Think back to the facts about your parents and assemble their story. I would imagine gaps and unexpected, hidden secrets would remain hidden. Autobiographies slant towards unreliable memory (I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday); biographies patch together memories of others who can’t remember what they had for lunch yesterday. Someone might say, they had a hot dog, whereas another may say, sausage, and still a third, frankfurter. One may embellish with relish, ketchup, mustard, another chili and cheese or sauerkraut.
Now to dive back 400 years, fiction flies closer the truth and glazing over the facts becomes less a problematic. Maggie O’Farrel’s novel, Hamnet, however, dives deep into obscurity, skipping William Shakespeare and rather looking at his dead son, Hamnet, named after a neighbor and also the Bards most famous play, “Hamlet.” The story, however follows Anne, Shakespeare’s wife, and their courtship, the birth of their children, the death of one of them, and how the couple dealt with that death.
Ms. O’Farrel has decided to call “Anne” Hathaway, “Agnes”, because that was how her father documented her name, which is similar to how many families call Vicky for Victoria, Millie for Mildred, and Liz or Betty for Elizabeth. She never mentions William’s name.
I’m okay with the name change and not naming Shakespeare and playing loose with facts for the joy a good story, but transforming our Lady of Stratford to a healer and mystical woman with clairvoyance, the ability to make positions, cure sickness, tame falcons, and birth squatting in the hallows of a tree make her near equal to her mythic husband—seem to me to go too far.
And if that wasn’t enough, Ms. O’Farrel scrounges for cliches for the 21st century reader would appreciate: the evil step-mother, the magically connected twins, the ghost of the dead son, the lumbering, silent, helpful brother, the distant and unpleasant mother-in-law, and of course, the two misunderstood lovers outcast from their little village. A sex scene is thrown in, should HBO wish to purchase the movie rights.
Nothing much really happens in the novel, but for a time, we live in the age of Shakespeare, coincidently similar to our own. And it doesn’t hurt that having a setting in the time of the plague during a global pandemic help make this story more relevant and easier for launch it to the top New York Times best seller list, reminding us that we may not know much about anyone's life, but that timing is everything in creating a life.
Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrel (2020)