Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

“It’s a tragedy,” Joan continues, baring her teeth in a smile. “And I am certain he will have told you the name of it. In his letters. Because of course he would never call it that without telling you first, would he, without your by-your-leave?

He was a child and he would have been a man but he died. He is himself, not a play, not a piece of paper, not something to be spoken of or performed or displayed. He died. Her husband knows this, Joan knows this. She cannot understand.

“Do you not wonder what is in it?”

Oh Christ that’s gonna make it so much worse 😭😭😭😭😭

How can the man who owns the largest house in Stratford, and much land besides, be living here?

It is the only place to be alone in such a crowd. He feels like a bird, above the ground, resting on nothing but air. He is not of this place but above it, apart from it, observing it.

He cannot tell, as he stands there, whether or not this new play is good. Sometimes, as he listens to his company speak the lines, he thinks he has come close to what he wanted it to be; other times, he feels he has entirely missed the mark. It is good, it is bad, it is somewhere in between. How does a person ever tell? All he can do is inscribe strokes on a page—for weeks and weeks, this was all he did, barely leaving his room, barely eating, never speaking to anyone else—and hope that at least some of these arrows will hit their targets.

It moves through him—this one, more than any other he has ever written—as blood through his veins.

You, she would say, and you: you are all nothing, this is nothing, compared to what he was. Don’t you dare pronounce his name.

She has her eye on that ghost: the height, that movement of the arm, hand upturned, a particular curl of the fingers, that roll of the shoulder. When he raises the visor, she feels not surprise, not recognition, but a kind of hollow confirmation.

He cast himself as Hamlet 😭

Why pretend that it means nothing to him, just a collection of letters? How could he thieve this name, then strip and flense it of all it embodies, discarding the very life it once contained? How could he take up his pen and write it on a page, breaking its connection with their son? It makes no sense. It pierces her heart, it eviscerates her, it threatens to sever her from herself, from him, from everything they had, everything they were.

He had no way of knowing this but think of how beloved and well known hamlet is. He didn’t rob your son of his meaning, he made him eternal.

It is just as she feared: he has taken that most sacred and tender of names and tossed it in among a jumble of other words, in the midst of a theatrical pageant.

She has looked for her son everywhere, ceaselessly, these past four years, and here he is.

She wants to lay hands on that boy; she wants to fold him in her arms, comfort and console him—she has to, if it is the last thing she does.

Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can.

He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.

“Remember me.”

😭😭😭