Hamnet

Hamnet is a historical fiction novel published in 2020 by the Irish-British author Maggie O’Farrell. It fictionalizes the life of William Shakespeare’s family at the time of his son Hamnet’s death in 1596 and the writing of the play Hamlet around 1600. Hamnet won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, a prestigious literary award in the United Kingdom.

Plot Summary

The novel comprises two alternating narratives. The first begins with the events leading up to Hamnet’s death in 1596, while the second describes the events between Hamnet’s parents’ meeting and his birth.

The first narrative of the novel opens with eleven-year-old Hamnet discovering that his twin sister Judith is ill with a fever and buboes, egg-shaped bulges, under her skin. He tries to find the physician and his mother Agnes, who is a healer, but both are absent. His grandparents are too distracted while his father, a playwright, is away in London. When Agnes and the physician arrive, the latter expects that Judith will die. Agnes, who is a more successful healer than the physician, attempts all the cures she knows in order to heal her daughter. The family is unaware that the origin of Judith’s sickness was the faraway meeting of a Venetian glass merchant with a flea that fell off the back of a monkey in Alexandria, Egypt.