Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

This is a book I’ve wanted to write for a very long time. I first heard about the existence of Hamnet, the boy, when I was studying the play ‘Hamlet’ at school for my Higher English exam. My teacher mentioned in passing that Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet who died several years before the play was written. I was immediately struck by the echo of these names. What did it mean for a father to call a play after his dead son?

He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place.

These lines came from observations of my children daydreaming. I’m always fascinated to witness this evidence of their inner likes, the workings of their imagination; I love to see them drift away from the quotidian world around them to a place all of their own. It’s such a crucial part of childhood – that other, parallel world. Adulthood, too, actually. We all need time for our brains to switch off, to go into a low gear.

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

I think we all have moments in our pasts which constantly return to us – a decision or conversation or split-second upon which so much hinges. Perhaps we have several. I was just imagining that Agnes would never be able to forget the fact that Hamnet and Judith were left alone at this point in their story. It would never rest easily with her.

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.

Hamnet grew up in a multi-generational household, with his mother, his paternal grandparents, an aunt and uncles who were not much older than him. Mary Shakespeare, William’s mother, gave birth to no fewer than eight children, four boys and four girls. Two of the girls died in infancy and another at the age of eight. William was her oldest surviving child; at the time he got married, his youngest brother, Edmund, was a toddler. So the Shakespeare children – Hamnet, his twin Judith, and his older sister, Susanna – would have been surrounded by an aunt and uncles, many of whom would have assumed a blurred parental/sibling role towards them.

Later, and for the rest of her life, she will think that if she had left there and then, if she had gathered her bags, her plants, her honey, and taken the path home, if she had heeded her abrupt, nameless unease, she might have changed what happened next. If she had left her swarming bees to their own devices, their own ends, instead of working to coax them back into their hives, she might have headed off what was coming.

How much would Agnes regret not returning home? How much would she regret and castigate herself for this? It’s almost unbearable to contemplate.

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.

Some scholars believe that Joan Hathaway was Agnes’ real mother; others claim she was the stepmother. There is little concrete evidence to support or discredit either theory, only a hiatus in the otherwise regular birth-dates of the Hathaway children. Either way, as the eldest daughter of the farm, Agnes would have been expected to care for the younger children, to keep the house clean, to cook for the family and the shepherds. This passage is, for me, about the effect of the lack of love while growing-up, and how this can be absorbed and internalised by a child. I really enjoyed creating the character of Hamnet’s mother. We are so accustomed to calling her ‘Anne Hathaway’ but her father’s will clearly names her as ‘Agnes’. That was an electrifying, defining moment in the writing of the book. In giving her what is presumably her birth name, I’m asking readers to discard what we think we know about her and see her anew. If you ask someone what they know about Shakespeare’s wife, you’ll probably receive one of two answers. Either: he hated her. Or: she tricked him into marriage. Historians and biographers and critics have for a long time inexplicably vilified and criticized her, creating a very misogynistic version of her. I wanted to persuade people to think again, to not rush to conclusions. And their evidence? Hathaway sceptics all fall back on the same overhandled facts: that Shakespeare only left her his ‘second-best bed’ in his will, that he was eighteen to her twenty-six when they married, that their first child was born only six months after the wedding. When I began my novel about Hamnet and his link to the play ‘Hamlet’, I envisaged it as a book about fathers and sons. I was unprepared for the Hathaway vitriol in much of what I was reading. Why, I kept wondering as I worked my way through histories and biographies, are we instructed to hate her? Is it a case of simple misogyny or is there something more complex at work here? Why do we desire the Bard to be unhappily married?

The husband, standing straight as a reed now, arms folded, lips pressed together, shakes his head. “What did she say?” “That you had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she’d ever met.”

I wanted to give readers a new perspective on Shakespeare’s marriage, to suggest that William and Agnes loved each other, that theirs was a partnership. This idea expressed in this excerpt is drawn from my conjecture about how Shakespeare might have been seen in rural Warwickshire when he was young. I think he must have stuck out a mile. We know now what was inside him, what his imagination and intellect were capable of, but people then might have considered him a bit odd, a bit of a misfit. I liked the idea that maybe Agnes was the only person who saw his potential or recognized his extraordinary abilities.

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.

Losing a child is every parents’ most visceral fear. I came across, again and again, in various biographies of Shakespeare, a lofty and dismissive attitude to Hamnet’s death. He got perhaps two or three entries in the index, and his death was usually wrapped up in statistics about child mortality in the 16th century, as if the implication was that his death was of no particular significance, that it was run-of-the-mill. It made me furious every time I read this! I just refuse to believe that at any point in history, any where in the world, the loss of a child is anything less than catastrophic for the family concerned. With this passage, we are inside the head of a woman who has birthed eight children and buried three of them. She, I don’t think, would have found any of their deaths run-of-the-mill. She would have been branded by the sense of their fragility.

Susanna, shortly before her second birthday, sits in a basket on the floor of her grandmother’s parlour, her legs crossed, her skirts billowing up around her, filled with air. She holds a wooden spoon in each hand and with these she paddles as fast as she can. She is sculling down the river. The current is fast and weaving. Weeds waft and unravel. She has to paddle and paddle to stay afloat—if she stops, who knows what may happen?

This passage and one following it are some of the first pages I ever wrote of the novel. They are interlinked, describing the same incident, as seen from Susanna’s point of view, and then Mary’s. I had written thirty or so pages of ‘Hamnet’ in 2015 or so, then swerved away from the project to work on something else. When I decided to give the book another go, in 2017, I read over those pages and ditched the lot, except for these. So I have a strange fondness for them as they feel like the book’s archeology to me, its bedrock. I loved writing about a complex adult situation from an uncomprehending child’s viewpoint: it gives it an extra potency, I believe.

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.

It was painful to write these words, even harder to construct the death scene. I found I couldn’t write these pages in the house, where my own children live. It felt too dangerous, as if I was inviting some terrible hex upon us. So I wrote them outside, in a dilapidated potting shed, with my laptop on my knee. I worked in fifteen-minute bursts, and then had to take a walk around the garden for a while, before I was ready to go on.

She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare.

I do this all the time, whenever my children aren’t directly under my eye. It’s a constant tabulation, not just on their whereabouts, but how they are in themselves, what they might be up to. It gets more abstract as they become teenagers, when you just have to hope they are where they said they would be, doing what they told you they were doing…

How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?

I was trying, here, to imagine how a family feels when one of its members passes away, how the construction of the unit must feel so different, how it would need to adapt and heal.

Acknowledgements

The novels which helped me find a path through the writing of ‘Hamnet’ were ‘The Sisters Brother’ by Patrick deWitt and ‘The Wide Sargasso Sea’ by Jean Rhys. The former because it is a work a genius - historical fiction which wears its history so lightly and deftly. The latter because it lights up the dark and unseen places in a story we think we already know. Thank you so much for reading. I hope you enjoy the book, the paperback edition is out on 5/18: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57426099-hamnet