HAMNET by Maggie O'Farrell - the novel and the film appraised by Celia Rees

"Being such a big fan of the book, I was very much looking forward to the film and I was not disappointed ..."

Celia Rees is a leading writer for Young Adults with an international reputation. Her titles include Witch Child (shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize), Sorceress (shortlisted for the Whitbread - later Costa - Children's Book Award), Pirates!, Sovay, The Fool’s Girl and Glass Town Wars. The chance discovery of an old family cookery book has now taken her writing in a new and different direction. In 2012, she began researching and writing her first novel for adults, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook, paperback edition, Miss Graham’s War, published in 2021.

Twitter: @CeliaRees Instagram: @celiarees1

Like William Shakespeare, I am Warwickshire born and bred. I was born within the area of the Midlands which was once covered by the great Forest of Arden. My grandfather came from a village not many miles from Henley-in-Arden; his family had lived there for many generations: carpenters, blacksmiths, small farmers. Stratford-on-Avon would have been their nearest big town. As a child, I visited Stratford regularly, to shop, go for tea, walk by the river, feed the swans, visit the market, which is still held on Rother Street, just as it was when Shakespeare lived a couple of streets away. Stratford was very familiar to me and there was still an echo of the town that Shakespeare once knew. Less so now, the streets thronged with tourists, every other shop selling souvenirs, but down by the river on an autumn morning, walking in the graveyard of Holy Trinity Church with the Avon flowing below the wall, it’s still just about possible to sense a continuity of place with the man whose son is buried close by. Similarly, the Great Forest has dwindled to tufts and patches, some of the last precious remnants destroyed to make way for HS2, but Warwickshire remains an arboreal county and from certain perspectives, it is possible to look across the landscape and maintain the illusion that the Great Forest is still there.

Perhaps, sharing a county is the reason I’ve always felt an affinity to William Shakespeare. The Stratford boy, son of a tradesman, who went to London to make his way in the theatre, taking his town, his people, his county, the forest and trees, the fields, the river, the plants and animals with him. His origins were humble. Like most people of his sort, the only records are in official documents: birth, marriage, death, a Will, the purchase of property. The bare facts of a life. The rest is conjecture. For me, this makes it possible to glimpse the man behind the towering genius. This gave me permission to make him a character in The Fool’s Girl. I had the idea while watching an outdoor performance of Twelfth Night by the river, a stone’s throw from the Royal Shakespeare Company Theatre. The production was in a natural amphitheatre, a group of drama students performing on a wooden platform, changing behind bushes, much more in keeping with the theatre Shakespeare would have known than the grand edifice I could see through the trees. Twelfth Night is one of my favourite plays, the line ‘What country, friends, is this?’ one of my favourite lines. I spent much of the play lost in speculation: ‘What happens to them after the play ends?’ Although a Comedy, the play’s end is ambiguous, to say the least. By the time the players took their final bow, I had an idea and two characters: Violetta (Viola and Orsino’s daughter) and Feste, the clown. A long way from Illyria, they are performing tricks on Bankside. Shakespeare is on his way from the theatre to his lodgings. He stops to watch. He is in need of a clown, but more than that, he senses they have a story to tell and, like all writers, he collects stories. He invites them to the Anchor Inn and the rest is The Fool’s Girl.

Shakespearian scholarship has changed in recent years and changed radically. In attempting to discover the possible truths about a life lived beneath the historical records, scholars have turned to the social history of the period, reasoning that, setting aside his genius, Shakespeare was a man of his time who can be discovered through extrapolating known facts about what life was like for people of his station in Stratford and the life of the London theatre. This is where I went to do my research. James Shapiro’s 1599, Jonathan Bate’s Soul of The Age, Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger and above all, Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife told me what his life could have been like and in Germaine’ Greer’s case the life of his wife. A life that could have been lived, very probably was lived. As a fiction writer that was good enough for me and I think, good enough for Maggie O’Farrell.

