On the website Goodreads, there are electronic ‘shelves’ for ‘Books Read’, and ‘Books I Would Read Again’. Of the 63 books I have read and uploaded on my account, only 11 have made it onto the ‘Books I Would Read Again’ shelf. Hamnet is one of them.
Naturally, when I heard that Maggie O’Farrell was coming to St Andrews to speak about Hamnet, Waterstones’ Book of the Year 2020, I had to go.
The event was hosted by Topping & Company, a bookstore in town. They posed a series of questions for O’Farrell, the first of which was what it was like winning the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, especially given lockdown.
The occasion was not quite so glamorous as one might expect. After finishing a Zoom call, O’Farrell got into her pyjamas and was cleaning up her cat’s vomit when she received a text asking her to get on one last call. Reluctantly, she complied, only to be told that she had won the prestigious prize. In reference to the ceremony itself, she commented that, in a way, she was grateful to have been in the online cohort of shortlisted authors after having seen the nervous 2021 nominees waiting backstage for the in-person ceremony.
O’Farrell then spoke about how long it took her to officially start writing Hamnet. After first having the idea in 2011, she wrote three books, none of them Hamnet, which was not released until 2020. She spoke of having an odd superstition. O’Farrell, like Shakespeare, has three children. She wished for them to surpass the age of 11 (the age Hamnet died) before she could write the book. When all three did, she decided it was about time she started putting her precious idea on paper. Her previous notes had proposed starting at the end of the story, when Shakespeare’s Hamlet debuted at the Globe Theatre, but when she started a first full draft, she wanted to begin with Hamnet still alive. Disclaimer: Hamnet’s death is no spoiler. His passing is made clear from the historical note at the front of the book.
When it came to writing the book, there were numerous historical questions to be asked. The book begins with Hamnet coming down a flight of stairs. Then, he jumps and stumbles onto a flagstone floor. As she was writing this opening, O’Farrell realised she had no idea what type of floors ordinary Elizabethan houses had, let alone Shakespeare’s floors. And so, true to her dedicated character, she went to Stratford to visit Shakespeare’s very own house, analysing each room intensely – especially the floors.
She spoke of the odd sensation of visiting the house of a person who had been so influential in the world of language and literature. However, in spite of her evident awe and admiration for Shakespeare, the bard is not named once in Hamnet. When asked why, O’Farrell replied that she would have felt like an ‘eejit’ linking an action to Shakespeare, such as ‘Shakespeare walked up the path and knocked on the door’. She also wanted readers to be able to think of Shakespeare as a human, in a way we hadn’t before, seeing him in the early stages of his career before his fame.
In fact, one could argue that Shakespeare plays a smaller role than his wife, Agnes. O’Farrell stated that Agnes was never meant to become a central part of the novel; the intention was to focus on Hamnet. Yet she found herself including Agnes more as she explored themes of love and grief. She refashioned the stereotypical representation of Ann Hathaway as a shrew, rendering Agnes as intelligent and connected to her body and the earth in a unique way.
When asked for writing tips, O’Farrell gave two pieces of advice. The first: don’t worry about starting at the ‘beginning’ of the story. If you have an idea, then just write – worry about how to start the book later. The second: set a time for writing each day. Rid yourself of all distractions and just sit. Even if you don’t write anything, you’re still meditating on thoughts in a dedicated time. This still counts as writing, in O’Farrell’s eyes.
As I listened to O’Farrell discussing her work, it became clear that she had thoroughly researched Elizabethan England, which is apparent in the book. Furthermore, she struck me as having a genuine care for her characters – after all, they were real people. O’Farrell even went so far as to attempt to get a marked gravestone for twins Hamnet and Judith, so they could have a formal place in the Stratford graveyard along with their family. I feel that, were I to go to see O’Farrell again, I would learn even more about the beloved Hamnet and the context in which it was born.