Hamnet
By Maggie O’Farrell
Framing the Novel
A story less about Shakespeare the legend and more about the fragile, universal bonds of family, grief, and memory.
Greg’s Notes
Inspired by a detail in the notoriously vague biographical record of William Shakespeare—the death of his 11-year-old son Hamnet four years before the London production of his play Hamlet—Scottish author Maggie O’Farrell has written an achingly beautiful historical novel about an unconventional family that dares to think and behave against the norm, the terrible grief that threatens to tear them apart, and the amazing ways those that remain discover a way to transcend such deep and heavy sorrow.
Throughout the novel, the author never names the male figure at the center of the novel—no mention of “Shakespeare,” no “William” and no “Will.” The character derived from the actual figure of the Bard is called “the Latin tutor,” the “husband” or the “father.” Other characters, including his wife Agnes, his children Susanna, Hamnet and Judith, are all specifically identified.
Points to Ponder
What is this author up to by deliberately obscuring Shakespeare’s name in a novel about this historical figure’s early marriage, his move from the country to London to begin writing plays and the death of his only son?
Are we meant to focus on the more universal emotions and experiences of the characters rather than the historical and/or biographical implications and contexts?
If not a novel about Shakespeare’s creative development and process, what is the thematic focus of O’Farrell’s narrative?
Agnes as Outsider
Agnes lives at the edge of her world—guided by instinct and wild wisdom in a society that fears what it cannot explain.
Greg’s Notes
Agnes, the female protagonist of HAMNET and wife of the playwright, is a free-spirited gifted herbalist who grew up “on the edge of the forest” and is able to communicate with falcons and squirrels. Her mother—now dead—introduced her to the sylvan life, emerging, according to village folklore, out of the woods to teach Agnes the mysteries of nature. It is said that Agnes can see through a thin veil that separates the present and the future. She has a habit of pinching the flesh between the thumb and the forefinger in order to see the mysteries hidden inside another:
“[Agnes] grows up fascinated by the hands of others, drawn always to touch them, to feel them in hers. That muscle between thumb and forefinger is, to her, irresistible. It can be shut and opened like the beak of a bird and all the strength of the grip can be found there, all the power of the grasp. A person’s ability, their reach, their essence can be gleaned. All that they have held, kept, and all they long to grip is there in that place. It is possible, she realises, to find out everything you need to know about a person just by pressing it.”
Her father and step-mother despise Agnes’s eccentric behavior, embarrassed by her active transgression of the social mores and expectations of the specific time and place. The rest of the town watches her strangely, gossiping about her “witchy” ways, and mostly avoiding her, save for those who, in desperate times, seek out her remedies. Consequently, Agnes grows up:
“… feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.”
Points to Ponder
How does Agnes represent an alternative way of thinking—and being—than those who surround her in her step-family, her family by marriage and her country hometown?
How does her point of view, her perspectives and her behavior work against the people in the world around her, who are more worried about appearances, about proper ways of making a living, about dowries, and about reputation?
Why does the glovemaker’s son, who cares more about Latin words than the family business, appeal to Agnes?
Special Knowledge of Others
Agnes’s gift for “reading” others suggests a deeper way of knowing, one that looks beneath appearances to the hidden landscapes within people.
Greg’s Notes
Agnes possessed the amazing ability of reading someone’s essence by gripping his or her hand. When she first holds the hand of the glovemaker’s son, the young man who is tutoring her step-brothers in Latin, Agnes senses something wild and deep:
“When [Agnes] had taken his hand that day, the first time she had met him, she had felt—what? Something of which she had never known the like. Something she would never have expected to find in the hand of a clean-booted grammar-school boy from town. It was far-reaching: this much she knew. It had layers and strata, like a landscape. There were spaces and vacancies, dense patches, underground caves, rises and descents. There wasn’t enough time for her to get a sense of it all—it was too big, too complex. It eluded her, mostly. She knew there was more of it than she could grasp, that it was bigger than both of them. A sense, too, that something was tethering him, holding him back; there was a tie somewhere, a bond, that needed to be loosened or broken, before he could fully inhabit this landscape, before he could take command.”
Points to Ponder
Is her ability to “read” her husband symbolic for the way in which Agnes is able to look deeper at and understand others?
Does it suggest that she thinks more critically about what it means to be alive?
Are we meant to believe that her abilities are real and powerful?
Or are they merely a result of her desire to be able to understand and control Fate, which has a peculiar way of surprising a person and turning her life upside down?
Grief and Loss of Knowing
After Hamnet’s death, grief unravels Agnes’s certainty, silencing the very intuition that once anchored her to the world.
Greg’s Notes
Later, after the death of her son Hamnet, who succumbs to the Black Death, she loses her prescient abilities, falling into a strange unknown. At Hamnet’s graveside:
“… [Agnes] turns to look at [her husband] 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? She can see, in his face, the cheekbones of her dead son, the set of his brow, but nothing else. Just life, just blood, just evidence of a pumping, resilient heart, an eye that is bright with tears, a cheek flushed with feeling.
