Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell

This is my first Maggie O’Farrell novel and I am so excited to read more of her work after enjoying this one so much. Hamnet is inspired by the life and marriage of William Shakespeare and one of his three children, Hamnet, who died aged eleven. The narrative jumps between the novel’s present, when Hamnet is a child, and also the courtship of his parents and how they met. The playwright is never named throughout the story; only referred to ‘the father’ or ‘the husband’, which illuminates the focus on his role in a domestic sense as opposed to his fame as a writer. In fact, his work in London is barely referred to throughout most of the novel, with only allusions to just how successful his career was. We are given a snapshot purely of the family life in Stratford, where he met his wife Agnes at the age of 18. Agnes was a subject of much speculation in the town and was believed to be a witch or wise-woman, so his partnership with her, particularly when she fell pregnant out of wedlock, was largely frowned upon.⠀

The novel repeatedly jumps forward in time to when the couple have three children - Susanna, the eldest; and Hamnet and Judith, who are twins. At the beginning of the story, Judith has taken to bed with a fever and buboes - a sure sign of plague. The tale focuses largely on one week of the family’s life, during which one of the children is destined not to survive. It is a beautiful and moving tale of the loss of a child, and how grief has the capability to tear a family apart - or bring them together. O’Farrell captures the nuances of family life in a stunning way. The historical novel also draws on a very topical issue which is happening right now - the spread of disease. O’Farrell cleverly illustrates how the illness has been passed on from animal to human, and travelled a great distance crossing large bodies of water, to reach an unassuming family in Stratford. This is particularly pertinent today with the prolific Covid-19 which has dominated headlines for weeks and months.