Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Wife, daughter, mother, artist’s lover. Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet makes the woman who holds it all together from the wings centre stage.

Hamnet is a timeless lyrical tale of love and loss that imagines the family life of one of the most well known people in history without mentioning his name. Though we all know him as the beloved bard, William Shakespeare. 

Published in 2020, Hamnet soon won O’Farrell the Women’s Prize for Fiction alongside popular acclaim. The novel swung back into the public consciousness in a big way with the release of the film adaptation late last year starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, which O’Farrell masterfully co-wrote with director Chloé Zhao. 

In short, the film is stunning. It rivals the book with its sweeping emotional impact, having me in silent tears in the theatre when what I really wanted was to wail uncontrollably from the comfort of my own home. Best Picture–yes, indeed!

Hamnet is set in late 16th century England during the black plague and moves between timelines with a curious urgency that hooks readers from the first few pages–pages that ultimately lead to the tragic death of the Shakespeares’ eleven year old son, Hamnet, one of the few well-known facts about Shakespeare’s life. Readers can’t escape this fate, and the fact that we know it to be true before we even open the cover offers little consolation.

That is with one exception, the story’s life force, Shakespeare’s witchy woman-of-the-earth wife, Anne “Agnes” Hathaway. 

It doesn’t take long for us to become just as enamoured with Agnes as young Shakespeare. She possesses powerful natural secrets, a knowing spiritual confidence, and even has a freakin’ falcon. 

In a literary tradition dominated by dead white men, we want and we need the other side of the story. While Shakespeare is the quintessential dead white guy, this novel is something special because it tells Anges’s extraordinary yet universal story, and not just as a means to further illuminate her husband’s life. 

Rather than a book about a grief-stricken marriage, which it certainly is, I read Hamnet more as a portrait of a woman who loves an artist. As one of these women I’m clearly biased, but hear me out. 

Hathaway and Shakespeare’s relationship gives them both distance from a fraught family situation as they escape together into a small family unit of their own. But for Shakespeare, this escape soon isn’t enough. While managing the demands of her new role as wife and mother, Agnes intuitively recognizes the world of potential within her husband and the struggle that exists outside herself:

There is so much to do in a family of this size, so much to see too, so many people needing so many different things. How easy is it… to miss the pain and anguish of one person, if that person keeps quiet, if he keeps it all in, like a bottle stopper too tightly, the pressure inside building and building, until—what?

And here is where a familiar narrative plays out. Agnes willingly sacrifices her own happiness to support and protect the creative pursuits of her partner. If you’ve ever known and loved an artist, you know this dilemma well. You can’t stand in the way of a person’s dreams because these dreams are who they are, so instead you mold your life around making them happen. By living two lives, Agnes allows William to live out an essential part of his. 

The distance this creates isn’t just about endless reunions and goodbyes. It’s reflected in another kind of emotional reserve–a part of artists always somewhat inaccessible to the people closest to them. They stow it away because making great art requires people to pour themselves into it. The unfortunate reality is that there isn’t always a surplus leftover for those they love.

But it’s difficult to view the pursuit of art as an entirely selfish act. For many, it’s not a choice at all. Often artists are formed by pain and exorcize this into their art, as O’Farrell empathetically writes into Shakespeare’s relationship with his father. They choose the path of creation instead of destruction–art as true necessity, not indulgent luxury. 

For many, the foundational people who make this way of life possible for great artists are erased from history or simply exist in brief footnotes. Though not strictly gender specific, this is often the story of a woman–the woman behind the man.

In Hamnet, however, Agnes comes out from behind a nameless man to tell her story, one of deep love and loneliness. And most importantly, commendable strength. 

Despite giving everything and more, Anges still loses something she loves and sought to protect most, one of her children. Everything she knew failed her in that moment: her absent husband, even her divine instinct. O’Farrell’s description of this is everything, and to me, something uniquely woman:

Agnes is not the person she used to be. She is utterly changed. She can recall being someone who felt sure of life and what it would hold for her… Her feet moved over the earth with confidence and grace.

This person is now lost to her for ever. She is someone adrift in her life, who doesn’t recognize it. She is unmoored, at a loss. She is someone who weeps if she cannot find a shoe or overboils the soup or trips over a pot. Small things undo her. Nothing is certain any more.

Now, if you’re doubtful of how artists’ relationships survive, here’s where the redemption comes. 

We often feel abandoned in our pain until great art illuminates it–makes it a real, tangible, transporting experience, one that profoundly connects the artist and his most intimate patron. The art heals by making all those swirling feelings expressible. 

For Agnes and Shakespeare, this indelible moment comes with the first performance of Shakespeare’s new play Hamlet, four years after their son’s death. It is an existential question that asks of us more than it answers–a play that immortalizes their son and their pain in a way nothing else could. It shines a spotlight directly into Agnes’s heart and makes the invisible woman seen in her grief. 

Hamnet is a story where not a lot happens and yet everything does. It’s whimsical and bittersweet like the bit of magic you feel when a wind sweeps up from nowhere. It’s not about the satisfying details, the behind the scenes look of an iconic man. It’s a small window into a woman’s life, the intimate understanding of her responsibility to carry everything and everyone, and the beautiful transcendence of that weight.

xo Kelly