Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

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?