3 Scenes From HAMNET That Changed My Life

this is shakespeare erasure, and i'm here for it

“If I see that bloody Bard’s name once — JUST ONCE — you’re all fired,” said Maggie O’Farrell to her publishing team.

“But- but Maggie!” cried her editor, aghast and close to tears, “this is a story about Shakespeare’s wife and children! It’s impossible not to mention him at all!”

Maggie, unfazed by this sad display of hysterics, tossed her brilliant red curls. This sort of flimsy, cannot-do attitude would never be tolerated back home. “Sarah,” she began, as patiently as she could. “For the fifth time, why would it be titled Hamnet if it weren’t about Hamnet’s mother?!”

With a click of her tongue and an indignant scoff, Maggie sweeps out of the meeting room, leaving the rest of her team gaping after her in confusion.

Okay, I’m 99.9999% sure that conversation didn’t happen. Still, I’d imagine this must’ve been a point of contention at some juncture in the publishing process of Hamnet, because censoring the name of the God of English Literature is a very serious offense. Blasphemous, in fact.

But Maggie O’Farrell, who was born in Northern Ireland, and grew up in Scotland and Wales, is trained in the subtle art of Giving Zero Fucks. She did what had to be done, and she did it well.

Hamnet, released in the pandemic-rotten year of our Lord 2020, is a very relevant fictionalisation of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, who was the (alleged) inspiration for one of his most brilliant plays — yep, you guessed it! — Hamlet.

But what does a tragedy about a fictional Danish prince, whose uncle murders his father and marries his mother to seize the throne, have anything to do with the 11-year-old son of Shakespeare, living his quaint, unbothered life with his mother and sisters in humble Stratford-upon-Avon?

The answer is nothing at all.

Let me explain.

*Note: I don’t really consider these spoilers since there’s nothing much to spoil? There’s no big twist or gasp-worthy villain reveal. But I do discuss some major plot points below — read forth at your own discretion!

❛There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.❜ — Boring writing?

This is my second attempt at reading this. The first time, I DNF-ed about 10 pages in. After The Secret History sent me into a rage-induced reading slump, I decided to give this another go. Once I powered through the somewhat slow introduction, I found that reading about 1500s pastoral life was not as dull as I thought.

As O’Farrell put to her team, Hamnet, despite bearing the boy’s namesake, is actually about his mother, Agnes (a.k.a Anne Hathaway, a.k.a Shakespeare’s wife).

Fun fact: Depending on which scholar you ask, Anne’s real name was Agnes, because that was the name put down in her father’s will instead of ‘Anne’.

Agnes is the draught-making, pestle-grinding, Kestral-whispering, no-nonsense mother of three children: Susanna, and twins Judith and Hamlet. She is someone who can “look at a person and see right into their very soul. She will take a person for who they are, not what they are not or ought to be.” Um? Queen??

Anyway, after the birth of their first daughter, Susanna, Shakespeare, feeling bored and constrained by their rural life, pulls a Disney’s Belle and departs for adventure in the great wide somewhere (London, lol). Agnes is left to her own devices, and gives birth Judith and Hamnet in his absence.

When Judith is infected with the plague, Hamnet, to save his sister, ‘takes her place’ on her deathbed and gives up his life for her. Don’t ask me how or why this happens — blame it on Late Middle Ages folklore-y stuff.

With Shakesie living his best life in London, Agnes is left to deal with the overwhelming grief alone, while being expected to keep the wheels of the house turning. Hence, we spend a good deal of time on Agnes keeping house, tending the garden, taking care of the children, and selling homemade cures to the good people of the village, so it’s easy to see why people might find this boring or meandering.

But you see, Hamnet is the sort of book in which nothing much happens, but also everything.

Read my quick review of the book on Goodreads

The story is told through an omniscient narrator in the present tense, creating a tense and claustrophobic atmosphere. Despite its ‘mundane’ subject matter, the overall tone is imbued with an almost testy sense of urgency that ramped up to its climax, and even then it never really eases up. I wasn’t anxious, but definitely enraptured.

O’Farrell is also a whiz at making the most tedious and pedestrian appear more vivid and intense. Even passing feelings that are usually skimmed over become acutely visceral, whittled down to the most minute details as if viewing them under a microscope.

It is the oddest sensation, as if something is being drawn from her, like a splinter in the skin or infection from a wound, at the same time as something else is being poured into her. She cannot work out if she is being made to give or receive something.

Many reviews take issue with this seemingly-affectatious writing. IMO, it takes nerve to even attempt to access the minds of characters one may not have a direct connection with (e.g. 11-year-old child, or a repressed male wannabe playwright) AND convey those ideas in a simple yet poignant and fluid way. All while keeping to the period setting, by the way!

