Hamnet

What's inside (8 sections)

1. Agnes of Hewlands
2. A marriage, three children
3. The week the fever comes
4. Two kinds of grief
5. Hamlet
6. What stays, what sags
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked up Hamnet because everyone kept talking about it as the Shakespeare book, and I wanted to see how anyone could make a whole novel out of a boy who gets one line in the history books. Mine was a paperback with a blue cover and a big gold H, bought after the film talk started up again. It is a standalone novel, the eighth by Maggie O'Farrell, first published in 2020. In Britain it came out from Tinder Press in March, and in America it came out as Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague from Knopf in July, the Knopf hardcover running 320 pages. It won the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. I expected a story about a famous writer. What I got instead was a story about his wife, his children, and a house in Stratford where the father is mostly absent.

The trick of the book, which I did not know going in, is that O'Farrell never speaks the husband's name in the text. He is her husband, the father, the son, the brother, the Latin tutor, the player in London. Everyone around him gets named. Agnes gets named. Susanna, Hamnet, Judith, Bartholomew, Joan, John, Mary, Eliza. He stays a set of roles. At first this felt like a game. After a hundred pages I stopped noticing, because the center holds elsewhere.

That center is Agnes. The history books call her Anne Hathaway. O'Farrell calls her Agnes, which was a common form of the same name at the time, and makes her a strange and physical presence from the first meeting. She walks the land at Hewlands with a falcon on her glove. She knows plants in the way other people know neighbors. She can look at a person and say something true about them that they have not told her. People in town think she is odd. Her stepmother Joan thinks she is difficult. Her brother Bartholomew understands her better than most.

Agnes of Hewlands

Hewlands is a farmhouse a little outside Stratford, and O'Farrell writes it the way some writers write kitchens, with attention to work surfaces and stores. Apples set out a finger width apart so they keep through winter. Bundles of herbs hung to dry. Bees. A garden that Agnes tends as if it were a member of the family. Her mother is dead. Her father is dead too by the time the main courtship starts. Joan, the second wife, runs the house with her own sons to look after, and Agnes lives slightly to the side of that order, older, unmarried, too sure of herself for Joan's comfort.

The tutor comes to Hewlands because of money and debt. John Shakespeare, the glover in town on Henley Street, owes money to Agnes's late father, and part of the arrangement is that John's younger son will tutor Joan's boys in Latin to work it off. He is young, poor, restless, afraid of his father, who drinks and shouts and beats his sons and cheats his customers with bad wool deals. The boy has good handwriting and a head full of words and no clear path. Through a window during a dull lesson he sees Agnes, and the book slows right down for that look.

Their courtship is physical and secretive and stubborn. He is drawn to her certainty. She sees in him something unformed that could grow. Joan tries to block them. John tries to use them. They meet in woods and barns and outbuildings. When Agnes becomes pregnant they marry, quickly, with pressure from both families and with John seeing a chance to settle accounts. O'Farrell does not make this romantic in a soft way. It is muddy, funny in places, tense in others. There is a scene where Agnes leaves a cryptic message about where she will give birth, and Bartholomew has to read it right to get her husband to the right place at the right time.

I liked how clearly the power sits with Agnes in these early chapters, even though she has almost no legal power at all. She chooses him. She decides when they lie together. She decides how she will bear her first child. He is the one who feels caught between fathers and families, between Stratford and some other life he cannot name yet.

A marriage, three children

Married life starts in John's house on Henley Street, which is crowded and loud and smells of leather. John cures skins in the workshop. Mary, his wife, keeps the house going and tries to keep peace. O'Farrell is good on the small humiliations of living with in laws when you are the new wife with a baby. Agnes learns who takes sugar, who sulks, who needs handling. Susanna is born first, a strong girl with a loud cry. Agnes nurses her, watches her, carries her into the garden to show her leaves.

The marriage strains under John's roof. The husband works for his father as a kind of errand boy, writing letters, running messages, selling gloves, and it eats at him. He falls into a low mood that Agnes recognizes but cannot lift by herbs or talk. Here Bartholomew helps hatch a plan. If John can be persuaded to let his son try his luck in London, the debt can be managed another way, and the boy can get out from under his father's thumb. John agrees, reluctantly, with strings attached. The husband leaves for London while Agnes is pregnant again.

She stays in Stratford. That decision shapes the rest of the book. He writes back about players and playhouses, about selling gloves to actors, about standing at the edge of that world and then stepping into it. Back home Agnes grows large with twins. She has always felt, in the private way she has of knowing things, that she would have two children. When the midwife tells her there are two coming, it unsettles her. Hamnet comes first, then Judith, smaller and weaker, blue around the mouth, slow to cry. For weeks Agnes will not leave her side. The plan for the family to join the father in London fades. Judith is too frail for a crowded lodging and dirty water. Susanna is settled. Agnes will not risk them.

