarity, the writing in Hamnet has an almost painterly languor. O'Farrell uses perspective the way a film might use a camera, stealing up on scenes from unexpected angles, summoning up this vanished woman from history through sensually composed domestic compositions: the jug of cream and loaf of bread placed on the table, the starched, pressed collars on the landing. All well and lovely, but such leisurely scene setting is really only preparatory work for the main event, the death of her son who, in his feverish last hours suggests to the ailing Judith that together they cheat death by changing places.

Through such moments readers hungry for insights into Shakespeare's creative thinking are left to make their own inferences as to how the death of his son might have shaped his plays: the comedies featuring twins who dress up as each other; the late romances featuring missing children.

Rather, O'Farrell offers a repositioning of his story, as though to suggest that while Shakespeare (whom she never names as such) was off in London, the real business of life was going on at home without him. Only when a grief stricken Agnes travels to London to see this play her husband has been writing that bears the name of her dead son do the worlds of husband and wife align. It's a beautifully written novel but I confess I read it with a faint impatience that only abated in its final pages.

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell (Tinder Press, £18.99), buy it here .

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Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2020

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

National Book Critics Circle Winner

by Maggie O'Farrell ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 21, 2020

A gripping drama of the conflict between love and destiny.

Imagining the life of the family Shakespeare left behind in Stratford makes an intriguing change of pace for a veteran storyteller.

While O’Farrell eschews the sort of buried-secrets plots that drive the propulsive narratives of such previous novels as Instructions for a Heatwave (2013), her gifts for full-bodied characterization and sensitive rendering of intricate family bonds are on full display. She opens with 11-year-old Hamnet anxiously hovering over his twin sister, Judith, who has a mysterious fever and ominous swellings. When Hamnet asks his grandfather where his mother is, the old man strikes him, and as the novel moves through the characters’ memories, we see the role John Shakespeare’s brutality played in son Will’s departure for London. The central figure in this drama is Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, better known to history as Anne, recipient of the infamous second-best-bed bequest in his will. O’Farrell chooses an alternate name—spelling was not uniform in Elizabethan times—and depicts Agnes as a woman whose profound engagement with the natural world drew young Will to her from their first meeting. The daughter of a reputed sorceress, Agnes has a mysterious gift: She can read people’s natures and foresee their futures with a single touch. She sees the abilities within Will that are being smothered as a reluctant Latin tutor and inept participant in his father’s glove trade, and it is Agnes who deftly maneuvers John into sending him away. She believes she will join Will soon, but Judith’s frailty forestalls this. O’Farrell draws us into Agnes’ mixed emotions as the years go by and she sees Will on his increasingly infrequent visits “inhabiting it—that life he was meant to live, that work he was intended to do.” Hamnet’s death—bitterly ironic, as he was always the stronger twin—drives the couple farther apart, and news of a new play called Hamlet sends Agnes to London in a rage. O’Farrell’s complex, moving finale shows her watching the performance and honoring her husband’s ability to turn their grief into art.

Pub Date: July 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-525-65760-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Maggie O'Farrell

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PERSPECTIVES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

SEEN & HEARD

by Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2024

Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”

A stranger comes to town, and a beloved storyteller plays this creative-writing standby for all it’s worth.

Hilderbrand fans, a vast and devoted legion, will remember Blond Sharon, the notorious island gossip. In what is purportedly the last of the Nantucket novels, Blond Sharon decides to pursue her lifelong dream of fiction writing. In the collective opinion of the island—aka the “cobblestone telegraph”—she’s qualified. “Well, we think, she’s certainly demonstrated her keen interest in other people’s stories, the seedier and more salacious, the better.” Blond Sharon’s first assignment in her online creative writing class is to create a two-person character study, and Hilderbrand has her write up the two who arrive on the ferry in an opening scene of the book, using the same descriptors Hilderbrand has. Amusingly, the class is totally unimpressed. “‘I found it predictable,’ Willow said. ‘Like maybe Sharon used ChatGPT with the prompt “Write a character study about two women getting off the ferry, one prep and one punk.”’” Blond Sharon abandons these characters, but Hilderbrand thankfully does not. They are Kacy Kapenash, daughter of retiring police chief Ed Kapenash (the other swan song referred to by the title), and her new friend Coco Coyle, who has given up her bartending job in the Virgin Islands to become a “personal concierge” for the other strangers-who-have-come-to-town. These are the Richardsons, Bull and Leslee, a wild and wealthy couple who have purchased a $22 million beachfront property and plan to take Nantucket by storm. As the book opens, their house has burned down during an end-of-summer party on their yacht, and Coco is missing, feared both responsible for the fire and dead. Though it’s the last weekend of his tenure, Chief Ed refuses to let the incoming chief, Zara Washington, take this one over. The investigation goes forward in parallel with a review of the summer’s intrigues, love affairs, and festivities. Whatever else you can say about Leslee Richardson, she knows how to throw a party, and Hilderbrand is just the writer to design her invitations, menus, themes, playlists, and outfits. And that hot tub!

Pub Date: June 11, 2024

ISBN: 9780316258876

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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by Elin Hilderbrand

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Reading Ladies

Hamnet [book review] #literaryfiction.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell is poignant Literary Fiction, the story of a mother’s grief, and the winner of the Women’s Fiction Prize for 2020.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Genre/Categories/Setting: Historical Literary Fiction, Family Life, Mothers and Children, Grief, Magical Realism, 1500s England

*This post contains Amazon affiliate links.

