When I was in college, studying literature, I visited Anne Hathaway’s Cottage in Stratford-upon-Avon and sat on a bench that, we were told, had been used by William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway when they were courting.
I felt connected to him there, on that bench.
Just now, a quick visit to the website of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust revealed that the bench has, in fact, been dated to sometime between 1750 and 1800, well over a century after Shakespeare’s death.
We have enormous capacity to feel connection where we want it to be.
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In 1596, an 11-year-old boy named Hamnet Shakespeare died. The cause of his death is not known, but the Black Death was ebbing and flowing in England at the time. (As an aside, in recent months, for obvious reasons, I was curious just how long the Black Death lasted. According to the History Channel, “The plague resurfaced roughly every 10 years from 1348 to 1665—40 outbreaks in just over 300 years. And with each new plague epidemic, 20 percent of the men, women, and children living in the British capital were killed.” Good times.) Despite living through the plague, and being directly affected by it (even if only in the periodic closures of the London theaters), Hamnet’s father never mentioned the “pestilence,” as it was known in the sixteenth century, in any of his writings. In the Author’s Note at the end of her new novel Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell says, “I have always wondered about this absence and its possible significance; this novel is the result of my idle speculation.”
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The novel begins with young Hamnet searching desperately for his mother, and then for any adult, because his twin sister, Judith, has fallen ill and is in need of help. His search is in vain, and Hamnet returns to the small apartment attached to his grandparents’ house, in which he lives with his mother and sisters (and father, when he’s in town), and sits next to Judith, waiting for their mother’s return.
Hamnet’s mother, known to most today as Anne, is known as Agnes in the novel, because it is the name written in her father’s will. It is, O’Farrell writes, “Said differently from how it might be written on a page, with that near-hidden, secret g. The tongue curls towards it yet barely touches it. Ann-yis. Agn-yez. One must lean into the first syllable, then skip over the next.”
Agnes is nowhere to be found because she is off at her childhood home, Hewlands, tending to her “witch garden,” as her stepmother calls it, and to her bees. She is, we learn, a diviner of sorts, a soothsayer, and she is able to heal her fellow townsfolk with potions she concocts from plants in her herb garden. She is a falconer, too, until she is married, tending to and communing with a kestrel.
When Hamnet’s father meets Agnes, he is 18 years old and she is 26, practically ancient, and she comes with the burden of a reputation:
She has a certain notoriety in these parts. It is said that she is strange, touched, peculiar, perhaps mad. He has heard that she wanders the back roads and forest at will, unaccompanied, collecting plants to make dubious potions. . . . Her father must have loved her, though, because he left her a sizeable dowry in his will. Not that anyone, of course, would want to wed her. She is said to be too wild for any man.
Agnes is lost in the natural world when Hamnet is running through the town looking for her. And she faults herself for not knowing something was amiss.
Back and forth we go, in the first part of the book, between this present moment (Hamnet and Judith and a dire illness) and a time 14 years before, when Shakespeare, a young Latin tutor, meets and falls in love with Agnes; their eldest child, Susanna, is conceived; and they marry and move into the apartment in which Judith now lies dying.
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Shakespeare in love is, it turns out, everything we would hope. He is lovesick and thinks of nothing else and wants only to be with Agnes. But after their child is born and Agnes is pregnant a second time, he falls into a deep depression. She senses it first as an odor coming off him:
The sour, damp smell is back. It is stronger. It is right here before them. It drifts off him, like smoke, collecting above his head in a grey-green cloud. He pulls it with him, this odour, as if he is enveloped in its mist. It seems to exude from his skin. . . . His face, under his beard, is sallow, parchment pale. His eyes seem hooded and have purplish shadows under them. He stares out of the window, and yet doesn’t. He seems not to see anything before him. . . . He is like the picture of a man, canvas thin, with nothing behind it; he is like a person whose soul has been sucked out of him or stolen away in the night.
That evening, after the bed curtains are drawn, she asks him what’s wrong, and he says, “I don’t know. Nothing. A heaviness of spirit. A melancholy. It’s nothing.” As she falls asleep she hears, or thinks she hears, him say, “I am lost. I have lost my way.” And in the days that follow, she sees all the signs we would recognize as depression today: He cannot sleep, he drinks too much, he is easily frustrated, “sad and sullen.”