So the pattern sets. He lives mostly in London, in shared rooms, learning lines, then writing them, coming home a few times a year with money and gifts and stories. She runs the house, the garden, the children. Letters go back and forth. Eliza, his younger sister, helps. Mary helps. Neighbors help and gossip. The children grow. Susanna is practical and sharp. Hamnet is tender and watchful, good with his twin, quick to laugh. Judith stays slight, prone to coughs, close to her mother and to plants in the way Agnes was at her age.

O'Farrell keeps London at a distance on purpose. We do not get rehearsal room scenes or tavern talk about art. We get what Agnes hears, what the children imagine, what a returned husband looks like when he is tired and distracted and smells of smoke. Some readers will miss the theatre. I came to see why she does it. This is not a life of Shakespeare. It is a life of the people who made his absences possible, and who paid for them.

The week the fever comes

The summer of 1596 arrives hot. In the book, as in life, Hamnet Shakespeare is eleven years old. He and Judith are twins in the way only twins can be, finishing each other's tasks, sleeping near each other, fighting and making up within minutes.

O'Farrell opens the crisis with an empty house. Judith has a sudden fever and takes to her bed. Hamnet goes looking for help and finds no one where they should be. Susanna is out. Agnes is over a mile away in the garden plot where she grows remedies. Mary is out. The apprentice Ned is gone. John is home but drunk and useless and frightening. Hamnet runs to the physician, a man in a hurry with no time for a boy, and gets turned away. He comes back, heats something, cools something, sits with his sister as her skin burns and her glands swell. When Susanna and Mary return they start making supper, not knowing the two children lie upstairs in the bedroom, one sick and one scared.

Agnes comes home and knows at once that something is wrong. Mothers in this book know things in their bodies before their minds catch up. She climbs the stairs, feels Judith's forehead and neck, sees the swellings under the arms and at the groin, and understands the word no one wants to say. Pestilence. Plague. Bubonic plague, likely, though O'Farrell lets the characters use the words they would have used. Agnes sends for herbs, for clean cloths, for help. She sends for Eliza. Eliza writes to London to tell the father to come home, that he may need to say goodbye.

Before all this, O'Farrell inserts the chapter everyone talks about. She leaves Stratford entirely and follows the sickness backward across land and sea. A glassmaker in Venice burns his hand. An apprentice packs glass beads with rags instead of straw. A cabin boy in Alexandria plays with a monkey and carries fleas back to a ship. The ship's cats die. One dead cat lies on a box of beads. Fleas settle into the cloth. The box travels to London, then by carrier to a dressmaker, then into the hands of a curious girl who loves bright things. Judith opens it, shakes out the beads, holds them to the light.

You can read this as mechanics or as fate. I read it as both. It gives the fever a history without giving anyone to blame. No villain poisoned the child. Trade did what trade does. A box moved from hand to hand because people wanted pretty things, and a living thing too small to see moved with it.

What happens next is the hardest part to describe without making it sound like magic, though the book allows for that reading. Hamnet gets into bed with his sister. He has watched the adults whisper and pray and boil remedies that do nothing. He loves Judith with the fierce loyalty of a boy who has never been apart from her. In the night, as Agnes dozes and wakes, as Mary prays, as Eliza writes, something passes between the twins. Judith's breathing eases. Her fever breaks. Hamnet grows hot and still. By the time the father rides in from London, dusty and wild with haste, it is not Judith in the shroud Agnes is sewing. It is Hamnet.

I will not pretend I understood this fully on first reading. O'Farrell does not explain it. She shows Agnes trying every remedy she knows, pressing cool cloths, coaxing sips, speaking to her son as if voice alone could keep him here. She shows Susanna confused, Judith weeping without knowing why she is better, Mary moving through rooms like a sleepwalker. The doctor returns with warnings about quarantine. Neighbors leave food at the door and step back. And the boy who went looking for help dies within days, and is buried on 11 August 1596.

Two kinds of grief

The middle of the book after the funeral is quiet in a way that some readers may find slow. I found it painful and true. Agnes and her husband mourn in opposite directions, and their marriage nearly breaks on that difference.

Agnes grieves with her body. She cannot sleep in the marriage bed. She walks to Hewlands and back. She lets the garden go weedy, then pulls weeds with a kind of anger. Milk comes and goes. Her clothes hang loose. She smells Hamnet in rooms where he is not. She hears him on stairs. She is sharp with Susanna and then sorry. She cannot look at Judith without both love and a flash of something she hates herself for feeling. Why her boy and not her girl. Why the strong one and not the weak one. She knows this is not fair. Grief is not fair, and O'Farrell does not tidy it.

He grieves by leaving. Within days of the burial he goes back to London. He says work calls him, money is needed, plague orders keep them apart. All true. Also true that he cannot sit in a house where every corner holds his son. He stays away a full year. Letters thin out. When he does come home he is restless, quick to tears, quick to anger, unable to meet Agnes's eyes for long. They lie together like strangers. They argue about small things because the large thing cannot be spoken.

