'Hamnet', the mourning for the death of a child

in Shakespeare's time according to the

writer Maggie O'Farrell
• The new novel by Maggie O'Farrell arrives in Spain,
winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction and one of the
best books of 2020 according to The New York Times

Maggie O'Farrell. Photo: Murdo Macleod. Photo: Murdo Macleod.

Carmen López

10 de marzo de 2021 23:01h

Updated on 11/03/2021 12:58h

Hamnet Shakespeare died in 1596 in Stratford for reasons that were not recorded in
the official documents of the time. Four years later, the father wrote one of his works
most celebrated and titled it with his name making it immortal: Hamlet. And five centuries
Later, the Irish writer Maggie O'Farrel has fictionalized that story.
in his novel Hamnet, which Libros del Asteroide has published in Spanish translated by
Concha Cardeñoso and L'Altra editorial in Catalan with translation by Marc Rubió Rodon. Still
It is not known whether it will go down in the annals of literature like the tragedy of the English author but, for the
moment, it has already won the Women's Prize for Fiction and has entered the top 5 of
the best books of 2020 from The New York Times.

There is little data about the personal life of William Shakespeare, but even less about
his family. He was married to Anne Hathaway—yes, like the actress—and had three children: Susanna,
Judith and Hamnet, who were twins. The boy passed away at eleven years old. O'Farrell learned about
that fact when I was 16 and still in high school. And it stuck with him. In the 16th century.
Hamnet and Hamlet were two interchangeable forms of the same name, which for her means
to say that Shakespeare wrote a play for his deceased son. Or, at least, with his name.

When I was at University and studying literature, I read a bunch of biographies and
criticisms about Shakespeare, logically. And what caught my attention was that the existence
his son is overlooked. In those 500-page biographies, he was lucky to find two
references to Hamnet: his date of birth and his death. And his death was always followed by
of some paragraphs about infant mortality in the Elizabethan era which, of course, was very
"high", explains in a video recorded forForbidden Planet TVin April 2020. "I always me
it seemed terrible to assume that the death of this child had not had too much of an impact
great in this family and not even for Shakespeare himself." According to his opinion, the plot of
Hamlet and the biography of his son are not so different as to not see the connection.

But even though the father's name and surname were what guided the writer towards
the story and can provoke the primary interest of potential readers, do not appear in
no page of the book. His character yes but with other names: 'father', 'son', 'brother',
'preceptor', 'husband'. He is not mentioned because he is really just the path that leads to
Anne Hathaway, the woman, the mother, the wife, the protagonist. It is her life as she has wanted it.
imagine O'Farrell starting from the scarce data we have about her: she was eight years
greater than him, they did not live together in London, was the mother of his children, and his father wrote
Agnes instead of Anne in her will. And that is the name assigned to her by the author in her
book.

In some of the biographies that have been written about Shakespeare, they treat his figure quite
bad, with statements filled with misogyny. They said they got married out of obligation because
she was pregnant, that he despised her and did not want to live with her, that she was illiterate. That
made O'Farrell want to seek justice in some way: "I got very angry, very angry, for
the way they had been treated. People will always mention the will [Shakespeare
"only left him 'his second best bed with the furniture', but it is a very
complicated and arid. Well, I can raise the fact that when he retired, he could have
lived anywhere. He was incredibly rich, but decided to return and spend his last
years with her in Stratford. That doesn't suggest that he was a man who hated his wife or
he will lament his marriage,” he explained in an interview with The Guardian.

The devastation of grief for a child

Hamnet dies in the novel due to the plague – by a macabre coincidence of fate, the
the book was published amid the current pandemic–, which had taken many people away
in front, among them boys and girls. Agnes looks around at mothers who bear the grief.
without fanfare, only with resignation and the obligation to 'move forward'. But she does not
she can, the pain divides her in the middle, she doesn't understand how the rest of the women are able to
do it.

O'Farrell assigns him a wild personality for the time, knowledge of

healing plants – in Hamlet they talk about healing remedies made with plants and decided
attribute that knowledge to Agnes - and an extrasensory ability to see the future and
feel the presence of the dead. But she is not able to save her son nor to
to feel it after his disappearance. He only knows that he is buried in the cemetery, with the shroud
that she herself did, breaking down little by little. And that incapacitates her for a
time, it is their daughters who have to take care of the family matters. Among
they, the businesses of their father, who invested his enormous theater profits in buying
properties.

At a certain moment, Judith asks her mother a key question. A matter that
It seems to demonstrate that the suffering is so great that it cannot be explained with words.
How do you say, Judith asks her mother, when a person had a twin and no longer does it
do you have? (...) If you are married, Judith continues, and your husband dies, then you are a widow. And if to
a child loses his parents and becomes an orphan. But how do you say what happened to me?
Does it go to me? I don't know how to say it, the mother (...) Maybe there isn't a word to say it. Maybe,
says the mother.” There isn't one that says what it is when a person has a child and it
loses.

The Irish writer took a long time to write Hamnet. So much so that she finished three books before it.
before getting started with that document he had on his computer.Ina conversationwith
Amity Gaige at Politics and Prose explains [laughing] that: "I had a strange feeling
about writing on the subject. I'm not a very superstitious person, but there was something,
perhaps because I have a son and two daughters like Shakespeare. I felt that I could not write the
book until my son was no more than eleven years old. It sounds absurd because it doesn't exist.
too much danger that my son catches the black death, although you never know. Now he is 17, like this
that I believe is out of danger.

It also states that it was unable to write the duel scenes of Agnes inside the house.
where he lives with his children, but he did so in a shed - 'nothing glamorous' - that they have in
The garden: "Writing about Agnes's grief may have been the hardest thing I've written.
until now because the worst fear of a parent is losing a child, having to bury a child.
In fact, I can't imagine anything worse. And it's horrible to write about it because you are
imagining your worst nightmare.

It is not an unfamiliar topic for her. She has not lost any children, but she has been close in quite a few.
occasions. One of them is narrated in her memoir book I am still here. Seventeen brushes with the
death (Asteroid Books, 2019. Translation by Concha Cardeñoso), in which it explains
literally that number of times he beat death in the game. The last one,
titled Daughter (nowadays) refers to the moment when, lost in the middle of a field
Italian with the family, the girl was on the verge of dying from anaphylaxis. It was not an episode.
punctual: in addition to a chronic eczema - which one of the characters in his novel also suffers from
It has to be here (Asteroid Books, 2017. Translation by Concha Cardeñoso)
allergic to a very long list of things.

There are moments when everything takes on mythological nuances: you raise the syringe of the
adrenaline towards the light thinking about that yellowish liquid and you realize that it has happened to you
granted an elixir to rescue your daughter from death. You have to stab her with a needle to
save her. You can steal her from the shadows, but you only have a specific set of objects,
only if you know to whom you should ask for them. Sometimes you mock yourself for being so fanciful.
And then, reading the myth of Persephone to your daughter, you can hardly believe how well it fits.
the situation and you will wonder what they knew about all this in ancient times,” he narrates in his book.

According to "wild speculations" as Maggie O'Farrell says about the proposals of her
novel, Shakespeare was able to unleash his pain and reunite with his son in the
tables thanks to Hamlet. It is unknown how Agnes did it, but the Irish writer has
given the opportunity to showcase it in Hamnet. Two versions of the same name, two stories
about the same child.