“I am dead:
Thou livest;
…draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.”

- Hamlet, Act V, scene ii

        Walking through William Shakespeare’s family home on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon is akin to a religious experience. To the modern eye, it is a simple dwelling–the exterior and walls muted in shades of brown, with stone-flagged floors and low ceilings–but in the late 16th-century, it was one of the most impressive houses in the neighborhood. The rooms throughout the house, accessible through a series of open doorways, are furnished with small wooden tables and fluffy mattresses bursting with straw, prepared as if at any moment, the family that lives there may swoop through the doors. As a student of Shakespeare, traveling to this house thousands of miles away from home was almost like a pilgrimage. It’s a journey that events currently going on around the world make impossible now. Walking from room to room, examining the wreaths on the doors and the dust on the mantelpiece, one feels like this man they’ve spent hours thinking about feels more like a human being than ever before. Here he was born, loved, lost, ate, drank, slept, wrote, wept. These walls, so humble-looking, bore witness to years of human experience. 

        This is the side of the Shakespeare clan that author Maggie O’Farrell brings out with her latest novel Hamnet, published March 31, 2020 by Tinder Press. The novel, taking place almost entirely in Stratford-upon-Avon, follows William Shakespeare, his wife Agnes, and his children--especially his son, Hamnet, the novel’s namesake--combining pieces of the historical record with imagined details to create a beautiful, lyrical work of historical fiction. But O’Farrell’s Shakespeare is not the Shakespeare modern readers and scholars may imagine when they imagine Shakespeare–in fact, the novel never refers to him by name. He is not Shakespeare, the greatest, most genius playwright known to the English language. He is the Latin tutor who walks to the Hathaway farm to school the children. He is the son of a demanding and abusive father. He is Agnes’s beloved husband. He is Susanna, Judith, and Hamnet’s father. He is a man whose seemingly idyllic life is plunged, suddenly and inexorably, into unimaginable grief. 

        Grief is an all too familiar feeling these days as the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world in unforeseen ways. People shut themselves up in their homes. Family members have gone months without hugging each other. Doctors and nurses risk their lives on the front lines to treat the afflicted. The holiday season will, for the first time in years, pass by with no pomp and minimal circumstance. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world, but it is not the first epidemic the world has faced. Hamnet situates its events amidst the plague outbreak of 1596, which little by little traveled to Stratford and took over the town, causing people to close their shutters, neighbors to avoid each other in the streets, and doctors in plague masks who come to examine the sick. 

In a brilliant sequence, O’Farrell chronicles how the sickness comes to the Shakespeare family home because of pure happenstance. A Manx cabin boy picks up a monkey in Alexandria. A flea on the monkey jumps to the boy’s red scarf, and then, in turn, jumps onto one of the ship’s cats, and then one of the midshipmen. The infected crew picks up a shipment of glass beads in Venice, which are then delivered to a dressmaking shop in Stratford-upon-Avon because a woman in town has visited London and Bath and wants a new dress to mimic the cosmopolitan styles of the city. A few fleas happen to jump into this box of beads, delivered to a shop where Judith Shakespeare happens to apprentice. All of these events must occur in that order “for a tragedy to be set in motion, halfway across the world” (O’Farrell 167). O’Farrell’s deft prose perfectly encapsulates how the butterfly effect results in devastating consequences. How horrifying and amazing it is that such seemingly innocuous actions can have ripple effects on our lives, thousands of miles away.  

 

O’Farrell’s depiction of the Shakespeares is effective because she introduces the reader to them not as the Shakespeares, but as a normal family one could find anywhere in the world at any time. The mother is a loving, if somewhat slightly eccentric, woman with a talented hand for healing. The father is beloved, but aloof, his work dragging him away to the city or on tour at inopportune times. He needs to provide for his family, but to do so, he must leave that family for long stretches of time, the days passing slowly as his children anxiously await his return. Like many other teenage girls, Susanna, the elder daughter, dreams of what life could be, indulging in materialistic fantasies of new dresses, handsome suitors, and journeys to faraway places. The twins, Hamnet and Judith, are as close as two siblings can be, together since before they were born. 

        These are family dynamics readers can empathize with. Perhaps the reader knows what it feels like to have a brother they love with all their heart, a well-meaning but absentee father they wish was around for them more growing up, or a mother they could not fully appreciate until they were older and realized all she had sacrificed for them. Perhaps they, too, know what it is like to have their family shaken in an instant, as the Shakespeares themselves were. In the summer of 1596, Hamnet dies. 

        O’Farrell begins the novel with a quote from Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s 2004 article in The New York Review of Books about Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, writing that Hamnet and Hamlet were “in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records,” and therefore Shakespeare’s great tragedy Hamlet can be studied as a response to Hamnet’s premature death. It is a product of Shakespeare’s grief, in which he can bring his son back to life, and sacrifice himself in his place. Despite this premise, O’Farrell’s story is relatable because it does not entirely center on the production of Hamlet, but on the grief that could produce such a response. Hamnet is not about Shakespeare the playwright, it is about Shakespeare the father, and the mourning family that must come back together in the wake of personal tragedy. 

