The title of this novel is especially significant. Elizabethan spelling often conflated ‘l’ with ‘m’ and thus Hamnet is synonymous with Hamlet, the title of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. Hamnet is, in fact, the young and only son of William Shakespeare, and O’Farrell imagines that his death (about which little is known except that it occurred when the child was about 11 years old) was due to the plague. In this imaginative recreation of a story around his conception and untimely death, the protagonist is not Hamnet himself, or even his father – who is never referred to by name – but his mother Agnes. Instead of the stereotype of an older, uneducated woman who entrapped the young son of the local glover into marriage by becoming pregnant, O’Farrell envisages a love match between the Latin tutor and the mysterious elder sister of his pupils, who is versed in herbal remedies and has second sight.

The novel switches between the courtship and marriage of Agnes and the young man and the story of the plague attack, first of Judith, Hamnet’s twin and then, seemingly by a process of the boy’s will, transferring itself, fatally, to himself. There is a wonderful imaginative reconstruction of the journey of the pestilence from Murano in Italy, where glass beads are erroneously packed with rags to prevent breakage rather than wood shavings, via an infected pet monkey and ship’s rats, whose infected fleas find a new home in the rags, to the town in Warwickshire, where Judith cuts away the rags to see the beads. Then there is Agnes’ overwhelming grief. O’Farrell apparently worked on the manuscript for years but put off finishing it until her own son was past the age when Hamnet died, such was her empathy with the mother’s devastation at her loss.

The novel is beautifully written and the characters come alive. However, I doubt it would have received the same attention if it had been a story about the death of any other young child in the same period. The ending where Agnes understands that the father’s ghost is her husband’s way of atoning for his son’s death seems a rather far-fetched justification for the genesis of Hamlet.

DNF’d it at 200 pages.

I think I might be in the minority here, but this book was just so boring. I couldn’t bring myself to care even a little bit about what was happening or who the characters were, and I was constantly trying to find ways to put the book down. In the first few pages, I loved how prettily written it is. Don’t get me wrong, I think the author does have skill. But as I continued on, I started to find it incredibly overwritten and this, along with the badly paced lack of a good plot, contributed towards my boredom. How many adjectives can you use to describe one thing? For some reason, everything needed to be done in threes. It became incredibly tedious, and I felt like the author was just trying to show off her writing skills rather than trying to create anything with actual substance. It’s a shame because I wanted to enjoy this book, but I just couldn’t get on with it.

Maggie O’Farrell is so uniquely talented at fleshing out tidbits of vague but interesting historical figures into a full-fledged imagining. Both Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait are, on the surface, supposed to be about the excitement of a more singular story (Shakespeare’s son dying of the plague and a young duchess getting murdered by her husband, respectively) even though they are really about the day to day life and enthralling family dynamics of the main characters. I really enjoy the way she flips back and forth with past and present in both until the two timelines meet at the climax.

Now this review has ended up being about both of her novels I’ve read simply because I feel like O’Farrell’s incredible prose takes the forefront over the actual plots of the books themselves. The beauty is in the way the characters describe and navigate their emotions and tribulations rather than what causes them or how they are resolved.

P.S. This fictionalized version of Shakespeare is nothing but a wimpy deadbeat to me and did not deserve the interesting, powerful, and persevering Agnes

It’s a beautiful reimagining of Shakespeare’s life and marriage. I wasn’t sure what to expect but I ended up liking it! The prose is elegant but at times excessive. There’s no need to spend several lines lighting a candle, we get it. Worth a listen because the narrator was great and it got me through a lot of driving to and from work.