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| Maggie O'Farrell. |
My son recently sent me a copy of Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, the
winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020. It is an
extraordinary novel, its prose is often lyrical and beautifully
sustained in describing emotions and events, funeral rituals and
detailing the journey of the plague. Sometimes its story is
unbearable. The heroine is Anne Hathaway, rechristened as directed by
her father in his will, as Agnes. She is a woman in her mid twenties
from a family of affluent yeoman farmers, old, then, to be unmarried;
she married the 18 year old son of a brutish Stratford glove-maker,
a bully and an unpopular man. The son, never named, has had a good
education and has become a Latin tutor to the children of the
wealthier citizens of Stratford, those with pretensions. When they wed, she is pregnant
and six months later, gives birth to Susanna; two years along the
road, identical twins Hamnet and Judith [named after friends and
neighbours of the couple] appear…
Agnes dominates the narrative; her husband is never named and she appears not to notice, or to dismiss, his gradual success as a playwright and the leader of a theatre company, appearing at Court from time to time. Chiefly, he lives in London. The gradual wealth he earns and sends home, is never discussed even when it permits the removal of the family into a huge and beautiful new home in Stratford. Everyone seems mystified as to how the Shakespeares have managed to become wealthy. The prescient details of how the plague spreads from a cabin boy and a monkey in Alexandria by degrees and chance encounters, to Stratford is brilliantly observed and should offer pause for thought to anti-vaxxers now. Twin Judith is infected but despite all, it is her twin Hamnet who catches the plague from her and dies at 11. The grief of both mother and twin is overwhelming but it is the grievous loss to the oft-absent father which is even more moving. He writes Hamlet three years after his much-loved son’s death in a sort of atonement and perhaps to demonstrate to his wife and himself the overwhelming grief he feels over their loss. Hamnet and Hamlet were “entirely interchangeable” names as seen in parish records in Stratford during the late
16th and early 17th centuries.
Having
just been moved with sadness and admiration for Maggie O’Farrell’s lyrical re-imagining of the death of Hamnet and the Shakespeare
story. I happened to see the phrase, “upstart crow”
somewhere and I remembered the Shakespearean connection. In fact the
description is the title of Ben Elton’s adaptation of the
critically-acclaimed BBC TV sitcom starring David Mitchell which
moved to the Gielgud Theatre in February 2020. It is a satirical
Black-Adderesque comedy which has been much-lauded. I hadn’t known
that the description came from one of Shakespeare’s rivals, Robert
Greene, who published, “at his dyeing request”, a tract called
Greene’s Groats-Worth of Witte bought with a
million of Repentance. It describes” the follie of
youth, the falsehood of make-shifte flatterers, the miserie of
the negligent, and mischiefes of deceiuing Courtezans” and
makes public criticism of his many enemies. Its singular title
quotes, “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers” and
this is meant for Shakespeare. It is the first mention of
Shakespeare in print [September 20, 1592.], and is both an accusation
of his plagiarism and the intellectual disparagement of Shakespeare
as someone who had not attended university. [Greene had attended both
Oxford and Cambridge!] Greene also refers to Shakespeare as “an
absolute Johannes fac totum” [or Jack-of-all-trades] a
reference to the fact that Shakespeare was an actor-manager as well
as a playwright.
A
timely footnote is that I happened across Kenneth Branagh’s All
Is True [2018]
on Netflix the other evening; it is a story suffused
with melancholy as it tells the elegiac tale of Shakespeare’s
retirement in 1610 after the complete destruction by fire of the Globe
Theatre. He sets about trying to establish himself as part of the
Stratford household he knows so little, and re-designing his large
garden as he ponders his life, often regretting past events. The narrative
is imagined differently from Hamnet in some ways, in particular
Hamnet’s death, and the portrayal of Anne/Agnes, but the stoical sadness of Anne, his wife, and the
clear unhappiness of his daughter Susanna in her marriage, and of
Judith, Hamnet’s twin, who lives with her parents, suffuses his
life. Interestingly, the script-writer for both Upstart Crow and All
Is True is Ben Elton who seems to be developing a Shakespearian monopoly. His script-writing is impeccable.
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| William Shakespeare April 23rd 1564- April 23rd 1616. He was 52, quite old in an age when the average age of death was 35. |
Agnes dominates the narrative; her husband is never named and she appears not to notice, or to dismiss, his gradual success as a playwright and the leader of a theatre company, appearing at Court from time to time. Chiefly, he lives in London. The gradual wealth he earns and sends home, is never discussed even when it permits the removal of the family into a huge and beautiful new home in Stratford. Everyone seems mystified as to how the Shakespeares have managed to become wealthy. The prescient details of how the plague spreads from a cabin boy and a monkey in Alexandria by degrees and chance encounters, to Stratford is brilliantly observed and should offer pause for thought to anti-vaxxers now. Twin Judith is infected but despite all, it is her twin Hamnet who catches the plague from her and dies at 11. The grief of both mother and twin is overwhelming but it is the grievous loss to the oft-absent father which is even more moving. He writes Hamlet three years after his much-loved son’s death in a sort of atonement and perhaps to demonstrate to his wife and himself the overwhelming grief he feels over their loss. Hamnet and Hamlet were “entirely interchangeable” names as seen in parish records in Stratford during the late
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| Globe Theatre, built by Shakespeare's company of players, 1599,destroyed by fire. June 29th 1613. |
16th and early 17th centuries.
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| Kenneth Branagh as Will in All Is True. |
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| /Ben Elton |
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| Globe interior. |
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| Robert Greene's Groats-worth of Witte |
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| Southwark where Shakespeare spent much of his life and wrote most of his body of work |
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| Cover of Maggie O'Farrell's extraordinary book. |
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