Which is why I want to talk about three unforgettable scenes from this book that will stick with me forever, each for different reasons.

❛Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.❜ — The Arrival of the Plague

Around the halfway mark, O’Farrell does a very contentious thing and interrupts the so-far unvaried pace to describe how the pestilence, which had been ravaging the rest of Europe, reaches Warwickshire — specifically Judith — in the summer of 1596.

It begins in Alexandria, where an unnamed cabin boy meets a man with a pet monkey, which is, unfortunately, carrying the culprit flea.

Here, O’Farrell dedicates a lot of time (and words) to the journey of the flea. And we all know words in a novel are a precious commodity. In the name of efficiency, many writers don’t waste them on minor characters like the cabin boy and the monkey.

But O’Farrell does it anyway.

The cabin boy—a young lad from a Manx family—looks at the monkey and the monkey looks at the boy. The animal puts its head on one side, eyes bead-bright, and chatters softly, a slight judder of sound, its voice light and fluting.

It reminds the boy of an instrument his uncle plays at gatherings on the Isle of Man, and for a moment he is back at his sister’s churching, at his cousin’s wedding, back in the safety of his kitchen at home, where his mother would be gutting a fish, telling him to mind his boots, to wipe his shirt front, to eat up now. Where his uncle would be playing his glute and everyone speaking the language he had grown up with, and no one would be yelling at him or kicking him or telling him what to do, and later on there might be dancing and singing.

For O’Farrell, the cabin boy’s story is as important as that of the main characters. He is a whole person with a life outside Hamnet’s, Agnes’s, and Judith’s. Nobody’s story will be erased — not on her watch! Well, except Shakespeare’s.

She even kind of gives the monkey a backstory:

The boy holds out his hand to the monkey and the monkey takes it. Its grip is surprisingly strong: it speaks of urgency, or maltreatment, of need, of craving for kind company.

Laughing, the boy puts up a hand to be sure of what is happening. Yes, there is a monkey sitting on his head. He feels himself fill with numerous warring urges: to run about the dockside, shouting to his crewmates, Look at me, look; to tell his little sister this, to say, You’ll never guess what happened to me, a monkey sat on my head.

I’ve recently watched a couple of documentaries on the Black Plague, and it was truly one of the darkest, SICKEST times in recorded history. And not in the ‘woah cool’ kind of way. In the ‘wtf how do I un-know a fact’ kind of way.

It’s unclear if O’Farrell is referring to the B.P. since the novel is set a whole 200 years after that. Still, this tiny moment of one boy’s innocent, momentary joy and one monkey’s mute yearning for kindness starkly juxtaposes the magnitude of the horrors these two cuties are about to wreak upon England. 😔

Knowing the utter shit show that is about to unfold, what is supposed to be a sweet moment created a sinking sense of foreboding in me, and I felt so terrible and sorrowful reading it. I even made a little annotation here: “So much beauty in a fateful moment. So much story to the characters, like watching a documentary about the plague.”

O’Farrell’s attention to detail is nothing short of commendable. Hell, even the flea (!!!) gets a few seconds of fame:

Four or five fleas, one of which once belonged to the monkey, will remain where the cat lay. The monkey’s flea is a clever one, intent on its survival and success in the world.

I mean, how does one give personality to an insect?? No, Kafka doesn’t count.

❛There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.❜ — The Death of Hamnet

Writing death is difficult. I often see authors cop out by describing the death of a character from their loved one’s point of view — rarely do they explore what goes on in the mind of the one dying.

Of course, O’Farrell jumps right in with grace and panache, writing about Hamnet’s death from his own POV. This scene had me in absolute shambles.

His body sweats, its humours expressing outwards through the skin, as if emptying itself.

Hamnet’s mind, however, is in another place. For a long time, he could hear his mother and his sisters, his aunt and his grandmother. He was aware of them, around him, giving him medicines, speaking to him, touching his skin. Now, though, they have receded. He is elsewhere, in a landscape he doesn’t recognise.

It is cool here, and quiet. He is alone. Snow is falling, softly, irrevocably, on and on. It pils up on the ground around him, covering paths and steps and rocks; it weights down the branches of trees; it transforms everything into whiteness, blankness, stasis.

The silence, the cool, the altered silver light of it is something more than soothing to him. He only wants to lie down in this snow, to rest himself; his legs are tired, his arms ache. To lie, to surrender himself, to stretch out in this glistening, thick white blanket: what relief it would give him. Something is telling him that he must not lie down, he must not give in to this desire. What could it be? Why shouldn’t he rest?