TW: Review mentions the death of a child.

My Summary of Hamnet:

Hamnet is set in 1580s Warwickshire, England and is the highly imagined story of William Shakespeare’s family and his wife, Agnes (Anne). This is a poignant and emotional story focused on marriage and family. Shakespeare and Agnes have three children, and we know from history that Hamnet dies. In this story of a mother’s grief, O’Farrell imagines that the 1550s plague is the cause of his death. You might be surprised that William Shakespeare is “off-stage” for the majority of the story and is never mentioned by name (referred to as husband, father, etc.). As a result, Agnes is centered as the main character of the story, and a mother’s grief is the main theme. A beautiful woman, Agnes exhibits some supernatural gifts of healing with herbs, is entirely devoted to family, and frequently experiences glimpses into the future.

My Thoughts About Hamnet:

Writing and Structure: The first thing that will strike you about Hamnet is the exquisite writing. I was convinced within a few chapters that Hamnet is truly Literary Fiction . (the focus of literary fiction is on the craft of writing, social observations, the meaning of life, and heavily character-driven with the action being internal). This passage is from the opening pages and sets the stage for the story and foreshadows the tension, grief, and regret to come:

“Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry. Him standing here, at the back of the house, calling for the people who had fed him, swaddled him, rocked him to sleep, held his hand as he took his first steps, taught him to use a spoon, to blow on broth before he ate it, to take care crossing the street, to let sleeping dogs lie, to swill out a cup before drinking, to stay away from deep water. It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.”

This passage is especially compelling as I felt the desperation of this boy as he calls for help for his sister who has fallen ill. At the same time, I can strongly image his mother’s regret at not being there.

O’Farrell uses the entire book to detail a brief number of days in which the plague descends on Shakespeare’s home with devastating results.  The filler is flashbacks of Agnes and William’s love story, early marriage, and family life. These flashbacks jump in a steam of consciousness way and readers can quickly lose their bearings if not focused. The flashbacks can take the reader to any time and place. It’s a challenging read in the sense of structure .

Character-Driven: Even though the story is heavily character-driven, it contains enough plot to move the story forward. I liked that William was kept in the background (mostly offstage) to better focus on the imagined story of Agnes and their family. O’Farrell draws a beautiful and fascinating portrait of an intriguing and mysterious Agnes from her early romance with William to the realities of being a wife and mother in the 1580s to her profound grief to her rebuilding. Agnes is a strong, likable, and inspiring character.

Setting: O’Farrell’s depiction of life in the 1580s to the 1590s is detailed and atmospheric and I was transported there! It’s not often that we’re taken that far back in historical fiction!

Themes: As mentioned above, grief is the driving theme and its description is breathtaking and heart wrenching. Other themes include brother/sister relationships, mother/daughter connection, a woman’s life in the 1500s, and forgiveness. The story includes magical realism, connecting with the dead, foreseeing the future, and striking a bargain in the dying process. This was not my favorite part (affected my rating) and I would have been happy with less of the paranormal, but this is personal taste. Readers who love the paranormal aspect will find it well done.

Strong Trigger Warnings/Content Consideration: Most of this heartfelt story is focused around the death of a child and resulting grief. Because of this I feel like it’s an emotionally heavy read for anyone .

Recommended!

Recommended: This mother’s story is definitely recommended for fans of Maggie O’Farrell, for readers of engaging historical fiction, for those who appreciate Literary Biographical Fiction and want to read the 2020 Women’s Fiction Prize winner, for readers who desire to know more about the woman behind a famous man, and for book clubs (with TWs). Because this is Agnes’s story, I feel like this could have been called Agnes , but the title probably wouldn’t have been as eye catching as Hamnet .

Hamnet has won the Women’s Fiction Prize for 2020.

Thanks Davida @ The Chocolate Lady’s Book Blog for bringing the book to my attention. You will enjoy her thoughtful review!

My Rating: 4.5 Stars (rounded up to 5)

More Information Here

Meet the Author of Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell

Have you read a book by Maggie O’Farrell?

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43 comments.

An excellent review. One of my favourite books this year. I love Maggie O’Farrell’s writing.

Thanks! It was an emotional read for me!

So… have I made you an O’Farrell fan, then?

Ha! I’m always willing to give her a try! This is an amazing piece of writing and I liked it better than This Must Be the Place despite it having paranormal elements. The historical setting and the mother losing a child theme gripped me. I think it depends on how much paranormal she includes….that’s really not my jam. But maybe it’s a Scottish thing??? I do like character driven when it has strong internal conflict and Daniel (I think?) certainly had that in This Must Be the Place. In both books she certainly uses a loose structure! I had to DNF her memoir I Am I Am….it made me feel anxious. So this is a complicated answer to your question!!

Well, this didn’t really have paranormal thing as much as more folklore rituals. Her book My Lover’s Lover almost feels like there’s paranormal but you have to read it all to get it!

Loved reading all your thoughts on this one. I have a feeling it will become one of my favourite books as it has so many themes that I am drawn to.

It’s an incredible and memorable read….I hope you enjoy it!

