Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrrell

He was the greatest playwright of all time and a substantial contributor of words to the English vocabulary we use today. Yet Shakespeare remains an enigma, with little or nothing known about him, his nature, his character or his life outside of his plays. Indeed, despite extensive and continued research by scholars from all over the world, all we know about the man centuries later is what he wrote in his plays, his birth certificate, his marriage certificate to Anne Hathaway and perhaps one or two of his signatures found on documents (in each case representing different spellings of his surname).

Set in Warwickshire in the late 16th century, Hamnet is based on Shakespeare’s ambiguous play, Hamlet, and is a wonderful story of life and love. Two unique individuals – he, a young Latin tutor, she, a slightly older medicine woman with unusual gifts – fall passionately in love, settle in Stratford, and have three children. Later, he goes off to London to seek fame as a playwright.

O’Farrell weaved a spellbinding historical novel based on what could have been Shakespeare’s life, even if he is never mentioned by name in the book. And, if a biography for the mysterious life of one of the fathers of English were to be conjured, O’Farrel’s version can hardly be topped – truly a rich and multi-layered legacy.

With vivid descriptions of what village life was like in small-town England in the late 1500s, the novel is brought to life with that unique skill that allows you to smell the leather that was used to make gloves or the fragrance of the apples in the orchards before harvest time, and filled with colourful and typical village characters.

Her cast is diverse and original. Agnes (a variation of Shakespeare’s wife's name Anne and pronounced Ann-yis), is an eccentric healer with a free spirit who spends most of her time in the woods collecting herbs for her medicines and who loves her children more than life itself.

When their only son Hamnet (one of twins) dies of the bubonic plague in 1596 at age eleven, Agnes falls apart, torn by the grief of losing a child, while her husband, by then an established playwright, takes off and has little or no further contact with his family. Some four years later, he expresses his intense grief in one of his most famous plays titled Hamlet, which is a commonly accepted variation of his son's name. In the play, the father dies and the son lives to avenge him.

Hamnet is about the intensity of motherhood – the birth, the love, the loss that goes hand in hand with what being a mother entails. Through the writer’s pen we experience what it meant to be a woman and a mother in medieval England, when the dreaded plague’s deadly grip tightened around households and entire communities. Reading of the devastation of that particular plague is eye-opening, and even more pertinent and poignant while Covid-19 wreaks havoc the world over.

There is so much more I would like to tell you about this book but suffice it to say that it is a brilliantly crafted story about a marriage, a family torn apart by grief and loss, and about an unforgettable little boy whose place in the family will never be filled but whose name will live on forever as one of the most celebrated plays of all time. It is mesmerising and unputdownable.