She is hollowed out, her edges blurred and insubstantial. She might disintegrate, break apart, like a raindrop hitting a leaf. She cannot leave this place, she cannot pass through this gate. She cannot leave him here.”
Likewise, her ability to sense the essence of her beloveds diminishes:
“[Agnes] goes out into the frost-gilded yard and stands under the bare plum tree and speaks aloud:
Hamnet, Hamnet, are you there?
Nothing. No one.
She cannot understand it.
She, who can hear the dead, the unspoken, the unknown, who can touch a person and listen to the creep of disease along the veins, can sense the dark velvet press of a tumour on a lung or a liver, can read a person’s eye and heart like some can read a book. She cannot find, cannot locate the spirit of her own child.
She waits in these places, she keeps her ear tuned, she sifts through the sounds and wants and disgruntlements of other, noisier, beings, but she cannot hear him, the only one she wants to hear. There is nothing. Just silence.”
Also, her motherly tendencies to feel awareness and power over her children disappears:
“She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their whereabouts: Judith, upstairs. Susanna, next door. And Hamnet? Her unconscious mind casts, again and again, puzzled by the lack of bite, by the answer she keeps giving it: he is dead, he is gone. And Hamnet? The mind will ask again. At school, at play, out at the river? And Hamnet? And Hamnet? Where is he?”
Points to Ponder
What are the many ways Agnes is affected by the crippling nature of her grief?
How does the author Maggie O’Farrell’s prose style shift and change midway through the book to suggest and emphasize how shattered all these characters are because of the death of Hamnet who is described as the “pin holding them all together….”?
Fate and Chance
The path of the plague reveals how vast, random forces collide with ordinary lives, turning coincidence into tragedy.
Greg’s Notes
In the middle of the novel, author O’Farrell includes a brief chapter that traces how the plague bacterium that will ultimately sicken Judith and kill Hamnet travels from a flea on a monkey in the port of Alexandria to Italy in a box of glass beads to a seamstress on Henley Street in the English town where Judith and Hamnet live. The chapter begins:
“For the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these people need to meet.”
It continues later:
“In Alexandria, at exactly the same moment, all the way across the Mediterranean Sea, the cabin boy must leave his ship, for Judith to contract the pestilence and for a tragedy to be set in motion, halfway across the world.”
Points to Ponder
What is the significance of this narrative of “contact tracing” the Black Death?
What does the author mean to imply, infer or suggest about the events that lead to Hamnet’s death?
How does O’Farrell explore the concept of Fate, divine or otherwise, just as William Shakespeare did in so many of his plays?
Twinship and Balance
From siblings to spouses to homes, the novel explores life as a series of pairs—connections that create strength but also vulnerability.
Greg’s Notes
Twinship, or the existence of twinning, is a major element in HAMNET, from the actual twins Judith and Hamnet, to the twin dwellings that house John and May’s family on one side and their son’s family on the other. One could argue that even Agnes and her husband are spiritual—or matrimonial—twins. In their immediate grief over Hamnet, they experience a moment of intense connection:
“[Her husband] is suddenly there, behind [Agnes]. His arms circle her waist, turn her around, pull her towards him. His head is next to hers: she smells the leather of his gloves, the salt of his tears. They stand like this, together, unified, for a moment, and she feels the pull towards him that she always does and always has, as if there is an invisible rope that circles her heart and ties it to his. Our boy was made, is what she thinks, of him and of her. They made him together; they buried him together.”
Of Judith and Hamnet, the author writes:
“[Hamnet] feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that [Judith] is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him. How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain. Tears are appearing on her cheeks now, like silver seeds, as if by magic. He knows they are his, falling from his eyes on to her face, but they could just as easily be hers. They are one and the same.”
Points to Ponder
What are the factors—both derived from character or from Fate—that threaten the balance of twinship?
From patriarch John’s mood swings which threaten to disrupt the peace of the two family homes, to the Latin tutor’s desire for another kind of life that pulls him away from Agnes and from his home, to the Black Death that leads to the death of one twin, how is duality and balance challenged in one’s life?
Dependency and Individuality
When two lives are bound too tightly together, love can blur into dependence, raising the question of how to remain whole on one’s own.
Greg’s Notes
As babies, Hamnet and Judith were tucked “into a cradle, neat as two loaves.” Yet, when Hamnet discovers Judith deathly ill, the author writes:
“They cannot both live: he sees this and she sees this. There is not enough life, enough air, enough blood for both of them. Perhaps there never was. And if either of them is to live, it must be her. He wills it. He grips the sheet, tight, in both hands. He, Hamnet, decrees it. It shall be.”