You’ve increased my desire to read this. Also, all the talk of this book makes me want to read This Must Be the Place again.

It’s an incredible and memorable read. I had to roll my eyes through the paranormal parts though. I hope you enjoy it!

Hamnet wasn’t on my TBR list, but it is now! Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Great! I hope it’s a good read for you!

[…] books were on my initial fall TBR list and then FOMO gripped me and I read them in early September! Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. I highly recommend both of these 5 Star reads for your fall […]

I enjoyed this very much, too. I think I would have raved about it a little more if we weren’t living in such dark times, if it weren’t so difficult to read sad stories now.

I immediately followed it up with 2 very light reads so I could shake the heaviness!

I’ve read so much about this book, I’m waiting for Christmas time to read it! Great post! x

Thanks! It’s a memorable read! Enjoy! 🙌

The first thing I thought as I saw the title was Hamlet. I wasn’t far off, huh? 😀 Fantastic review, Carol. I love how much depth this one has and how it explores various relationships so beautifully too. It’s been a while since I picked up literary fiction, but they are often hit or miss with me. Sometimes the author really does too much, making it harder to appreciate the premise by the end. This one, however, sound brilliant! Thanks for sharing! 😀

You’re welcome! I’m hit or miss with lit fiction, too. This grabbed my heart and emotions. 😍

[…] 4.5-5 Stars. Compelling, engaging, and emotional literary fiction. My review of Hamnet here. […]

What a wonderful review of Hamnet Carol. I have the audiobook of this one on hold, but I think I will read it instead, I want to relish the language and I can’t always do that when I listen to a book. I also added this one after reading Davida’s review.

Thanks Carla! I hope you enjoy it! Hamnet is one memorable and unforgettable (albeit emotional) read.

[…] favorites list! I love Book Hangovers! Books this year that have given me a book hangover include Hamnet, The Girl With the Louding Voice, and Transcendent Kingdom. I haven’t yet finished The Choice […]

[…] month (January 2, 2021), we’ll start with the winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. Join […]

[…] Hamnet by Maggie O-Farrel (histfic, Shakespheare). My review of Hamnet here. […]

Thank you for this detailed review. I was gobsmacked that Hamnet didn’t make it to the Booker prize.

So beautifully written! 😍

[…] Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell […]

[…] month’s prompt starts with Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, and I’m thrilled because it was a favorite, top read for me in […]

Reading this at the moment, WordPress highlighted your post at the end of my latest which mentioned it. A good review!

Thank you so much for visiting and commenting! I hope that Hamnet is a memorable read for you! It gave me a book hangover!

[…] I have learned through experience to approach highly buzzed and popular books with caution because high expectations have definitely affected my reading experience. Do you find this true in your reading life? Two recent books that did meet my high expectations were the audio version of Project Hail Mary (The audio was absolutely as good as I expected) and Hamnet. […]

[…] Genre: literary fiction, historical literary fiction Maggie O’Farrell is a popular writer so her new releases receive a great deal of hype. Because this is historical fiction, I hopped aboard the hype train. My review of Hamnet here. […]

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Book review: Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell


If you are feeling a twinge of concern about a novelist releasing a Tudor historical novel at the same time as Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & The Light, be not afraid. This is a remarkable piece of work, in which emotional intelligence and solid, intellectual research are evident, but with enough of a “space for fiction” to make it a novel and not a thesis.


How do you write a novel about Shakespeare? Others have tried – the only one which seems to me a success is Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like The Sun which, in a rather extravagant performance, only uses words used by Shakespeare (with one exception). I would suppose that the cardinal rule is: you can’t get into the mind of Shakespeare. A subsidiary recommendation is not to try to write in cod-Shakespearean, full of prithees and privies and fol-de-rols and hey, nonny, nos. Mostly because that’s not really like Shakespeare. O’Farrell excels in avoiding both the traps, and, perhaps most impressively of all, has fashioned a novel of true heart and character that can be read and appreciated even if you have no interest in Shakespeare at all.

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Part of the ingenuity is that Shakespeare is, if not absent, very much in the background. The two lensing characters are Agnes and Hamnet. Agnes is Anne Hathaway: Elizabethan orthography was rather more fluid than we have today, and it is also a subtle way to assert the fictive nature of the book. She has something in common with the depiction in Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife, being assertive, clever and nobody’s fool. But O’Farrell adds in a layer of almost mysticism. To deploy and yet not succumb to the “witches were just clever herbalists oppressed by the patriarchy” is a cunning move. Hamnet is a clever and sensitive and imaginative boy; perhaps too clever and too sensitive and too imaginative. The Bard appears most frequently not as the Bard at all. He is “a Latin tutor”, “my son”, “that wageless, useless, beardless”, “my husband”, “the father”.


Even though there is no attempt to imitate Shakespeare, the novel does have a very distinctive set of Shakespearean registers. Shakespeare has an odd number of negative words, from privative suffixes, as seen above, to the use of “no” words (as in King Lear’s “no, no, no life!... Never, never, never, never, never!”) He also had a penchant for words beginning “un”, and this is replicated in O’Farrell. We get unfinished, unrisen, ungainly, unasked, unruffled, unmoving and many, many others. It gives a Shakespearean tang. More so, in scenes where Shakespeare is in dialogue with other characters, his most frequent response is “nothing”. Although this is an astute reading of the texture of Shakespeare’s style, it also serves the purpose of keeping him a blank. Nothing will come of nothing, speak again. There are other touches, such as Agnes’s bridal crown or herb garden which give the granular detail of flora that is reminiscent of the plays (such as Ophelia’s famous speech); or the details about Shakespeare’s father’s glove-making business. But it is not cluttered detail for its own sake.   


