Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell, 2020
The story begins with a wandering child. This is a theme that’s returned to often—that of transience, that of aloneness, that of search. Hamnet, age 11, is playing with his twin Judith when she becomes ill with the pestilence (the bubonic plague). The novel’s first few scenes do an exceptional job at setting its location. We are in Hament’s point of view (through the third person omniscient) searching his home and the grounds around his home for his grandmother, grandfather, older sister Susanna, and mother Agnes, but none are in their normal spaces. Hamnet, sturdy in mind, heart, and body, is confused, frightened, torn between consoling Judith and leaving her to find help. The concept of the torn or cloven self, as well as the concept of the double, is found throughout Hamnet, resulting in the most stunning way to tell the story of persevering the self through death and grief.
It is clear this author has felt peace. Her writing is ambient, clear, controlled. Even through Hamnet’s searching sequence, the sense of abandonment is undermined by the comfort of “slashed” light as it enters the downstairs room, a “windless” late summer day, the “orange embers” of fire “ruminating in its grate,” and the “noise of barrows, horses, vendors” coming from outside. This is all from page 1. In Hamnet’s question of where his family could have gone off to, a feeling of neglect is coupled with the warmness of their close family dynamic. Nonetheless, the book’s immediate opening is that of helplessness—what does one do when they have known love and help, but can not find it anywhere?
The novel is parted by sections, flipping from the present day sickness of Judith (and then Hamnet) to Agnes’s birth story and so forth until present. Agnes was the daughter of a woman close to the forest. After her mother’s death, Agnes rebels against her stepmother by becoming like her mother, close to the forest. Agnes is known to be a witch, to set both curses and healing, to be wild, unmoored, to speak to nature. The stigma doesn’t affect her—she is intuitive, able to see through the veil between worlds, and is able to sense the intentions or futures of a person by grasping the skin between their thumb and forefinger.
For a character like her husband (unnamed through the novel but known to us as Shakespeare), her “mystified” presence is alluring. Her husband is an artist, a dreamer, a person who lives completely in his mind. A woman so perplexing is his perfect divergence from reality. Later, when he is a successful playmaker, the speaker says “He can manage these: histories and comedies. He can carry on. Only with them can he forget who he is and what has happened. They are safe places to stow his mind…” (254).
At first, Agnes and her husband are connected, two parts as one. In the language of their intimate scenes, it is as if their limbs are each other’s, etc. This distinction of the self as entwined with another’s is important because they lose this connection to each other when they become split within themselves. Her husband loses his way, becoming dismal in his day-to-day work of selling gloves, “like the picture of a man, canvas thin, with nothing behind it; he is like a person whose soul has been sucked out of him or stolen away in the night” (155). Agnes feels this loss as a hit to herself: “for the first time in her life, she finds she does not know how to help someone” (159). It is here, when she is pregnant with the twins, that she schemes with her brother to send her husband off to London, where he will be more successful.
I’d like to talk quickly about Agnes and her husband’s wedding scene, in which Agnes has an experience within herself, observing herself and her family around her, and observing change in its very moment. The speaker says “she feels a corresponding motion within herself, in time with the plants, a flow or current or tide, the passage of blood from her to the child within. She is leaving one life; she is beginning another” (99). This theme of transience, of movement, of the weight of perceiving the world in determining oneself becomes the novel’s concluding statement.
Agnes’ brother Bartholomew is an interesting side character. I say this because I had trouble placing his importance, though his importance is clear. He plays the part of the voice of reason and protector. He is with Agnes at her most formative moments, in what seems like a more secure position than her husband. He gives her away at her wedding, finds her in the forest when she gives birth to her first born, is at her side before her husband when Hamnet passes, and journeys with her to London to see the play “Hamlet” at the novel’s close. If the next generation’s Hamnet and Judith are literary “doubles,” as at many points they are, then Bartholomew is Agnes’ true double, where her husband is not. Her husband is more so a double to himself.
A little bit about the double: doubles or splits run throughout the novel, cumulatively reflecting the nature of Agnes’ husband who, as an artist, is naturally split between two selves. The literary double for context is when a character outwardly reflects a protagonist’s inner turmoil. Although Hamnet doesn’t quite do this in the way, say, Crime and Punishment or The Picture of Dorian Gray does, the novel directly uses doubles and feeling split from self to mirror Agnes’ husband’s split from his life with Agnes to his life as Shakespeare.
Judith and Hamnet are direct doubles of each other. It is repeated probably more than any idea in the novel that they are replicas of one another, and can not be told apart. As young kids, they would sometimes fool even their parents by wearing each other’s clothes and pretending to be the other. Their status as doubles is why Hamnet ultimately feels he can take her place. In the novel’s pivotal moment, the speaker says “They cannot both live: he sees this and she sees this. There is not enough life, enough air, enough blood for both of them. Perhaps there never was” (169).
Agnes, though not doubled, deals with a split from herself in the same vein: “Agnes seems to split in two. Part of her gasps at the sight of the buboes. The other part hears the gasp, observes it, notes it: a gasp, very well” (105). She, who is deeply rooted in her connection to nature, seems to dissociate from her conscious self and fall into her natural state at intuitive moments. Hamnet’s writing is very reflective of this, relying heavily on the 16th century England pastoral environment. After Hamnet’s death, Agnes splits further from herself, feeling lost in her preternatural abilities. She questions “how could fate be so cruel in setting her such a trap” (209) by making Judith fall ill before Hamnet. She surveys the long life line on Hamnet’s corpse’s palm, and wants to say to Bartholomew “Do you see that? Can you explain this?” (222). She ultimately loses trust in herself and loses faith in her universe, which have also been preternaturally connected.
Her husband, the main split, is unhappy in his identity with Agnes despite having love for her. Quickly after marriage, she learns: “It is evident to Agnes now, as they enter the kitchen, as he stirs the fire and throws on a log, that her husband is split in two. He is one man in their house and quite another in that of his parents” (122). It is this split that is most important, as the grief of Hamnet allows him to close the gap between his one persona and his other. The sad reality here is that it seems the story seems to be saying that for him to do this, he also must disconnect from Agnes, symbolic of love and family, and move fully inward to his own despondent mind. When he leaves again after Hamnet’s burial, Agnes says this: “You are caught by that place, like a hooked fish…the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else” (240). It is a few pages after Hamnet passes until husband and wife reunite, and then another few before they have a scene between them two, which is filled with a sense of misrecognition. In the pages leading to this reunion of husband and wife, Agnes’ interiority is loud, pressed with sadness and shock, but not quite questioning where her husband stands through it all. It seems the author is rendering him insignificant; Agnes is completely alone, whether her husband is at her side or not. That’s the clearest thing O’Farrell is saying about death—grief is a violent energy, unceasing and lonely. In fact, Agnes’ heartache feels so complete and pungent that I became aware around the time of her husbands’ return that this novel is written by one author; it is somebody’s account of emotion. The story took on a very real, non-fictionalized feeling (as did, actually, Jessie Buckley’s performance in the 2025 adaptation, where at this moment I became aware that Buckley herself has known real grief).
The theme of abandonment returns after Hamnet’s death. Agnes tells her husband “you weren’t here,” in a touching parallel to the novel’s first sequence when Hamnet is searching for his mother and screams “where were you?…I looked everywhere!” (104). Agnes’ husband tells her he cannot abandon his men, to which Agnes responds “but you may abandon us?” (239). While Agnes lives in her grief, Shakespeare’s fear is that his grief will live in him: “Here he is, back in this town, in this house, and all of it makes him fearful that he might never get away; this grief, this loss, might keep him here, might destroy all he has made for himself in London” (236).
In Agnes’ continuation of motherhood after Hamnet’s death, the book somehow poses her maternity as a disconnected force, like it is something that must be kept up with, separate from herself. It continues to be critical to her movements, though it becomes something of a duty, attached to her. It is as if she no longer feels fully connected to motherhood. Her position as a wife also is incomplete. Her husband returns for the first time after burying Hamnet a year earlier. Agnes knows he has been with other women, but sadly and realistically does not mention it. It seems clear that he knows she can tell, so it may be that which makes it forgivable—this unsaid thing that she must know he’s sorry for, as she can read others’ intentions, or that she understands is no part of his life with her.
When she hears the title of his latest play, “Hamlet” she is immediately struck with anger and grief: “Agnes cannot understand what this means, what has happened. How can her son’s name be on a London playbill? There has been some odd, strange mistake. He died. This name is her son’s and he died, not four years ago…He is himself, not a play, not a piece of paper, not something to be spoken of or performed or displayed” (287). She travels with Bartholomew to see the play, to understand it. She searches first for her husband in his apartment, and finds it is empty. She notes “such austerity, such plainness” for someone of his success (293), which she sees in grand note when she meets the theater and the audience crowding it. It is here that Agnes understands her husband’s grief—despite seeming to run away from it, it has got him in the same chokehold as it’s gotten her.
That understanding goes deeper when the play begins, and Agnes realizes it is not a play about her son, as she expected, but a play in which her husband has given her son life. He has made himself a ghost, as if having succumbed to grief, and Hamlet is as he’d be if he had lived. The ghost exits the scene, and says “Remember me,” marking for Agnes that he, too, is forever changed. This last scene reiterates the message that grief happens alone. It feels transitory, like a singular moment of intensity in which Agnes forgives her husband for having abandoned her, but, like the wedding scene in which she watches change happen, we the audience know the scene continues after the novel ends. It can be no mistake that the novel ends in the middle of a London play, which will, of course, continue. The significance is that Agnes is struck by a change in perspective of her husband, seeing his veneration of death and grief as it is made legendary on the stage.
This story is a 5/5. I can’t help but be baffled at knowing there is a person (Maggie O’Farrell) with such wisdom and understanding of our temporal natures, and with such impressive storytelling craft to execute the essence of life and humanity so perfectly.
