A Quick Look Back at Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell for #LiteraryWives

By Rebecca Foster on December 4, 2023

I read Maggie O’Farrell’s Women’s Prize winner, Hamnet, at its release in 2020. Unfortunately, it has been my least favourite of her novels (I’ve read all but My Lover’s Lover now), and it turns out 3.5 years is too soon to reread and appreciate anew. But I had a quick skim back through, this time focusing on the central marriage and the question we ask for the Literary Wives online book club:

What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?

From my original review: O’Farrell imagines the context of the death of William Shakespeare’s son Hamnet and the effect it had on the playwright’s work – including, four years later, Hamlet. Curiously, she has decided never to mention Shakespeare by name in her novel, so he remains a passive, shadowy figure seen only in relation to his wife and children – he’s referred to as “the father,” “the Latin tutor” or “her husband.” Instead, the key characters are his wife, Agnes (most will know her as Anne, but Agnes was the name her father, Richard Hathaway, used for her in his will), and Hamnet himself.

It is refreshing, especially for the time period, to have the wife’s experience and perspective be primary, and the husband in the background to the extent of being unnamed. Both, however, blame themselves for not being there when 11-year-old Hamnet fell ill with what O’Farrell posits was the Plague. Shakespeare was away in London with his theatre company; Agnes was off tending her bees. Shakespeare is only present in flashbacks – in which he morphs from eager tutor to melancholy drinker – until three-quarters of the way through the novel, when he returns to Stratford, too late. All he can do then is carry his son’s corpse.

I have heard it said many times that few marriages survive the death of a child. And for a while that looks like it will be the case here, too:

Her husband takes her arm as they reach the gate; she turns to look at him and it is as if she has never seen him before, so odd and distorted and old do his features seem. Is it their long separation, is it grief, is it all the tears? she wonders, as she regards him. Who is this person next to her, claiming her arm, holding it to him?

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?

With his earnings, Shakespeare buys the family a new house, but never moves them to London as he once intended. He continues to stay away for long periods at a time, leaving Agnes to her grief. When, four years after Hamnet’s death, Agnes and their daughters learn that he has written a play about a character called Hamlet, they feel betrayed, but Agnes goes to a performance and her anger melts as she recognizes her son. “It is him. It is not him. … grown into a near-man, as he would be now, had he lived, on the stage, walking with her son’s gait, talking in her son’s voice, speaking words written for him by her son’s father.”

Although O’Farrell leaves it there, creating uncertainty about the couple’s future, she implies that the play has been the saving of both of them. For Shakespeare, it was the outlet for his grief. For Agnes, it was the proof she needed that he loved their son, grieved him as bitterly as she did, and still remembers him. That seems to be enough to hold them together.

While her next novel, The Marriage Portrait, which I liked a lot more as historical fiction goes, might seem on the surface better suited for this club, Hamnet was in fact perfect for the prompt, revealing an aspect I don’t recall looking at before: the strain that a child’s illness and death can place on a marriage. At my first reading I found the prose flat and detached, to the point of vagueness, and thought there was anachronistic language and unsubtle insertion of research. This time, I was more aware of how the deliberate evenness softens the emotion, making it more bearable – though, still, I have a friend who gave up reading this partway because she found it too raw.

See also Kay’s and Naomi’s responses!

The next book, for March 2024, will be Mrs. March by Virginia Feito.