In the 20th century, academic controversy raged about the possible connections between the death of Hamnet and the tragedy of Hamlet – or even the links it might have to the lost son Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale or to the (slyly referenced) female twin who thinks her brother is dead in Twelfth Night. But the novel’s success is nothing whatsoever to do with where one thinks the balance of probabilities lies. Rather it is about grief, about the loss of a child, about the transformational capacity of art, about childbirth, about ambition, about absent fathers. These are all themes O’Farrell has explored before in novels like The Vanishing Act Of Esme Lennox, or The Hand That First Held Mine, and, as with her other novels (and her memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am) the same shuttlecocking of chronology generates tension even when the outcome seems predestined. 


This is a staggeringly beautiful and unbearably poignant novel. O’Farrell is one of the most surprisingly quiet radicals in fiction. When I finished it, I wondered – no, I hoped – that instead of shifting genre again, O’Farrell might not follow Mantel with a sequel. After all, the final years of Shakespeare between leaving the stage and dying are another curious absence.


In one scene Hamnet returns to “the narrow house, built in a gap, a vacancy”, making it much like the superior kind of historical novel. No-one is at home. “He pauses waiting for an answer but there is nothing: only silence”. “The rest is silence”, as Hamlet says. But there is still the rapturous applause of the audience. 


 Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, Tinder Press, £20


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'Hamnet' review – this deeply felt portrait of grief and love honours Shakespeare's essential humanity

Read our four-star review of Hamnet , adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's hit novel, now in performances at the Garrick Theatre to 17 February 2024.

While the subject matter of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel Hamnet – Shakespeare’s courtship and marriage, the death of his beloved son during the plague, and how that affected his subsequent plays – makes it a natural for stage, this RSC production is actually a tricky feat of adaptation.

O’Farrell’s novel leaps between time periods and has an intimate interiority, so Lolita Chakrabarti does impressive work to find a new framing for the tale, while honouring O’Farrell’s determination to centre Shakespeare’s wife Agnes and his children. This is a fascinating origin story for the Bard, but it’s as much Agnes’s story – perhaps even more so.

Chakrabarti chooses a chronological structure, so we begin with the future spouses meeting at Agnes’s unhappy home, where a young Will Shakespeare is working as a Latin tutor as repayment for his glove-maker father’s debts. But already the action is haunted by later events: a pair of twins dash around the edges of the stage, and Agnes, who has second sight, hears their voices on the breath of the wind.

Twins: that’s just one of numerous Shakespearean tropes that echo throughout the play, particularly as these twins enjoy disguising themselves as one another to fool people. But, unlike Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love , the parallels are looser here, and more emotionally grounded. Chakrabarti honours the man who captured humanity with such visceral authenticity that we still connect to his work now.

She gives us such a portrait of Will’s own messy, bickering family. The second half also introduces theatrical figures like Burbage and Kempe once Will makes it to London, but it’s the domestic scenes, with their earthy details like how you have to soak animal skins in urine before using them to make gloves, that have the most power.

That’s partly thanks to the sensational Madeleine Mantock, who makes Agnes a riveting figure. She always feels otherworldly, and her connection with nature (she instinctively flees to the woods to give birth) suggests that opposition in Shakespeare’s plays between the confining court and the freedom of the forest, or Christian versus Pagan beliefs. Yet her bereavement is all too relatable: her stark delivery of “How will we bear anything now he’s gone?” lingers, unanswerable.

Erica Whyman’s fleet, fluid production (aided by movement director Ayse Tashkiran) has seamless transitions, the company using minimal props to great effect. Some have enormous power: Agnes and Will’s hands are bound with cloth when they wed, and that cloth is later wound around her to create a pregnant belly – and, horrifically, finally becomes a shroud.

The actors playing their children each enter holding a bundle representing them as a baby, so we meet the person immediately and, like Agnes, glimpse their future. Most memorably, Agnes’s agonised birth cries are bookended by her howls of loss. The only misstep is an overly intrusive, manipulative score.

There are strong performances from Tom Varey as dreamy artist Will, Alex Jarrett and Ajani Cabey as the instantly lovable twins, Phoebe Campbell as their stroppy teenage sister, Gabriel Akuwudike as Agnes’s blunt brother, Liza Sadovy as Will’s no-nonsense mother, and, in particular, Peter Wight as Will’s father, whose bullying violence stems from hurt pride at his loss of status in the town.

Tom Piper’s handsome wooden set morphs from homestead to playhouse, bringing Stratford to the West End, while Prema Mehta supplies gorgeously atmospheric lighting. The play has one advantage over the book in its climax: we can actually hear a speech from Hamlet , and feel for ourselves how personal grief possibly infused that great work.

Thanks to the pandemic, our own plague, we too need art to make sense of those bewildering deaths, to offer solace and escape, and to remind us of the fierce resilience of humanity.

