Hamnet
Hamnet
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Maggie O’Farrell on Hamnet
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A name dropped in passing, never forgottenThe book’s origin sits in a single classroom moment that O’Farrell carried for roughly two decades before she committed it to the page. Her English teacher in a Scottish state school mentioned, almost parenthetically, that Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet who died about four years before the play bearing nearly the same name was written. The observation didn’t read to her as a biographical footnote. It read as a deliberate act whose weight no Shakespeare scholar she later encountered seemed willing to measure.
It could not have been a casual decision; nobody would casually give their dead son’s name to a prince and a ghost in a play they were writing.
At Cambridge in the early 1990s, reading through thick Shakespeare biographies, O’Farrell kept arriving at the same omission. Hamnet appeared in those books exactly twice: at his birth and at his death. The death was always surrounded by statistical context about Elizabethan infant mortality, a framing that implied the loss was unremarkable. A related frustration was accumulating around Agnes: a consistent, unchallenged portrait across decades of scholarship that O’Farrell found actively constructed rather than evidenced.
From scholarly texts to popular culture, we’re told Shakespeare’s wife was an older woman, a peasant. We’re told he did not want to be with her, that she trapped him into marriage. We’re drip-fed this image. I started to feel anger about how domestic life is diminished: people want to believe Shakespeare appeared in London fully formed, that he did not have a domestic life.
The case for Agnes sharpened into a specific archival discovery. O’Farrell was reading Richard Hathaway’s will, written before Agnes married Shakespeare, and found that her father named her not Anne but Agnes. Centuries of biography had been using the wrong name, and the correction came from the one document whose author would have known with certainty.
That was a real lightning bolt moment for me. On top of everything else about the way scholarship and biography has treated her, we’ve been calling her by the wrong name for all these years. I thought, ‘If anyone knows her real name, surely it’s going to be her father.’ I wanted to give that name back to her.
Even after committing to the project in earnest, O’Farrell kept deferring it. The delay was not logistical. Her own son was still under eleven, the age at which Hamnet died, and she understood exactly what writing the central scene would demand of her.
If I was doing this, I’d have to put myself inside the skin of a woman sitting beside her son, laying him out for burial. I thought, I cannot do it – imagine!
She wrote three other novels and a memoir before returning to give herself a direct choice: write the book, or let it go for good.
How she wrote it
Stripping a name, planting a gardenWhat began as a novel about fathers and sons was redirected by research into a novel centered on Agnes. O’Farrell had planned the story along one axis and found herself pulled entirely off course by what the historical record was doing, or failing to do, for Hamnet’s mother.
I should say that I originally conceived the novel to be about fathers and sons. While I was researching the novel, I was sidetracked because I became very upset about how history treated Agnes.
The first structural decision was a removal. Shakespeare’s name appears nowhere in the novel, referred to only as ‘the husband’ or ‘the father.’ The choice was not protective caution but a practical unlock: the name had accrued so much cultural sediment that attaching it to a character made the character impossible to see.
Shakespeare’s name has become so detached from the human being and works as an adjective that can apply to history, clothing and drama, so taking that name away from the novel was very liberating. I stopped feeling so self-conscious about what I was doing and was able to write and ask readers to consider him as a human being before the playwright.
Agnes and the children had almost no documentary trace, so O’Farrell built her understanding through physical practice rather than archival reading. She cultivated an Elizabethan medicinal herb garden and took a course in turning those plants into medicines, wanting to inhabit the reality of a household where a patch of ground was your only defence against illness. She also spent time in the Scottish Borders with a falconer.
I learned to fly a hawk, which was literally the most fun thing I’ve ever done in the name of work.
Writing a sixteenth-century interior from scratch dismantled the instincts O’Farrell had spent a career developing. The era required her to unlearn her own prose automatically: similes built from modern textures and sounds were simply unavailable. A telling slip survived into the copyedit stage, when her editor caught a reference to something folding into concertina folds, a device not invented until the eighteenth century.
Writing Hamnet reminded me most of my first forays and attempts into fiction: that sensation of feeling your way in the dark, not knowing how to proceed. It was invigorating; it made me work hard.
One chapter in particular took on an unexpected resonance. O’Farrell wrote the section tracing the plague’s journey from Alexandria to Stratford in 2018, sitting in her study with maps on the wall showing the illness advancing across a continent. She described wondering what it felt like to watch a deadly disease closing in from a distance. Two years later she was watching COVID tracking graphics that looked almost identical to those maps.
I do remember when I was writing the book in 2018, I was planning the chapter which traces the journey of the plague all the way to England. I remember sitting in the same chair I’m sitting in now and thinking, ‘I wonder what it’s like to be living in a world where this deadly illness is coming towards you, getting ever closer.’
The personal thread
Her own child, her own proximity to lossO’Farrell’s middle daughter has severe anaphylaxis and lives every day under a condition that cannot be brought under control. That daily proximity to potentially fatal risk is not background texture to the novel’s emotional core; it is inseparable from it. The years of deferral O’Farrell described, waiting until her son was old enough, existed alongside the years of managing her daughter’s condition, and both fed the same nerve the book required her to touch.
If I was doing this, I’d have to put myself inside the skin of a woman sitting beside her son, laying him out for burial. I thought, I cannot do it – imagine!
She has spoken elsewhere about her daughter’s anaphylaxis as a daily confrontation with the idea that a child can be lost, and it runs beneath the novel’s grief in a way that no amount of historical research could have supplied.
The wait ended only after O’Farrell finished her memoir, ‘I Am, I Am, I Am,’ which catalogued seventeen near-death experiences of her own. That book required a different kind of reckoning with mortality, and completing it appears to have cleared the path to ‘Hamnet.’ After the memoir, she gave herself no further reprieve.
It could not have been a casual decision; nobody would casually give their dead son’s name to a prince and a ghost in a play they were writing.
What she wants us to sit with
What grief leaves behind, and what it makesO’Farrell’s reading of Shakespeare’s later work is that Hamnet’s death does not disappear after the burial; it resurfaces, transformed. She noticed that boy-girl twin pairs appear again and again in the plays written after 1596, the year Hamnet died. Hamnet and Judith were themselves boy-girl twins. The pattern, to her, is not coincidental.
The writing of those plays for him must have been kind of wish fulfillment, you know, he couldn’t reunite them in life so he could reunite them on stage. And that, that’s incredibly moving to me. [paraphrased from audio]
On the naming of the play itself, O’Farrell is equally unwilling to treat it as incidental. She argues that the act carries a weight Shakespeare biography has consistently underweighed, and she wants readers to feel that weight rather than absorb it as a curious footnote.
It’s not nothing to call a play and a tragic hero after your son – it speaks volumes. We may not quite know what the volumes are – but it’s a huge act.
The novel’s final movement follows Agnes to London to watch her husband perform in a play named for their dead son. O’Farrell deliberately declines to resolve what Agnes feels in that theatre. The four years between Hamnet’s death and that performance matter to her as much as the death itself, because they are the years in which grief turns into something made. The question the novel leaves open is the one she wants readers to carry.
Art explains us to ourselves, you know, and it offers us a road map through life and through difficult situations.