Agnes comes up with a plan to save her drowning husband, and goes to her brother, Bartholomew, to get his help in putting the plan in place: Bartholomew will suggest to Shakespeare’s father, John, that he expand his glove-making business to London and send his eldest son to the city to set it up. It doesn’t matter to Agnes whether Shakespeare succeeds in the business (she fully expects that he won’t). This move to London is about getting him out from under the thumb of his father and into the city, where he can write.
The plan succeeds, and Agnes is left alone, with a small child to tend to and a baby on the way. She gives birth to not one baby, but two, and raises the children largely on her own, with the help of her husband’s family.
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Hamnet’s heartache for his dying twin is all-consuming. They have a deep connection, not just spiritually, but physically, in the form of their shared likeness. In fact, their appearance is so similar that they’ve often played tricks on their family, posing one as the other, always ending in surprise (they come by their love of mistaken identity naturally).
After Agnes returns, Judith is brought downstairs to be tended to. Hamnet wakes in the night and goes to Judith’s side, where he sees his sister’s condition has worsened:
He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him. How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain. Tears are appearing on her cheeks now, like silver seeds, as if by magic. He knows they are his, falling from his eyes on to her face, but they could just as easily be hers. They are one and the same.
Hamnet senses that Death is in the room, waiting to take his sister, and he realizes that he can trick Death, that he can trade places with his sister one last time, and spare her, taking her place in death and allowing her to live.
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Where the first part of the book is a mixing of past and present, the second part takes place entirely after Hamnet’s death. It is a portrait of grief, mainly Agnes’s, as her husband has returned to London. She is looking, always looking, for Hamnet, everywhere she goes, searching desperately for her son, and never finding him. And she resents her husband for leaving her again. How could he go back to London so soon after such a loss?
Nearly a year after Hamnet’s death, Shakespeare returns to Stratford, and Agnes senses he has been with other women. She awaits his apology, and instead, he talks to her about their son, asking how often she thinks of him. He says:
I find that I am constantly wondering where he is. Where he has gone. It is like a wheel ceaselessly turning at the back of my mind. Whatever I am doing, wherever I am, I am thinking: Where is he, where is he? He can’t have just vanished. He must be somewhere. All I have to do is find him. I look for him everywhere, in every street, in every crowd, in every audience. That’s what I am doing, when I look out at them all: I try to find him, or a version of him.
She takes his hand in hers and pinches the skin between his thumb and forefinger, because when she does, she can see everything there is to see in a person, and she wants to know the truth about her husband. What has he been doing, who has he been with, in London? She sees it all,
. . . and beneath all this, behind it all, she finds something, a gap, a vacancy, an abyss, which is dark and whistling with emptiness, and at the bottom of it she finds something she has never felt before: his heart, that great, scarlet muscle, banging away, frantic and urgent in its constancy, inside his chest. It feels so close, so present, it’s almost as if she could reach out and touch it.
He asks her what she has found, and she says, “Nothing. Your heart.” He teases her, “That’s nothing?” And then adds, “And it’s your heart, not mine.”
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Several years later, Agnes learns that her husband’s newest play has their son’s name, Hamlet (the names Hamlet and Hamnet were interchangeable at the time), and she’s devastated. How could her husband use their son in this way? What could he have written about their child? Did their son mean nothing to him?
She decides she must go to London to see the play herself. So, Agnes and her brother head off on the three-day trip. They arrive in the city and make their way across London Bridge, complete with heads on stakes, and to the Globe, where Agnes goes in alone to witness the atrocity.
At first, she’s confused. She sees her husband, in the form of a ghost of an old man, a dead king named Hamlet. But then she sees a blond boy, like their son, also named Hamlet, a prince, young and breathing and very much alive. She realizes, in that moment, that in this play, her husband has given life to their dead son, and taken his place in death:
Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own. . . . He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.
She knows now, finally, the true nature of her husband’s heart, and why he must spend so much time away in London, writing.
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I haven’t cried while reading a novel in many, many years, but I cried more than once while reading Hamnet. For a family’s devastating loss, for the ways in which we are misunderstood by even those closest to us, for the chance to see up close—as close as I’ll ever get—the mythic man behind some of the most powerful and lasting words in the English language, and to understand that he was, after all, just a man.