No fancy words, no typical, cheesy light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel imagery. Just calm, peaceful snow and a tired 11-year-old boy tired from fighting a butcher bacterium. (Didja get my Sandman reference :D)

As if that wasn’t heartbreaking enough, O’Farrell also has to tell us how much Hamnet DOESN’T want to die, which provides some nuance to the scene, but also, yes, makes everything infinitely worse.

Anyone, Eliza is thinking, who describes dying as “slipping away” or “peaceful” has never witnessed it happen. Death is violent, death is a struggle. The body clings to life, as ivy to a wall, and will not easily let go, will not surrender its grip without a fight.

And then, the actual death happens.

All at once, he stops shaking and a great soundlessness falls over the room. His body is suddenly motionless, his gaze focused on something far above him. Hamnet, in his place of snow and ice, is lowering himself down to the ground, allowing his knees to fold under him.

He is placing first one palm, then the other, on to the crisp, crystalline skin of snow, and how welcoming it feels, how right. It is not too cold, not too hard. He lies down; he presses his cheek to the softness of the snow. The whiteness of it is glaring, jarring to his eyes, so he closes them, just for a moment, just enough, so he may rest and gather his strength. He is not going to sleep, he is not. He will carry on. But he needs to rest, for a moment. He opens his eyes, to reassure himself the world is still there, and then lets them close. Just for now.

And there, by the fire, held in the arms of his mother, in the room in which he learnt to crawl, to eat, to walk, to speak, Hamnet takes his last breath.

He draws it in, he lets it out.

Then there is silence, stillness. Nothing more.

It’s like you want to stop reading because it’s so upsetting but you can’t. And you’re yelling at the book, screaming at Hamnet, Don’t lie down!!! Don’t you dare close your eyes! STOP, STOP RIGHT NOW!!! But he doesn’t, and then it’s over and your soul is empty and life is a meaningless void.

❛Remember me.❜ — The Aftermath

Yeah, it gets worse.

After Hammie bb dies, O’Farrell moves away from big, overwhelming emotions, and the story shifts gently to become a subtle exploration of mental health. And there is no fairytale ending where everyone magically moves on and things return to normal. In fact, quite the opposite happens.

Through the first half of the novel, we see how Shakespeare coaxes Agnes from her shell. Coming from an abusive household, Agnes’s new family helps her open up and grow into her own person.

After her son’s death, Agnes recedes slowly into the abyss of sadness, doesn’t eat, doesn’t leave her room for days. This is worsened when Shakespeare returns from London and, consumed by his own grief, is unable to provide her with the emotional support she needs. Her grief is so debilitating, it feels like one multiple giant steps back for both Agnes and the reader. It is frustrating. It is heartbreaking. It is realistic.

Agnes searches for him. […] She seats herself in his father’s chair, placed on the very spot he died. She goes out into the frost-gilded yard and stands under the bare plum tree and speaks aloud: Hamnet, Hamnet, are you there?

Nothing. No one.

She cannot understand it. She, who can hear the dead, the unspoken, the unknown, who can touch a person an dlisten to the creep of disease along the veins, can sense the dark velvetpress of a tumour on a lung or a liver, can read a person’s eye and heart like some can read a book. She cannot find, cannot locate the spirit of her own child.

She waits in these places, she keeps her ears tuned, she sifts through the sounds and wants and disgruntlements of other noisier beings, but she cannot hear him, the only one she wants to hear. There is nothing. Just silence.

Now, the reason for making Agnes a ‘witch-like’ character becomes apparent. Agnes, who has a cheat sheet for every illness and wound, has finally met the one force she cannot reckon with. Nothing is as absolute and non-negotiable as death, and for once, Agnes, who has never been beyond the village and is still very much rooted in tradition, doesn’t know how to cope.

Suddenly, ‘affectatious’ becomes ‘affecting’ as we’re immersed stark-naked into the raw confusion and agony Hamnet’s family goes through. Young Judith grapples with survivor’s guilt as she pines futilely for her twin brother, and Shakespeare… well, he does what any bereaved playwright would do. He writes a bloody play. Aaaand doesn’t tell his wife.

When Agnes gets ahold of a poster for her hubby’s new project, it is the final straw that prompts her to leave the safety and comfort of the village, and make the long, arduous journey to London on horseback, so she can give Shakesie a good bollocking.

It is there, at the Globe, that Agnes watches for the first time the play we have all come to know and love. Full circle, babyyy!

At the end of it, Agnes stretches out a hand, “as if wishing to pierce the boundary between audience and players, real life and play.” Very clever, O’Farrell. Because THAT is the beauty of Hamlet, the play that isn’t really about a fictional Danish prince whose uncle murders his father and marries his mother to seize the throne — but about grief, ghosts, and the pain and joys of being (or not being).

The rest is silence.