Hamnet – Review

Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell

'Hamnet' is an imagination of the lives of William Shakespeare's family, centred around his son, Hamnet. Hamnet Shakespeare died aged just eleven, and his birth and burial records are the only historical record of him. Those, and the famous play that his father wrote, which shared his late son's name. (Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable in the sixteenth century.) What O'Farrell has done here is turned this child, whom history has all but forgotten, into a living, breathing character. And the whole book is beautiful.

One thing I found interesting about this book was William Shakespeare's absence from it. Although he features prominently in the sections of narrative past, all the bits in the present concern his family in Stratford-upon-Avon, while Shakespeare himself is in London writing and performing plays. Furthermore, he was never once named, in the whole book. He was referred to as 'the Latin tutor' or 'the husband' or simply 'him,' and we could work out who he was from the schema and the context. But the name of Shakespeare never occurred at all.

I think this makes a powerful point. People really only ever think of Shakespeare as the playwright, not as a real man with a life, and people think even less about his family, and their life. And this book is not about Shakespeare. Not really. Not as we know him. It's about his forgotten family, the people in his life and the parts of his life that were nothing to do with his career as a playwright. The perspective is flipped. O'Farrell is filling in the gaps in history with her narrative. So by refraining from naming Shakespeare, she is removing all the connotations and associations and schema we have attached to this figure, and redefining him as a normal man, a Latin tutor, a husband, him.

Because we know that Hamnet dies, there is a heart-rending sense of tragic inevitability woven throughout the novel. There is such a focus on Fate, on the chance alignment of small events, that makes you feel the oncoming tragedy like an ache. In only the second chapter, there is the sentence: 'Later, and for the rest of her life, she will think that if she had left there and then, she might have changed what happened next.' The implicit afterthought is but she didn't. Nothing could change what happened next; page by page we tumble inexorably towards the tragedy. One chapter tracks the movement of a flea carrying the plague, all the way from the back of a monkey at the port of Alexandria. Sickeningly, we know that it will end up in Stratford-upon-Avon, and O'Farrell has thus created an awful sense of overwhelmingly bad luck.

So I suppose the real question is - did 'Hamnet' break my heart of stone? I am renowned among my friends for my inability to cry at books. It's not that I'm emotionally void - books do affect me - it's just that they rarely cause me to shed real physical tears. Call me cold-hearted, but I suppose it just takes a lot to tip me over the edge. I have a list, entitled Books that (nearly) made me cry (I count welling-up and lump-in-the-throat). If a book can make it onto that list, it means it is seriously emotional, and very well-done. Before I read 'Hamnet', there were nine titles on the list (note how few there are!), and 'Hamnet' just became the tenth.

It was desperately sad, but without wishing to spoil anything, it was not the death of Hamnet that got me. There was a particular scene a little after Hamnet's death that I found incredibly powerful, and it put a lump in my throat and real, actual tears in my eyes. Good job Maggie O'Farrell. You broke me.