She is a falconer and a herbalist, and is believed by some to have unnatural powers, “this creature, this woman, this elf, this sorceress, this forest sprite”. She is an independent spirit, “like no one you ever met”. And his wife, known to us as Anne Hathaway but referred to in the novel as Agnes (which is what her father called her in his will).Īgnes, not Hamnet, is the real centre of the novel. There are his daughter Susanna and twins Judith and Hamnet. There’s his father John, a glove maker, who disapproves of his errant son wasting his life as a language tutor. She recreates Shakespeare’s – let’s say Will’s – family amid the sights, sounds and especially smells of Elizabethan England. According to Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were entirely interchangeable at the time, and O’Farrell is interested in determining the connection.

Hamnet is named after William Shakespeare’s only son, who died aged 11 in 1596 a few years later, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. Until now her novels have varied between contemporary settings and period pieces from the mid-20th century: now she has gone full historical with “a novel I’ve wanted to write for over 30 years”. Maggie O’Farrell has been prominent since her debut After You’d Gone, 20 years ago, and her books have won acclaim from then up to her 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am.

Not that there is much danger of Hamnet being overlooked. Folly, or good sense to get a leg-up from the interest in the period? After all, a rising tide lifts all boats. Imagine publishing a novel depicting a famous person in 16th-century England in the same month as The Mirror and the Light.

Hamlet book