Hamnet is at the Garrick Theatre through 17 February 2024. Book Hamnet tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: Hamnet (Photo by Manuel Harlan)

Originally published on Oct 19, 2023 10:25

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Hamnet review: Maggie O’Farrell’s bestseller gets caught between raw power and Tudor twee

The rsc’s adaptation of this women’s prize-winning novel about shakespeare’s son has the whiff of a naff heritage tourist attraction at the start – but the second act will break your heart, article bookmarked.

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Maggie O’Farrell ’s Women’s Prize-winning novel Hamnet persuasively needles at a mystery lodged at the heart of Shakespeare’s biography – his little-documented but seemingly strained relationship with his wife Anne Hathaway – and finds answers in the death of his young son. Staged by Royal Shakespeare Company current artistic director Erica Whyman, this story is an absorbing and emotive (if less than groundbreaking) plunge into the world of Tudor England.

O’Farrell’s book has a deeply satisfying multisensory quality to it, with her extensive historical research worn as lightly as the scent of the medicinal herbs that would have filled Hathaway’s house. Whyman’s production aims for the same sense-filling richness but, although Tom Piper’s wood-beamed set design has a welcome authenticity, other elements fall into the naff territory of a heritage tourist attraction: bursts of cod-Renaissance muzak jangle between scenes, the amplified whispers of children play over speakers, and everything’s lit in a lovely bright golden glow.

Still, adaptor Lolita Chakrabarti tells this story with such deftness that it’s hard not to be immersed in this world. She’s on home territory here – her past successes include another behind-the-scenes glimpse into thespian life, 2012’s Red Velvet – as she effortlessly captures the freighted camaraderie of actorly life. Tom Varey gives young Shakespeare an intriguing vulnerability as he jostles with bumptious, scene-stealing comic actor Will Kempe (Peter Wight) and ambitious actor-manager Richard Burbage (Will Brown), as they risk everything on setting up their theatre in scandalous Southwark.

Shakespeare’s home life is even more compelling. The mysterious Anne (more properly known here by her full name Agnes) is a wild thing he finds in the forest, hunting with her kestrel, delighting in its kills. Then, she’s caught herself, into a married life where her roamings are looked upon with suspicion by her extended family – even if the herbal concoctions she brews heal their ailments. Madeleine Mantock shines with an otherworldly brightness in this role. She loses touch with reality and her prized son, but never becomes pitiable, even as she’s haunted by things past and gone.

Hamnet is a play that achieves something that every historical drama strives for: it shows you a world where people don’t just dress and act differently, but understand the world differently. Ghosts are a part of ordinary life here, a way of coping with grief in a world where plague and illness are constant visitors. And if Hamnet ’s first act periodically descends into romanticised Tudor twee, its second act is utterly heartbreaking as it captures the emotional intensity of a whole family battling the horrors of death as one, an endless fire burning to smoke out the sickness.

It’s almost incomprehensible that Shakespeare’s response to such horrors was to write The Comedy of Errors , a wilfully silly farce infested with identical twins and bad puns. But people are complicated. And Hamnet shows that Shakespeare compartmentalised his life as a way of coping, retreating away from his wife yet drawing on his suppressed pain to write his most haunting passages. It’s a moving commentary on his life, one that restores the family life that has slipped out of his story to its rightful, central place.

Garrick Theatre, until 17 February

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By Maggie O'Farrell

Book review, full book summary and synopsis for Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, a story about Shakespeare's marriage and the death of his son.

Hamnet opens with some historical notes. A couple in Stratford had three children, twins Hamnet and Judith, and daughter Susanna. Hamnet, died in 1596, aged eleven. Roughly four years later, his father writes the play Hamlet (a name that is interchangeable at the time with name Hamnet).

As the story unfolds, the book tells a fictionalized story of William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes and the death of their son Hamnet.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

The three-sentence summary: Hamnet is essentially a family-type drama telling the background between Will Shakespeare and his wife Agnes. It follows their relationship as they deal with their grief over the death of their son Hamnet, the implications of Will's career and Will's infidelity. In the end, Will writes the play Hamlet as a farewell to his son -- it's a play where the father dies instead of the son and the ghost's final line is "Remember me."

(The book opens with a few historical notes . A couple in Stratford had three children, twins Hamnet and Judith, and daughter Susanna. Hamnet, died in 1596, aged eleven. Roughly four years later, his father writes the play Hamlet , interchangeable at the time with name Hamnet.)

The chapters jump back and forth between two timelines. In 1596, Hamnet is a young boy whose twin sister Judith has suddenly fallen ill. Hamnet searches for an adult, but the only person home is his drunk and abusive grandfather John Shakespeare. John is a disgraced glove maker, due to his illicit wool trading, among other things. Hamnet's father (William Shakespeare, though he is never named in the book) is in London, as usual. Hamnet's mother, Agnes, is away. He falls asleep next to Judith, crying.

In an earlier timeline, John Shakespeare owes a debt to a (deceased) sheep farmer. John and the farmer's (second) wife Joan have an arrangement for his son William to work off the debt by tutoring Joan's sons. It results in the tutor (Will Shakespeare) meeting Agnes. Agnes and her brother Bartholomew are the farmer's children with his first wife. Agnes has special abilities, where she is able to divine information about people, and she is also good with plants. Agnes and William fall in love.

