"The curiosity that drove the Irish novelist Maggie O'Farrell to write her bestselling 2020 novel Hamnet sprang from the scarcity of documentation about the book's title character, Hamnet Shakespeare. Born in 1585 to William and Anne Shakespeare, the twin brother to a girl named Judith, Hamnet died of unknown causes in 1596, the only one of the Shakespeares' three children not to reach adulthood. But for the records of his christening and his burial in the Stratford-upon-Avon parish registers, Hamnet's 11 years on earth remain a tantalizing blank, one of those countless human existences that are legible to us now only in the form of a bookended pair of dates."
"And yet, because Hamnet happened to have a father who spent his life creating characters that four centuries on remain as legible and as vibrant as any have ever been, the six letters of this boy's name are all that are needed to suggest an infinity of questions. What was the connection between the loss of the dramatist's only son and the creation, about four years later, of his longest, most linguistically innovative, and-as generations of speculation about its ambiguities attest-philosophically richest play? An epigraph to O'Farrell's novel by the Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt notes that, given the Elizabethan era's disregard for consistent name spellings, "Hamlet" and "Hamnet" were functionally the same name. Was Hamlet, a play entirely caught up with exploring the lived experience of grief, intended in some way as a tribute to the playwright's lost child? And whether or not that was the author's conscious intent, what might it have meant to Anne Shakespeare to learn that her husband, far off in London, was having one of his greatest successes yet with a tragedy that shared a name with the son they had just lost?"
"O'Farrell's radical gambit is to decenter the character of Shakespeare, placing the book's omniscient third-person narration mainly in the consciousness of his wife Ann"
Hamnet Shakespeare, born in 1585 to William and Anne Shakespeare and twin to Judith, died in 1596 at age eleven; only his christening and burial are recorded. Those two archival entries leave his childhood largely unknowable, reducing a life to a pair of dates. The near-identical spellings of Hamlet and Hamnet in the Elizabethan era raise questions about whether the son's death influenced the later tragedy, a play deeply engaged with grief. The narrative shifts focus away from the dramatist himself and instead centers the consciousness and possible reactions of Anne Shakespeare to loss and to her husband's success.
Read at Slate Magazine
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