Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

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.