I've been dying to read Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, and I got it from my library.
Hamnet is of course the name of the twin born to Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare. His twin was Judith. Turns out there is a novel about Judith written by William Black in 1884.
I read the novel. There are assumptions being made. Are they based in facts or made up to flesh it out? By a quarter of the novel I am hooked in. The chapters move back and forth in time. I want to read reviews and interviews, but I don't want to contaminate my first reading of the novel.
Spoiler Alert! If you haven't read the novel, skip to links.
I have read three quarters of the novel and my feeling is this: what Shakespeare's life was like is a projection of us. We know so little. O'Farrell has created a caring loving relationship with Anne Hathaway. Anne is called Agnes, and she is part wild, part witch, in tune with the natural cures, and even goes into the woods to have a baby. She knows all the homeopathic cures. She is very sensitive to others, and assertive. Shakespeare goes pale, is depressed not knowing what to do. He goes off to London to sell gloves, but finds the theater. He comes alive, but she stays in Stratford. His father is very harsh, violent, brutal. But she stays with his family in Stratford, in town.
O'Farrell has 3 children. She does not want to imagine one of her children dying of the plague, but she writes it. What a lovely projection of her own sensitivities, imagining into Shakespearian space. In a way, this is a thought experiment from a woman who wrote a 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, that you could read and know as much about her, as through the novel.
She guesses at the 7 years of fallow time where we know nothing about Shakespeare--Shakespeare was a Latin tutor and ran errands for his father. He goes to London to sell gloves, and gets a contract with a acting troupe, but falls in love with the theater. Agnes stays in Stratford because Judith is sickly.
Instead of seeing Anne Hathaway as anything negative, O'Farrell is “a feminist avenging angel” and makes her more interesting than Shakespeare. She imagines the marriage as a partnership. William knows about herbs from Agnes, he knows about falconry from Agnes.
According to the Guardian interview, she use the language of the times, and wouldn't use any terms that were modern. While I didn't really feel like she captured the rich language of Shakespeare or any of his poetry, she did inhabit the language of the times. The novel should be titled Agnes, not Hamnet. She has a kind of psychic sight, and sees hidden depths in him.
I imagine O'Farrell writing at a desk with a map of Stratford in those times, with lists of herbs, with lists of words that retain their meaning into today and words that have changed, and won't be used the way they are today.
The novel has given me a new interpretation of Hamlet. Hamlet is inactive because he is dead. Hamlet died at age 11, leaving his twin sister Judith to live. A widow is a person in a marriage who has survived. When your parents die, you are an orphan. When another twin dies, there is no word for it, but must be worthy of a word. Hamlet is inactive because he is himself a ghost, that is why he can see other ghosts.
Well, I'm against such tendentious interpretations, I prefer close readings that obliterate wild interpretations, but this one sprung to my mind thinking more about the death of a child, which is the central action of this novel.
Like a good novelist, the novel ends in a thrilling drama. I won't spoil that though. I thought it was a really good novel and I was glad I read it. It imagines into their lives, and while there's no basis for any of the speculation there is a modern wondering and filling in of the blanks. There could be a million different filling in the blanks, and this one isn't bad.
In a totally irrelevant sidenote, O'Farrell's husband wrote Otherhood, which was turned into a movie on Netflix by other people. Just watching the preview, 3 mothers go into Manhattan to see their grown children on Mother's day, and have an adventure.
Links:
Maggie O'Farrell Wikipedia
Hamnet Shakespeare Wikipedia
Book Wikipedia
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