Maggie O'Farrell, <Hamnet>

Hamnet. Does it sound familiar to you? Yes, no one would have not heard of one of the most famous lines in the entire history of English literature, "To be, or not to be-that is the question," addressed by Prince Hamlet. Yet, O'Farrell diverges from the usual suspection that her novel is about either the play or Shakespeare's motive behind it. Perhaps it is about the motive, more precisely, the background of the play as the author closes the very last scene with the apparition of the late King Hamlet exclaiming to his dear son, "Remember me!". Nonetheless, neither the author nor any of her audience genuinely believes that her story contains the slightest degree of veractiy in that aspect. Nothing much has been known about William Shakespeare except he was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon and worked in London under the royal patronage of Queen Elizabeth I. The greatest playwritght of all time stands behind the curtains of history and remains obstinate when demanded upon more privacy. The adamance eventually bore some repercussions too. The most well-known one to the public is, for sure, the ongoing controversy over his authorship. Thus, it is not an exaggeration that Shakespeare as a human being who once lived out the 15th century seems blurry and transparent at the same time. Since the readers do not have any fixed impressions on him, it totally depends on individual receptions. And that was the exact point from which O'Farrell started to lay out her ambitious scheme to reconstruct and recolour the life of the greatest writer. Shakespeare as a boy, a man, a lover, a husband, and lastly, as a father, a bereaved father.

 

Surprisingly, O'Farrell does not talk about Shakespeare that much. Those readers who anticipated the novel to pivot on him would surely be disappointed to a degree as if one has been waiting for more than hours listening to radio for her favourite rock star to say merely two syllables, "hello," and disappear. However, I indeed put some accentuation describing how little portion the great author is given. He plays quite important roles, the ones enumerated beforehand. The narrative tracks down the time period in which he had been still a feeble eldest son of an avaricious glovesmaker but then gradually transforms into a young husband, father, and the most successful literary figure amongst his contemporaries. However, it is Agnes, his wife, on which the author focuses. Not much is directly known to the readers about the Shakespeare family but alluded. For instance, the author never allows anyone to speak about the key incident that defamed the family all of a sudden. Maybe the British audience could have taken the hint earlier than others under the caveat that they feel slightly more familiar with how guilds of the late Middle Ages operated. The author switches back and forth the present and the past - present in the sense that the characters are still driving the plot - with the latter time frame mostly devoted to the childhood of Agnes. Thus, O'Farrell relies heavily on her creativity and imagination here.

 

According to the historical record, William's wife had a different name, but here Agnes seems apt as not only her name but the character itself forms an untypical mystery. The mystery is still the accurate word for Agnes although her uncanniness does not resemble that of the victims of witch-hunts. Some villagers do call her witch because to some extent she is. She can sense the right or wrong of whatever she touches. Wherever her hand touches, Agnes effortlessly understands what is going on inside. And that is why some fear her and some need her. Among the most intimate secrets she can perceive is not only human emotions, such as love, fear, jealousy, and so far, but also the cause of a distress. Now the biggest irony lies on a fact that she cannot diagnose a disease for herself and the closest to her. Agnes always cares for other people who are not her own kin, and she pays the cost by her ignorance of the nascent tumult immanent in her household. Although the author's intention remains garbled, Agnes is the pivot of the whole story. She embodies the idea of human ambivalence: that a man, who cannot always foresee the future, diagnose ever so complex nature of the world as it is, and twist the inexorable course of fate, nonetheless lives in a pretence that everything is under control. Perhaps that is why O'Farrell wanted Agnes to be so fantastical yet real concurrently.

 

Young William, fed up with dark sides of nascent capitalism at the time, visits the Hewlands to teach Latin at the local grammar once a week - but only speciously. He is still tied to the malignant greed of his father because his expedition was utterly 'planned' to compensate for the unscrupulous contract between the glovemaker and the yeoman. However, from there, William unexpectedly finds his only source of rapture: a girl with a kestrel whose deceased mother was supposedly "gypsy or a sorceress or a forest sprite" (37) and herself is "too wild for any man" (37). She had waited for him to free her from the manipulating stepmother and unhappiness that permeates from the stepmother's discontent. He had waited for her to free him from the suffocating amalgam of revulsive smell of materials for gloves such as leather and glues and ceaseless bitterness. The two young victims of harsh reality of the English Middle Ages met, talked, and loved each other. Each of them seeked a way to escape from gloom. As a result, three children were born in their wedlock. The couple had their own versions of fantasy and reality, and they pursued their dreams independently, nonetheless their marriage was the essential part of the personal voyages unfairly underestimated. Thankfully it was Agnes who believed in ideals, which is very untypical of any 15th-century women, that allowed William to fulfil his quest for literary success and his name emblazoned forever in the human history as 'the' Shakespeare. Because Agnes was an amphibious woman often crossing the distant boundary between eccentric and normal, she let the ideal become normal, and the normal become ideal. Yes, all she wanted, different from her husband, was a happy ordinary family: a father, a mother, and their children living happily ever after. It is so strange that a person with strange powers craves for dullness, and to its extreme opposite, every one of us thirsts for something special.

 

The Shakespeare once had three children, but now two. If Hamnet had not died at the age of 10(or 11), then William would have consumed his life in his London attic, his head up in the clouds, always feeling vacant. Likewise, Agnes would have died without any tribulations in William's parents' house in Henley Street, buried under house chores and some unknown plants used to make cures. O'Farrell describes the scene in which the young boy surrenders his own life to save his twin sister with a great fervour. It is so intense that one cannot quite realise how fast he or she is turning the pages. Especially the author seems to be aware of the universal truth that men feel more comfortable with others' sorrow than joy. Mary, William's mother and a wife of John, usually keeps her distance from her peculiar and unfavoured daughter-in-law, but does not hesitate at all to sympathise with Agnes and even console her throughout the entire sequence by which her own child fades away. Anyway, except for the climax, I could not doubt O'Farrell's capacity as an author for constructing a proper narrative. She adopts a non-linear narrative, jumping back and forth the story about how Agnes and William eventually got married and the account of a 'single' day in which Hamnet died. I assume she rather chose to present two separate stories sporadically as she unrelentingly held onto the starting point of the novel: the death of Hamnet. The incident, which presumably gave birth to the greatest English drama, should be at the centre regardless of what comes as its layer. Of course, to achieve the goal, she had no other choices but to gradually disclose what happened before and after the climax in a seemingly random manner. But I shall point out that her effort to insulate the core was a slippage. What comes before and after are not balanced at all in terms of both length and significance. The author did another splendid job delineating how is it to lose a young child and how can one transcend that indelible grief into an art. I guarantee you that Hamnet was written for the last fifty pages with a warning that you need to bear a few hundred to reach the oasis.

O'Farrell, Maggie. <Hamnet>. Tinder Press, 2020.

Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead.