Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother's: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry ... It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell is a 2020 Historical Fiction novel about William Shakespeare's family during the death of 11-year-old son Hamnet in 1596.
A stage adaptation written by Lolita Chakrabarti premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2023.
Examples
- Adaptation Name Change: In real life, Shakespeare's little sister was actually named Joan. Due to One-Steve Limit and Joan also being the name of Agnes's stepmother, this Joan — and also Joan their parents' firstborn daughter who died as a baby, for whom the Joan we know is named — are both renamed Eliza.
- Angsty Surviving Twin: At he sits on his twin sister's deathbed, Hamnet thinks:Hamnet's internal monologue: He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him. How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain.
Except the audience already knows from the beginning how this will end: Judith will pull through somehow, and Hamnet himself will be the one that dies.
- The Black Death: The book is set in the 1580s and 1590s, and the pestilence is a very real and ongoing danger.
- Creepy Catholicism: Amidst The Protestant Reformation, Agnes's mother — a mysterious, quasi-supernatural herb witch — is a secret Catholic. When she dies, her husband calls in a Catholic priest to perform her last rites, and then swears their toddler daughter to secrecy.
- Inconsistent Spelling: Spelling was not yet standardized at this time. Hamnet is the same name as Hamlet. Agnes is also Anne.
- No Name Given: William Shakespeare is never referred to by name, just epithets describing his relevant identity in the context of the scene. He's a son, a brother, a husband, a father, a Latin tutor.
- Shotgun Wedding: The historical record is that their firstborn, Susanna, was born 6 months after their wedding. The book plays it as an Inverted Trope: Agnes's stepmother initially denies their request to marry, so they go ahead and get pregnant to force the families to allow it.
- Tempting Apple: To preserve apples effectively, they cannot be touching each other. To be space efficent, they need to be pack as closely as possible. So the apple shed is full of apples nearly but not quite touching — a metaphor for Unresolved Sexual Tension. The the focus pans to the young couple who are all over each other, having Their First Time in that shed, jostling the apples.
- Twin Switch: Twins Hamnet and Judith look very alike. At 11, just shy of puberty, they can still pull of switching places. This is a reference to Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night.
- Wicked Stepmother: Agnes and Bartholomew are the children of late first wife Rowan, while the other 6 children in the family are from second wife Joan. They are outsiders, and there is an acrimonious relationship between Joan and Agnes. However, it's an Inverted Trope in that little Agnes started messing with Joan out of resentment for replacing her mother before Joan took any issue with Agnes, before she even married her father.
