In a small Warwickshire village, an eleven year old succumbs to the plague. The year is 1596; the boy’s name is Hamnet. His father, who remains nameless throughout the book, goes on to write a famous play about a young Danish prince, while his mother stays behind with the boy’s sisters, trying to pick up the pieces of their life.
Hamnet is about a side of Shakespeare we rarely get a glimpse of, mostly because not a lot is known about it save for a few salacious details (that his wife was pregnant when they married, or that he left her his second best bed in his will). The lack of historical supposition gives O’Farrell the liberty to speculate, and she chooses to focus most of her attention on Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes (generally known as Anne, though her father’s will names her as Agnes, which was commonly pronounced as Annès, hence the confusion). Agnes is a free spirit, who knows the medicinal properties of plants, who knows what the future holds in store for people, who – I wish I were joking – can get squirrels to come down from the trees for a cuddle.
It’s not a bad book and by and large, I quite enjoyed it, but O’Farrell has never met a metaphor she doesn’t like. What she also likes is summing things up; a garden is never a garden but a sea of lavender, wolfsbane, rhododendron, monkshood, purple-hooded leopardstongue and grey-sheafed codswallop (or whatever. I’m not a botanist). I also didn’t care much for Agnes; she’s likeable enough, but why do women in these books always have to be misunderstood Children of Nature?
Other parts of the book are poignant and heartbreaking; we know Hamnet’s death is coming from the get-go, and his death is agonising, his mother’s fear turning into desperation, then grief. It’s a tough read, but it’s well executed. And the descriptions of the daily grind in the stagnant Stratford and the filthy vibrancy of London and its theatres are vivid and almost leap off the page.
All in all, though, I’m not entirely sure how I felt about this book. I think O’Farrell is a good writer, but the adagem “less is more” is something that she should perhaps take to heart a bit more.