Susanna, older now, watches all this. Judith, who survived, wonders if her father stays away because she looks so much like Hamnet. Twins in a small town get mistaken for each other, and Judith both wants and dreads it. Eliza and Mary do what they can, which is cooking and cleaning and sitting. Bartholomew comes and goes, steady, saying little. Joan ages. John drinks.

What saved this section for me was how O'Farrell lets neither parent be the villain. Agnes thinks he abandoned them. He thinks she blames him. Both are right and both are wrong. He sends money and buys the largest house in Stratford so they will have room, light, a garden Agnes can shape. She keeps the children alive and keeps their names and stories straight. They fail each other in bed, at table, in prayer. Then, slowly, they find a way to live in the same rooms again. Not healed. Living.

A note on Agnes's gifts, since they may bother some readers. She senses things before they happen. She reads people at a glance. She works cures with plants that seem to help. O'Farrell never calls her a witch, and the book never stages a trial or a test. If you need every event to have a medical paper attached, you will frown. I took her second sight the way I take a character's perfect pitch in a novel about music, as part of who she is, used sparingly, mostly to show how lonely it is to know more than you can explain.

Hamlet

About four years pass. The family rebuilds around the empty place. Susanna grows into a young woman who can reckon accounts and talk to lawyers. Judith grows tall and learns her mother's plants. Agnes replants, harvests, dries, bottles. The husband comes and goes, more successful each time, with better clothes and heavier worries.

Then Joan brings news. He has written a new play. It is called Hamlet. In Stratford records of the time, Hamnet and Hamlet were forms of the same name, used for different children in different parishes as if they were one word with two spellings. Everyone in Agnes's world knows this. She hears the name as her son's name.

Her first response is anger so deep it frightens her. How could he take their dead boy's name and put it on a play for London crowds. How could he sell their loss. She does not eat. She does not sleep. Then a friend asks a simple question about what might be in the play, and curiosity replaces dread with something harder to name. She decides to go to London with Bartholomew to see it.

O'Farrell stages the London chapters with care. The crowds, the smell of the playhouse, the crush at the doors, Agnes in a borrowed cloak trying to be invisible. Bartholomew beside her, solid as a wall. On stage a court in Denmark, a dead king, a prince in black, a ghost on the walls. Agnes does not follow every plot turn at first. She watches faces. She listens for her son and hears instead a father.

The point lands for her all at once near the end, and it landed for me too. In the play the father is dead and the son lives on to speak and grieve and act. In life the son died and the father lived on. Her husband has reversed the loss. He has given the boy the years he did not get, the words he did not speak, the choice to remember and to act. When the ghost says Remember me, Agnes hears it as both theatre and prayer. She weeps in the crowd and does not hide it.

I do not want to oversell this as comfort. The book does not claim a play fixes a death. Agnes goes home still bereaved. What changes is that she sees his grief at last, plain and public, after years of thinking he felt less than she did. He could not say it in their kitchen. He said it in front of a thousand strangers with drums and torches. That is a strange kind of fidelity, but fidelity all the same.

What stays, what sags

What stays with me weeks later is not Shakespeare at all. It is Agnes in the garden with dirt under her nails, Hamnet running from house to house banging on doors, Judith holding glass beads to the window light, Susanna counting coins at a table while her parents fight upstairs. O'Farrell writes housework and childcare with the same attention other historical novels give to battles. Birth, nursing, weaning, teething, fevers, washing, mending, storing apples, potting herbs. The past feels close because bodies feel close.

The prose is rich without being showy. She likes short sentences for shock. Then a long sentence that rolls through a room, naming objects. She repeats images of hands, breath, heat. Sometimes she repeats a little too much for my taste. Hands, breath, heat again. I noticed it more in the grief chapters, where the mood is already heavy and the images circle. A firmer edit in those fifty pages would have helped.

Two fair warnings. If you come wanting Shakespeare the wit, the schemer, the word machine, you will wait a long time and get little. He is a tired husband who writes elsewhere. If you want a fast plot, the book will test you. After the death, time drags the way mourning drags, which is honest but not always exciting. And if unexplained knowing troubles you, Agnes will trouble you from page one.

Still, I am glad I read it, and I see why it took the Women's Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2020 and was named Waterstones Book of the Year that December. It takes a footnote boy and makes him loved without making him a symbol. It takes a famous marriage we thought we knew, cold husband and older wife, and shows something warmer and harder. It shows how a family can break and keep eating supper together. The last image I kept was not the stage in London but the garden in Stratford, replanted late, coming up anyway.

FAQ

When was Hamnet published, and by whom?

It was first published in 2020, by Tinder Press in Britain in March and by Knopf in America in July. The Knopf hardcover runs 320 pages.

Did Hamnet win the Women's Prize?

Yes. It won the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction, along with the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and Waterstones Book of the Year.

Is Hamnet part of a series?

No. It is a standalone novel, the eighth by Maggie O'Farrell, with no series or series order.