In 1596, Agnes finally comes home and tries to treat Judith, confirming that she has "the pestilence" (the plague). The doctor shows up and warns them that no one is to leave the house until it has passed. When nothing works, Eliza (William's sister) writes to her brother in London to tell him to come home to say goodbye.

In an earlier timeline, Agnes becomes pregnant. John senses a business opportunity and strikes a bargain with Joan and Bartholomew regarding the debt, wool and Agnes. Soon, Agnes and the tutor are married. The baby, Susanna, is born. Agnes notices that her husband is unhappy as an errand-boy for his father. Agnes comes up with a plan to get John to send William to London. The plan works. Though Agnes is pregnant again, but William leaves for London, with plans to reunite once he is settled there.

An interlude traces the path of the disease. It involves a chance meeting of a glassmaker in Venice and a cabin boy on a ship. The cabin boy brings a disease-ridden flea onto the ship after interacting with a monkey in Alexandria. The pestilence ravages the ship. After the glassmaker loads his cargo in Venice, fleas end up in those boxes, which is unloaded in London. One box makes its way to a dressmaker. Her neighbor's daughter, Judith, is curious about it. The dressmaker lets Judith unpackage the disease-ridden box.

In 1596, Hamnet sees his dying sister and wants to trick death into taking him instead. He crawls into bed next to her. Agnes is soon surprised to discover that Judith is looking better, but Hamnet is barely breathing. She tries every remedy, but he dies.

In the earlier timeline, William sells some gloves to actors at a theater. Soon, he is acting (and later writing plays) and no longer dealing in gloves. In Stratford, Agnes is surprised to have twins, though she is worried because she has always known she would have only two children. Judith is the second one out, and she is weak and smaller than Hamnet. Agnes delays going to London until Judith is stronger, but Judith continues to be weak and sickly. The years pass, but the move to London never happens.

In 1596, William comes home to find Hamnet, not Judith, dead. Hamnet is buried. William is heartbroken. The house is full of reminders of Hamnet, and he is worried about the life he has built in London. William soon goes back to London and does not come home for a long time. Judith wonders if her resemblance to Hamnet is what keeps him away. Agnes grieves, too.

A year after Hamnet's death, William finally comes home. Agnes senses that he has been with other women. William apologizes for everything and decides to buy his family a house here in Stratford since it is clear that they will not be coming to London. He buys the largest house in the town, though he still only visits two or three times a year. As the girls grow up, Judith develops a love of plants like her mother. Susanna helps out with her father's affairs in terms of purchasing land, rental income, and other business affairs.

One day, Agnes learns that William has written a play (Hamlet) named after their son. Upset, Agnes goes (with Bartholomew) to London to find William. She finds him at the playhouse before a performance of Hamlet. As she watches the play, she realizes that her husband has written a play where the father is the one that dies instead of the child. In his play, "Hamlet"/Hamnet gets to live. The book ends with the last line that the ghost delivers, "Remember me".

For more detail, see the full Chapter-by-Chapter Summary .

If this summary was useful to you, please consider supporting this site by leaving a tip ( $2 , $3 , or $5 ) or joining the Patreon !

Book Review

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (or, Hamnet and Judith in some markets) is one of books in recent memory that I’ve been genuinely really excited to read.

After reading Bill Bryson’s wonderful (non-fiction) biography of Shakespeare , I’ve been interested in reading more historical fiction about the famous Bard, but haven’t found much to catch my eye. I tried a couple that I disliked enough that I gave on the pursuit for a while, but Hamnet has gotten great reviews and it sounded like a unique take on Shakespeare.

Hamnet is largely told with a focus on Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare. (Anne Hathaway is the name that’s commonly used, but Agnes and Anne were commonly interchangeable at that time.) The death of Hamnet, their only male child, due to the plague features prominently in the story as well.

O’Farrell never actually refers to William Shakespeare by name, which helps to detach the story from all the mythology that comes with Shakespeare and his reputation. It also helps to reinforce that, although he is still a main character here, he’s not the main character.

O’Farrell’s Hamnet is a work of historical fiction, with a lot of emphasis on the word fiction . The reality is that what’s really known about Shakespeare is spotty at best (if you want to know more, I’ll reference Bryson’s Shakespeare biography here again), but it still makes for a delightful story to wonder about his life. (I also suspect that this story wouldn’t stand up to careful scrutiny about Shakespeare and all the details of his life, see the Historical Accuracy section below, but I’m not enough of a Shakespearean scholar to say for sure.)

Instead, facts serve as the rough contours of this book that gets filled in colorfully and vividly by this moving and beautifully written story. It’s not a complex or even terribly clever rendition of Agnes and William’s story, but O’Farrell tells it in a way that’s powerful and alive.

Quick (Minor) Criticism

The character of William Shakespeare in this book is humanized and made smaller. I understand why O’Farrell might want to do that, to avoid writing yet another tribute to the greatness of the towering figure of the William Shakespeare. However, I have to admit that this aspect of the book wasn’t entirely satisfying to me. Unlike his portrayal in the book, ultimately, he wasn’t just a guy who became financially comfortable writing plays. Instead, he wrote masterpieces and a lot of them.

