Hamnet

Dualities: Shakespeare is both the best- and least-known of all famous writers. He flips effortlessly between the darkness of Macbeth and the airy lightness of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He is deeply English, and yet for the whole world.

Dualities are central also to his most famous play. A Ghost has neither left this world nor joined the next, but is trapped between the two. A loving Queen too rapidly remarries her recently-dead husband’s brother. A sweet-natured Prince shouts abuse at his girl, and carelessly stabs her father to death. Most strangely, its title is one letter different from the name Shakespeare gave his own son, dead at 11, possibly from the plague. There can hardly be any more defining event in a person’s life than the death of a child, but it is difficult to find any easy equivalence in the plays. 

Shakespeare can ‘do’ grief, all right, and there is no more heart-breaking example than King Lear’s as he carries onto stage his murdered daughter Cordelia:

And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life?

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

And thou no breath at all? Oh, thou'lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never.

But grief and loss are not at all the defining marks of his work after 1596. Instead, all human life seems to be there. In the words of Borges, ‘No one was as many men as this man: like the Egyptian Proteus, he used up the forms of all creatures.’

Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel Hamnet also teems with dualities. Agnes (‘Anne’) Hathaway, becoming real in a way she has never done before in fiction, seems to oscillate between the material world and the otherworldly. She hears an owl:

Agnes isn’t afraid of the creatures. She likes them, likes their eyes, which resemble the centre of marigolds, their overlapped, flecked feathers, their inscrutable expressions. They seem, to her, to exist in some doubled state, half spirit, half bird.

Agnes is ‘at once observer and participant.’ History’s most famous author is never referred to by name, but is ‘merely’ a husband, a brother, a son, and he is both heavily present in the imaginations of the family and the readers, but mostly absent in his own mind, or literally absent in London. Then there are the twins, Hamnet and Judith: for them, death and life are also twins.

Maggie O’Farrell’s imagination swarms over the unrecoverable mysteries in the story. She is spectacularly good at putting her readers right into the world of Stratford in the late 16th century, particularly in interior scenes. Characters are vividly portrayed: Shakespeare’s parents, the older daughter Susanna, Agnes’s brother Bartholemew. A bravura chapter imagines the terrible coincidences which resulted in the multiple transfers of plague-ridden fleas between a Venetian glassmaker, a boy sailor and the Shakespeare family and so many intermediaries. Plague haunts the book, and there is a terrible irony in Susanna’s wishes:

If the plague comes to London, he can be back with them for months. The playhouses are all shut, by order of the Queen, and no one is allowed to gather in public. It is wrong to wish for plague, her mother has said, but Susanna has done this a few times under her breath, at night, after she has said her prayers. She always crosses herself afterwards. But still she wishes it. Her father home, for months, with them. She sometimes wonders if her mother secretly wishes it too.

The heart of it all is of course Hamnet’s death. O’Farrell’s writing makes you hurtle through the events leading up to it, knowing what is coming and still desperately hoping it won’t (in her version, it is Judith who seems at first destined to die). And then there are the terrible pages about first Agnes’s, then her husband’s grief, echoing King Lear’s words:

He carried messages for them, petted their dogs, stroked the backs of their cats as they slept on sunny windowsills. And now their lives are carrying on, unchanged, their dogs still yawning by the fireplaces, their children still whining for supper, while he is no more.

It is very hard to read about this grief, very hard not to.

Finally there is the question of the great play. O’Farrell draws everything together in a scene set in London (no spoilers) which explains why Shakespeare wrote and performed in Hamlet. No matter that it is entirely speculative: like the novel as a whole, it is beautiful and devastating.

What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.