Title: Hamnet
Author: Maggie O'Farrell
Genre: Historical
ISBN: 978-1472223821
Publisher: Tinder Press
Publication Date: 2020
Publisher Description: On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?
Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London.
Neither parent knows that Hamnet will not survive the week.
Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright: a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.
Literary Atelier Review: This novel is honestly a beautiful work of genius. O'Farrell intelligently and convincingly creates a narrative of The Bard's family life before he moved down to London to become the English language's most celebrated dramatist. Shakespeare's inner life is famously obscure to historians. Very little is known about the man himself which is perhaps part of why his work has endured for hundreds of years. Would Shakespeare have made it in our current world where an artist can be 'cancelled' for their personal views? Is it perhaps better to know very little about the artists we love? I certainly think so.
With this lack of historical primary sources O'Farrell has used what we do know about Shakespeare to write about his family, his children and his wife Anne Hathaway. Crucially, the novel does not put Shakespeare at the centre of the story. O'Farrell does not even name him. Instead we learn about how he and Hathaway might have got to know one another, got married and what might have led him to move to London and create his brilliant plays, in particular Hamlet, which is crucial to this novel.
As a huge Shakespeare fan I was always going to enjoy this novel. What I hadn't counted on was how emotional it would make me feel. That is naturally a testament to the great literary mastery of O'Farrell. It is also because there are facts about Shakespeare's family life which we often ignore. The loss of a child, the geographical distance from his family for most of his working life. These are aspects of his reality which we rarely consider but surely must have impacted him greatly. In Hamnet Maggie O'Farrell explores an idea of how this may have affected him not only emotionally but also creatively.