Apart from a very brief section where he plays a quick word game with his sister Eliza, there’s nothing in the book indicating that this is or was a brilliant person. Instead, he’s depicted as a disappointment to his parents, an absent father, a weakling and kind of an unmotivated loser in general, all of which made it hard for me to view this as a story that was about Shakespeare at all. I understand this wasn’t intended to be an origin story about William Shakespeare, but I also can’t imagine that this useless lump of a man described here would become the mythological creature that he is.

As a final note, even with that criticism, Hamnet not even being longlisted for the Booker Prize still says a lot more about a deficiencies of the Booker Prize’s judges panel (in my opinion) than it does about Maggie O’Farrell’s newest novel, which is well worth a read.

Historical Accuracy

As mentioned previously, there’s definitely a lot of fiction mixed up in here.

For example, a colorful interlude in the book involves a petrified Hamnet and a doctor wearing the distinctively creepy beaked plague mask that you’ve probably seen before. The problem is, in the book this happens in 1596, and the design is commonly attributed to Charles de Lorme , chief physician to Louis XIII, who was born in 1584. It seems unlikely he designed it when he was 12. Furthermore, historians have noted that there’s no evidence the Plague Doctor costume was ever used in London . (It was primarily used in 17th/18th century Italy and France.)

I’m not a historian — not even a history buff, really — so if I can catch this fairly obvious mistake, I’m certain there are others in here as well.

Did any of this spoil my enjoyment of the book? Not really, but again, history buffs and Shakespearean scholars may feel differently.

Read it or Skip it?

Hamnet is a moving and uncomplicated tale about a marriage, a family and the loss of a child. It focuses on the character of Agnes and offers unique rendition of Shakespeare’s life.

I enjoyed the story quite a bit, the writing is lovely, and there’s a lot to like about Maggie O’Farrell’s vivid and engaging version of Agnes and William’s story.

I found the portrayal of William Shakespeare here a bit unconvincing and I think there are likely some historical inaccuracies here, but it still works splendidly as a work of historical fiction due to O’Farrell’s storytelling abilities. It’s an intimate and emotional book that I think historical fiction lovers can appreciate.

See Hamnet on Amazon.

Book Excerpt

Read the first pages of Hamnet

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See Everything We Know About the 'Hamnet' Adaptation

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Thanks for your thoughts. I will put this one on my TBR list.

Hi rosi! And thanks for reading, hope all is well with you!

Very emotional moments in the book. The love of a brother for his twin sister is amazing. The only other such example I know is when the firs Meghal emperor Babur was sitting near his son Hamayun’s death bed.He prayed to God to take his life and save his son and that did happen.

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This timid RSC adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Shakespearean tearjerker fails to capture the book’s magic

Time Out says

A stage version of Maggie O’Farrell’s 1.5m-selling 2020 novel ‘Hamnet’ feels like it should be an effortless home run for the RSC, being a sort of origin story for William Shakespeare that smartly puts the focus on his wife Agnes (better known to us as Anne) and the tragic early death of their eponymous son. But this adaptation is a palpable miss. 

I’m sure there are extremely pragmatic reasons for playwright Lolita Chakrabarti’s abandonment of the book’s non-linear structure and more experimental flourishes. But in doing so ‘Hamnet’ loses pathos and intrigue, turning it into an episodic, linear account of shamanic Stratford-upon-Avon lass Agnes (Madeleine Mantock), her romance with and marriage to overeducated local boy William (Tom Varey), and their subsequent parenthood and loss.

The book has Hamnet as a character from the beginning; in Erica Whyman’s inexcusably pedestrian period production he doesn’t even turn up until the second half. It’s consequently much less sad when he dies, more of a plot point than a tearjerker. And where on the page Shakespeare is a distant figure seen only through Agnes’s eyes, that sense is never achieved here. Again, I fully appreciate why it’s difficult to replicate in a play, but the character feels overexposed here, which really drains the book’s brilliant final scene of power.

The cast is solid, and Oguz Kaplangi’s electronic score is both powerfully atmospheric and a much-needed note of modernity. But considering how expansive and ambitious some RSC adaptations are, ‘Hamnet’ is disappointingly meek. This surely could and should have been much braver theatre.

Been there, done that? Think again, my friend.

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The Land of Lost Things by Andy Griffiths review – a madcap adventure for young readers

The first in the highly anticipated post-Treehouse series delights in silliness, imagination and problem-solving

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H ow do you start afresh after a runaway success? Adventures Unlimited is Andy Griffiths’ answer, his new children’s book series after the beloved 13-book Treehouse series with the illustrator and collaborator Terry Denton. The first instalment in Adventures Unlimited, The Land of Lost Things, introduces an imaginative and madcap world of adventures for newly independent readers. Characters named You and Me embark on an adventure in their homemade adventure suits – cardboard box hats, toilet rolls, uggs and utility belts for comfort and function.

The action-packed adventure, in which Me is searching for their lost lucky rabbit’s foot, sees the pair stuck in the land of lost things. With awesome inventions and fantastical vehicles, You and Me travel across the land, meeting zany characters as they go: a bull who has lost his temper and is trying to learn to control it, and a flying watch who looks at its own wrist to check the time. Naturally, before Me can find the rabbit foot, the crew become lost and are interrupted by a couple of swashbuckling villains: the smarmy Johnny Knucklehead, his twin, Jimmy Knucklehead, and the Pirate Rabbit, all of whom are out to steal treasure and stop You, Me and their growing crew from getting home.