Points to Ponder
What is the author saying here about the lasting possibilities of dependent twins?
When two people—Judith and Hamnet, Agnes and her husband — are inextricably linked, what are the dangers of that codependency?
Given the strong sibling bonds in the novel—Agnes and Bartholomew, Eliza and her brother, and ultimately, Susanna and Judith—what are the benefits of a relationship between two people who are strong within each their own individualities?
Inner Dualities
Each character carries opposing selves (tender and practical, dutiful and restless) struggling to reconcile who they are with who they must be.
Greg’s Notes
A sense of duality exists even within a single person, say Agnes and/or her husband. At one point in the novel, Agnes is described as being made up of two opposing parts:
“Agnes seems to split in two. Part of her gasps at the sight of the buboes. The other part hears the gasp, observes it, notes it: a gasp, very well. Tears spring into the eyes of the first Agnes, and her heart gives a great thud in her chest, an animal hurling itself against its cage of bones. The other Agnes is ticking off the signs: buboes, fever, deep sleep. The first Agnes is kissing her daughter, on the forehead, on the cheeks, at the place where hair meets skin on her temple; the other is thinking, a poultice of crumbed bread and roasted onion and boiled milk and mutton fat, a cordial of hips and powdered rue, borage and woodbine.”
Later, the author tackles the duality that exists in Agnes’s husband:
“It is evident to Agnes now, as they enter the kitchen, as he stirs the fire and throws on a log, that her husband is split in two. He is one man in their house and quite another in that of his parents. In the apartment, he is the person she knows and recognises, the one she married.
Take him next door, to the big house, and he is sullen, sallow of face, irritable, tetchy. He is all tinder and flint, sending out sparks to ignite and kindle. Why? he challenges his mother. Whatever for? he snaps. I don’t want to, he retorts to his father. She had never understood why this was so but the coiled fury she witnessed in John, as he raised himself from his stool, told her everything she needs to know.
In their apartment, he lets her take his hand, lets her lead him from the fire to a chair, lets his eyes lose focus, lets her rub her fingers through his hair, and she can feel him switch from one character to another; she can sense that other, big-house, self melt off him, like wax sliding from a lit candle, revealing the man within.”
Points to Ponder
What is it that causes each of these dualities -- Agnes’s keen ability to love and fear for her family vs. her objective productivity and purposeness, the disgruntled, coerced son vs. the creative who seeks freedom -- to splinter?
Is their challenge in this novel, post-Hamnet’s death, to re-integrate their two selves, finding a balance once again?
How are both Agnes and her husband—in addition to other characters like Susanna whose petulance side becomes partnered with her mature, responsible side, or Judith who moves from a devastated twin who struggles with her identity (“But what is the word for who I am?”) to a survivor who is able to feel and mourn productively—able to experience a re-integration of their two selves?
Sacrifice as Love
Acts of sacrifice ripple through the family, showing how love can demand loss and how giving something up can transform everything.
Greg’s Notes
One character sacrificing him or herself for another is not only a measure of great love in this novel, but also an act that deeply reverberates through the family. Agnes, sensing her husband’s deep sadness in being trapped in the family business, stage-manages his escape to a more creative life in London. And Hamnet, sensing his sister’s frailty and fear, trades his life for hers:
“[Hamnet] breathes in. He breathes out. He turns his head and breathes into the whorls of her ear; he breathes in his strength, his health, his all. You will stay, is what he whispers, and I will go. He sends these words into her: I want you to take my life. It shall be yours. I give it to you.”
Points to Ponder
How is the act of sacrifice–and the expression of love, compassion and understanding contained in that act—the catalyst for change in this novel?
How does it work against the impulse to exploit and control (say, John’s trading the Latin tutor’s services to settle a business deal gone wrong, for example, or Joan, Agnes’s stepmother, who beats, blames and banishes her from the farm)?
Art as Resurrection
Though art, grief is transmuted into memory, allowing love to outlive death and giving Hamnet a second life on the stage.
Greg’s Notes
The epigraph that opens the second half of the novel, which details how Hamnet’s death ricochets through the lives of the surviving characters, is from the play Hamlet, the work that is inspired, according to the novel, by Hamnet’s memory.
“I am dead:
Thou livest;
...draw thy breath in pain,
to tell my story.”
When Agnes, who believes (incorrectly) that her husband has betrayed her in turning away from the memory of their son, travels to London to see the play, she is initially furious, thinking that her husband is using her son’s death in superficial and exploitative ways:
“To hear [Hamnet], out of the mouths of people she has never known and will never know, and used for an old dead king: Agnes cannot understand this. Why would her husband have done it? 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 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.”
Yet when she continues to watch the play, she begins to understand that her husband has “pulled off a manner of alchemy”: he has poured his love, his grief, and his memories of Hamnet into a creative work that has memorialized her son:
“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. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place.”