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A review by brughiera
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
4.0
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.
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.