Known for his outrageous humour and imagination, Griffiths’ latest is no different. The book reads almost like improv comedy, every unlikely mishap having an outrageous solution that will probably lead to more trouble. This recursion is perhaps a little tiring for adult readers but it will delight Griffiths’ young fans. And although this is a new series, every lovable part of his absurd imagination remains strong and his creativity knows no bounds, as the adventurers encounter the odorous Lost Foot Empawrium and pirates on the high seas.

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Part of the subtle brilliance of this book is its narration, which begins with Me reminiscing about their previous adventures with You (“Remember the time we flew to the moon without a rocket?”), establishing the kind of adventures this series might cover. It has all the comfort of an older sibling or a parent sharing in imaginative play. This is harmonious with reading aloud and leaves room for the roles to be reversed, allowing the reader to grow into playing both parts and eventually pass the story on to a friend or younger sibling.

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After nearly 30 years of working together, Griffiths parts ways with Terry Denton, with Bill Hope taking up the reins as Griffiths’ co-conspirator. It’s not quite a graphic novel; Hope’s dynamic illustrations enhance the wacky plot, while sometimes providing extra details to linger on a page for longer, like snarky comments from tiny insects and crustaceans witnessing the story. There isn’t a single page without illustration, which will bolster the confidence of younger readers. Occasionally a whole spread will be illuminated by Hope’s illustrations alone, which gives the artist a chance to show off his own humour, such as the dozens of buttons in the uncrashable car, including a “button button” and a “popcorn nozzle”.

The illustrations sometimes repeat the dialogue in speech bubbles, which is at times tedious, but gives young readers a moment to visualise the action and find the meaning of unfamiliar words (the language isn’t all that challenging, really, but some words might stretch younger readers).

The Land of Lost Things is a confident new era for Griffiths and the scope of You and Me’s adventures is truly unlimited. And we know they will go looking for another soon – a sequel is already confirmed for 2025.

The Land of Lost Things by Andy Griffiths and Bill Hope is out now in Australia (Pan Macmillan, $16.99) and will be published in the UK on 5 September (£12.99)

• Children and teenagers
• Australian book reviews
• Australian books

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‘Alien: Romulus’ Review: Go Ahead, Scream (No One Can Hear You)

The seventh installment of the series centers on Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a contract worker in an outer-space mining colony, and her friend Andy (David Jonsson), an android.

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By Manohla Dargis

Some movie sequels take a series in new directions, adding original ideas, new characters, different approaches and, at times, heft and myth. Other sequels are more like filler. They help plug the spaces between movies and keep the franchise’s brand in the public’s imagination, all while trying to make some cash. The newest “Alien” movie, “Alien: Romulus,” the seventh installment in this storied, apparently inexhaustible cycle of films, is perfectly adequate filler.

Since Ridley Scott’s “Alien” burst into gripping, gruesome life in 1979, the series has generated hits and misses, tankers of acidic slobber and a sizable body count. The franchise turned Sigourney Weaver into an icon and gave David Fincher his start as a film director. As the movies piled up, they also reminded you that the original “Alien” is a masterpiece and that even the lesser follow-ups that Scott directed, “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant,” have their virtues, among them striking visuals, filmmaking intelligence, a curiosity about the cosmos, and a twinned appreciation for the mystery of life and the inevitability of death.

“Alien: Romulus” is a nuts-and-bolts action-adventure horror story with boos and splatter. It doesn’t have much on its mind but it has some good jump scares along with a disappointingly bland heroine, a sympathetic android and the usual collection of disposable characters who are unduly killed by slavering, rampaging extraterrestrials. In series terms, the events in “Romulus” take place between those in “Alien” and those in the second film, “Aliens.” Written and directed by James Cameron, and crowded with big guns and bulging biceps, “Aliens” is largely notable for its swaggering action sequences that have become de rigueur in the series and for giving Weaver’s Ripley a muscular makeover while turning her into a surrogate mom.

Directed by Fede Álvarez (“ Don’t Breathe ”), who shares script credit with Rodo Sayagues, “Romulus” tells a familiar, half-baked story of adversity, gritty perseverance, quick thinking and a drag-down fight for survival. It centers on Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a 20-something contract worker in a grim outer-space mining colony. There, along with Andy (David Jonsson), a glitchy android that she loves and calls her brother, Rain yearns to leave the sunless planet and the punishing conditions that condemned both her parents to early deaths. She soon gets her chance when some other friends share that they’re planning an escape in an abandoned space station that has conveniently drifted above their planet.

Álvarez gets through this setup economically, and it isn’t long before Rain and company are creeping through the station’s eerily empty corridors, exploring its topsy-turvy rooms and pondering its not particularly mysterious mysteries. (Álvarez spends a lot of time showing off his sets, which are more engaging than the writing.) Spaeny, who played Priscilla Presley in Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” is an appealing performer — her youth and slight frame deceptively suggest near-childlike vulnerability — and you’re on Rain’s side straightaway. What keeps you rooted there is largely a matter of film-going habit and franchise familiarity: She’s the heroine and Ripley’s symbolic heir, after all, and the monsters are coming.

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