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.

Hamnet too is showing symptoms of illness, but no one notices these. As Hamnet cannot bear the thought that his twin will die while he continues to live, he makes a pact with death. He swaps clothes with Judith and vows to take her place as Death’s victim. Agnes wakes up to find that the dying twin is Hamnet and not Judith. There is nothing she can do to save him.

The second narrative of the novel begins with the meeting of Hamnet’s parents. His father is a Latin tutor and the son of a disreputable glove-maker, while his mother is the daughter of a deceased yeoman and a forest-dwelling healer. By the time Agnes meets the Latin tutor, her mother is dead, and she is in service to her stepmother Joan, who is intimidated by Agnes’ psychic and healing abilities. When Joan opposes a marriage between the Latin tutor and Agnes, the couple have sex. Their union results in a pregnancy and a rushed marriage which John, the Latin tutor’s father, favors because it lessens his debt to the deceased yeoman. Agnes goes to live with the Latin tutor and his family in the town of Stratford. In accordance with her dead mother’s guidance, she gives birth to her first baby, Susanna, in the forest. Over time, Agnes gains a reputation for her healing powers

However, when Agnes is pregnant with her second baby, she is troubled by her inability to divine the child’s sex and by her husband’s restlessness and depression. She senses that he needs to get away from confining Stratford and go to London. Agnes originally plans to follow him there after she gives birth. When Agnes gives birth to twins, Hamnet and Judith, she is afraid, owing to the psychic feeling that she was only meant to have two children and not three. She determines that she should oppose fate and ensure all three of her children’s survival. As Judith is a frail child, Agnes maintains that London would kill her, and so she decides that they will stay in Stratford. Subsequently, the children grow up apart from their father, who becomes an increasingly successful playwright.

The final part of the novel chronicles the aftermath of Hamnet’s death. While a devastated Agnes mourns her son at home, her husband feels that he must escape his grief in London. Although he still visits home periodically and acquires a bigger house for his wife and remaining daughters, he grows further apart from them and is unfaithful to Agnes. A few years later, when Agnes finds out that he wrote a play bearing their dead son’s name, she is horrified. Determined to see the work, she finds that the play is her husband’s means of resurrecting Hamnet and consoling himself over the loss of a child.