I must admit to being a great admirer of Maggie O’Farrell, her skill in weaving one story into another, past into present, just as memory is woven through everyday consciousness. She has a powerful sense of place. In Hamnet, her meticulous research never dominates or overpowers the narrative, but subtly confirms the world her characters inhabit, what they see and sense around them. Their world is there on the page, fully formed, as it would be for them. Her characters were real people, familiar to us because one of them is universally recognised. We can visit their different houses, see where they lived but not how. We cannot know them. Maggie O’Farrell makes them known. Particularly, the wife, Anne. She calls her Agnes, which distances her from the stock character of Anne Hathaway (of Cottage fame) and makes her into someone else entirely. Agnes pronounced with a soft ‘g’, sounds very much like Anne. Names were not fixed in sixteenth century Stratford: Agnes for Anne, Hamnet for Hamlet and there we have the key to the book.

Maggie O’Farrell does not just re-claim Anne/Agnes, she makes her a powerful, rather mysterious woman, a daughter of the ever present forest, herbalist, hawker, bee keeper with the gift of second sight. It is these qualities that mark her out as ‘other’, mysterious, mis-trusted, seen as dangerous and as such powerfully attractive to the Latin Tutor who comes to teach her younger brothers. The tutor is, of course, William Shakespeare. He is never named in the book because he doesn’t have to be. The author doesn’t only reclaim Shakespeare’s wife, she reclaims his children, too. Susannah, the oldest and especially the twins Judith and Hamnet. The book begins with Hamnet searching the house and then for any of the women folk of the family who can care for his sick twin. His search is desperate, the reader knows that Judith has plague as does Hamnet, he’s seen the buboes on her neck, ‘A pair of quail’s eggs, under Judith’s skin. Pale, ovoid, nestled there, as if waiting to hatch.’ His search is intercut with the past, his parents’ courtship and marriage. later, his mother’s equally frantic attempts to save her child are interwoven with the birth of children, her husband’s move to London and the plague bacillus’ ominous journey from Alexandria to Stratford-on-Avon.

The story turns on the interchangeability of the twins, as if they are two aspects of one person, as it does in two of Shakespeare’s plays The Comedy of Errors and particularly Twelfth Night. ‘One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons,’ Orsino exclaims on seeing Viola’s twin. Hamnet changes places with Judith, takes her sickness onto himself. He dies, so that she will live. The profound sorrow felt by everyone at his death, contradicts the glib idea that a child’s life was cheaply held.

Shakespeare uses the alchemical power of his enormous talent to turn his beloved boy’s death into perhaps the greatest of his plays, Hamlet. Agnes goes to London to see the first performance. The whole book has been working towards this moment when Hamnet is brought back to life, if only for the span of the play.

Being such a big fan of the book, I was very much looking forward to the film and I was not disappointed. The stripping back of the complex narrative to a linear structure, allows more room for the story to develop from the initial courtship to the children falling ill. Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Emily Watson as her mother-in-law, Mary, bring alive the position of women at the centre of the everyday Elizabethan world, the harsh reality of their lives, the ordeal of childbirth, the constant threat to their children. The central tragedy was as harrowing on the screen as it was in the book, Jessie Buckley’s/ Agnes' frantic, inconsolable grief is visceral.

The most powerful part of the film lies in the performance of Hamlet in The Globe. Film is a child of theatre and it took a visual form to do justice to the scene. Part of the power lies in Agnes never having been in a theatre, never having seen a play, puzzling out what was going on, but the real power lay in the merging of the boy Hamnet into the young man Hamlet, played by two brothers Jacobi Jupe and Noah Jupe, and the effect this has on Agnes. Her reaching out to Hamlet and the reaching out of those around her, until the whole audience is reaching toward the stage says something about the power of theatre, the yearning to be part of it, for it to be true. Weeping audiences have become a cliché of the film, but when the young Hamnet turns for one last look at his mother before entering the black void at the centre of the painted backdrop, I must admit to shedding a tear.