        To lose someone you love is a fear everyone knows, especially in the time of a pandemic. Though O’Farrell has never lost a child, she took inspiration from her own fears as a mother of three children, one of whom suffers from anaphylaxis, an allergic reaction that causes potentially life-threatening swelling, breathing difficulties, and shock. O’Farrell continually lives with the fear that her 10-year-old daughter may die from an allergic reaction, or that a tragic accident could befall one of her other children. “It’s every parent’s worst and most visceral fear that you will lose your child,” O’Farrell said in an interview with The Guardian. “That – and the idea you couldn’t save them or weren’t able to safeguard them. I cannot imagine the agony of having to bury a child. It must be unlike anything else.” 

        When O’Farrell began writing Hamnet, she also could not have imagined that another epidemic would arise all over the world by the time of the novel’s publication. COVID-19’s effects around the globe have given Hamnet new relevance. Now every person must live with the fear that a family member or friend could become sick or die unexpectedly. That anxiety has become a core part of daily life during COVID times. COVID-19 does not discriminate. It impacts people old and young, male or female, rich or poor. Even children, who should have their whole lives ahead of them, have died due to COVID complications. The worst part is that due to cautionary measures, many people have not been able to say goodbye to their loved ones in person. Their last conversations must take place through a phone screen, without a kiss or a hug or a touch. 

        In a 2020 New York Times piece entitled “The Last Anointing,” Elizabeth Dias examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has stood in the way of traditional death rites, and forever changed mankind’s relationship to death. “A virus has forced a reckoning with the most intimate questions we have, questions not only about how we live, but also about how we die,” Dias writes. “About what we can control, and what we cannot. About how to name human dignity, despair and hope. And especially about how to make meaning of our final hours on this earth.” Burying the dead is, in Dias’s words, a way to honor the “sacredness of life” and the COVID-19 pandemic has robbed many grieving families of that closure. In Hamlet, Laertes repeatedly cries “What ceremony else?” when Ophelia’s burial service is truncated due to her death by supposed suicide, a grave sin. Despite Laertes being “shallow and rash,” argues Greenblatt, this question of death rites “echoes throughout Hamlet, and it articulates a concern that extends beyond the boundaries of the play.”  

        In Hamnet, Shakespeare is also deprived of the opportunity to say goodbye to his son. He is in London when he receives a letter from home telling him that Judith, not Hamnet, is sick. His paternal instincts kicking in, Shakespeare immediately abandons the premiere of his latest play and rides for Stratford to see his child, to “look upon her once more, before she passes into that other realm, before she breathes her last” (O’Farrell 247). However, by the time he finally arrives, Judith has recovered, but Hamnet had sickened, rapidly declined, and passed away. He dies never knowing the lengths his father went to get home. Shakespeare must live with the knowledge that he never got to hold his son one last time. Agnes, who was home but too preoccupied with Judith’s health to notice Hamnet’s early warning signs, must live with the knowledge that her husband was not there when she needed his support the most. 

        The family spirals, overcome by grief. “How were they to know,” O’Farrell writes. “That Hamnet was the pin holding them all together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?” (O’Farrell 277). 

 

In the wake of Hamnet’s death, Agnes agonizes over what she could have possibly done to save his life. “I would have cut out my heart and given it to him,” She says to her husband. “If it would have made any difference” (O’Farrell 278). At this moment, people all over the world must also live with this uncertainty. How did their loved one contract COVID? Did they give it to them? Had they not gone to the grocery store or the park or the office, could this tragedy have been prevented? 

        Unfortunately, these questions are impossible to answer, and it is not the first time mankind has grappled with them. During the plague epidemics of medieval times, dying became such a core part of society that, Dias explains, a new genre of literature emerged around it: ars moriendi, literally translating to “the art of dying.” These handbooks “outlined final prayers for the dying and their families, and how to avoid temptation and fear in the final hours.” Death hurts. It always hurts. But the human species must find ways to continue living when it hurts the most. 

       In “The death of Hamnet and the making of Hamlet,” the article by Stephen Greenblatt that O’Farrell quotes at the beginning of her book, published October 21, 2004, Greenblatt explores how Shakespeare parsed through his grief after the death of his only son. “Hamlet,” He argues. “Marks a sufficient break in Shakespeare’s career as to suggest some more personal cause for his daring transformation both of his sources and of his whole way of writing.” Though Hamlet was written approximately four years after Hamnet’s passing, Greenblatt argues that the imminent death of Shakespeare’s father may have caused him to revisit the grief he felt at his son’s loss and, finally, put pen to page. According to Greenblatt, Shakespeare “believed that the theater–and his theatrical art in particular–could tap into the great reservoir of passionate feelings.” 

        In Hamnet, it is the writing of Hamlet that brings the Shakespeares back together after Hamnet’s death. Finally, Agnes can peer into the depths of her husband’s soul, and they have a moment of clarity and understanding over their mutual loss. They are the only two people on this earth who understand the full weight of Hamnet’s death. Together, his memory lives on through them, and nothing can ever take that away. In the COVID-19 era, perhaps this is Hamnet’s most valuable lesson. 

        Psychologists say there are seven stages of grief: shock, anger, bargaining, depression, testing, and, finally, acceptance. The last stage is the hardest of them all. How does one accept a reality in which their loved one no longer exists? It is easy to seclude and assign blame. It is more difficult to process your emotions and remember the joy among the pain. Ultimately, it is through our memories that the ones we love can achieve immortality. In our hearts, they can live forever, blissful, untouched. Perhaps they never truly leave us after all.