I had never read anything by Maggie O’Farrell, but her novel ‘Hamnet’ was allocated for this month’s reading group, so I was very pleased to spot it at a church book sale a couple of months ago. The blurb on the back makes it clear that the novel is about William Shakespeare and his family, and if I hadn’t read the blurb it’s explained in a brief note at the front of the book. It’s also mentioned in the blurb that 11-year-old Hamnet is not going to survive.
So I wasn’t really sure what to expect, since the plot of the story appeared to have been given without my even opening the book. It’s not a short novel - over 350 pages - but we meet Hamnet in chapter one, hurrying around his home and neighbourhood desperate to find an adult, because his twin sister Judith is sick. She has the bubonic plague which is ravaging European cities in this period, and although it’s not yet rampant in Stratford, where they live, we learn much later in the book how it reached them.
However the plot follows two different time periods so it’s not just a long drawn-out week while Hamnet becomes sick. As well as this story, there’s a backstory, beginning when his mother Agnes and his father have not yet met. His father - who is not in fact named through the whole novel - lives with his parents and siblings, often abused verbally and physically by his father John because he’s a bit of a dreamer. John makes gloves but his son is an academic, and mainly works as a tutor.
Agnes lives not far away, a somewhat eccentric, mystical young woman who has uncanny intuition and some healing powers. Her brothers are being tutored, she and her future husband meet…and as neither of their families wants them to get married, they take matters into their own hands and force the situation.
So this story runs alongside the week before Hamnet dies, going rather faster, following Agnes through her two pregnancies. In this part of the novel we also see how her husband becomes increasingly frustrated with his life, and eventually goes to work in London, returning home whenever he can, but this is not very often.
It’s good historical fiction, using the small amount of information known about Shakespeare and his family, weaving the plot around it in an entirely convincing way. It’s also extremely well-written. The pace is good, the tension builds in both parts of the plot, which are woven together cleverly, each one pausing to give place to the other at significant points. I’m not generally a huge fan of historical fiction, but I found it gripping, and read long sections at each sitting, finding it difficult to put down.
I knew, of course, that Hamnet was not going to survive although it wasn’t clear whether his twin sister would; she’s quite frail, we learn, and it takes him too long to find his mother. Not that her healing potions are necessarily any good at all against the bubonic plague…
When it eventually happens, the writing is poignant and moving, beautifully written without gratuitous or graphic detail. Agnes’s grief and pain are all too believable. The book continues afterwards, moving onwards and eventually demonstrating how Hamnet’s father manages to deal with his terrible loss, creating one of his best-known plays. It’s not known whether he did this in memory of his son, but it seems likely given the name of the play, which is so close to his son’s name (and apparently a variant spelling of it).
As social history the book is good, too, the settings believable without feeling researched. We see poverty, and cramped living conditions, as well as sicknesses that cannot be healed in that era. Yet it’s sensitively shown, with people who are for the most part positive and supportive of each other.
I had not expected to like it, but have no hesitation in recommending ‘Hamnet’ highly to anyone interested in a possible interpretation of events in Shakespeare’s family life, or indeed anyone who likes history fiction set in the first Elizabethan era.
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