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A young William Shakespeare (but his name is never used in the book) falls in love with a woman 8 years his senior. She comes from a respected family but is eccentric, a little wild. She is known for her gifts as a healer and for the kestrel she keeps and takes out hunting. Agnes is also a little uncanny; she knows things others don’t.
She and her new husband have a daughter, then twins: a boy and a girl. And at age 11, the boy, Hamnet, dies.
That event, and the grief it precipitates, are the core of Hamnet. The story goes between the “present,” right around 1600, when the boy is about to die, and the past of the lives of Agnes and her husband, touching a bit on their childhoods and then mostly on their meeting and marriage.
I’ve read and enjoyed a number of Maggie O’Farrell’s books, so I knew this would be beautifully written, and it truly is. Each word, phrase, sentence is a gorgeous item to pick up and turn over and examine. I savored how she approached and expressed the characters’ traits, personalities, and very beings. These were real people, truly, and while we know extremely little about Agnes (known most often in history as Anne) and her children, O’Farrell fleshes them out with compassion and thoroughness.
There are a few threads of magical realism running through the story, which I didn’t expect but felt perfect. The knowing (and not-knowing) that was part of Agnes’ being made the events, when they occurred, even more powerful.
This book is a novel about grief (and wow, she captures the emotions and reactions so incredibly well!), but it’s also more broadly a portrait of a marriage and family (O’Farrell does do that well… see The Marriage Portrait, for instance). It ties in at the end with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which readers know must happen somehow (Hamlet, we are told, is just another spelling of Hamnet). The very last words packed a punch.
I’m so glad I got around to reading Hamnet; such a lovely book and the best of what I’ve read from O’Farrell.
Rated: Moderate. Profanity includes a few uses of mild language and fewer than 10 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Sexual content includes a scene that includes some details and exposure of the woman’s chest and the character’s brief thoughts about the experience. It is told in not-explicit ways, however, with roundabout ways of sharing what happened. There are also other references that are largely closed-door, just an understanding that a married couple is being intimate. (This really in most ways feels like a mild-rated book, but the brief mentions of a few details make it more technically a moderate.) Violence includes some mentions of a man who gets angry and violent with his family members; there are few details but it’s a theme that pops up occasionally.
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