How does a writer bring the past to life? Usually, by taking us into the minds of their characters so that we can say, "I recognise him... I would feel the same in those circumstances... I would behave just like that..." But at the same time, much as we want to relate to characters, we want the landscape to be different; we want to know how it was in Tudor England. We want the detail of the flagstones on the floor, which was, Maggie O'Farrell tells us, her first stumbling block in imagining the life of Hamnet; the very reason she travelled down to Stratford from Edinburgh to visit Shakespeare's birthplace and see for herself the house where his son Hamnet spent his short life.
It is a precious book to read if you have spent most of your life in Stratford-upon-Avon. Because you will think that you know the Bard. You will have walked past those famous black and white buildings; his birthplace, his mother's house, his wife's family home, so many times that you won't see them anymore. But a work of fiction such as Hamnet forces us to consider a new William Shakespeare; it gives us a glimpse of a domestic life that we have probably never considered. It takes the facts and illuminates them from a different angle. Did you know that Shakespeare and Anne married in Temple Grafton because young Will was, well, so young that they couldn't get a vicar to marry them anywhere else? Imagine the walk to Temple Grafton. Imagine all the walking in those lives. Most likely, Shakespeare would've walked from London to Stratford and back, before his literary success enabled him the finances for swifter means of travel.
O'Farrell possesses the great talent for bringing the past to life. Just as Hillary Mantel manages in her historical novels, it is mostly to do with dialogue and inner voice. It always rings true without ever sounding anachronistic. It is at once natural and unnatural to modern day readers. The tone of the prose is also fitting. I could select so many passages to demonstrate this writerly skill but I am choosing the following because I wonder if you've ever considered Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare having sex. No, of course not, and yet, sex is so often written badly but in this extract, the words and the act are so artistically married; the imagery is at once domestic, rural, even brutal; whilst the language is skilfully lubricated:
'And now there is this - this fit. It is altogether unlike anything she has felt before. It makes her think of a hand drawing on a glove, of a lamb slithering wet from a ewe, an axe splitting open a log, a key turning in an oiled lock. How, she wonders, as she looks into the face of the tutor, can anything fit so well, so exactly, with such a sense of rightness?'
How exactly? Because it is Anne, or as she is named in the novel, Agnes, that the story really focusses on. It is Agnes's thoughts that cross the pages and drive the story forwards. Her son is the title character but he dies. And the second half of the novel deals so sensitively, so exquisitely, with this son's absence that the following passage needs to be read over a few times. I wept when I read it first because in it is captured the very nature of grief and how grief is built into houses just as memories come to us from smells. This passage has made me long for the Birthplace Trust to open up again so that I can visit that house that I haven't been in since childhood school trips, and imagine the scene that Agnes too is imagining here, four years after her son's death:
'...she would find them all as they were: a woman with two daughters and a son. It would not be inhabited by Eliza and her milliner husband, not at all, but by them, as they ought to be, as they would be now. The son would be older now, taller, broader, his voice deeper and more sure of itself. He would be sitting at the table, his boots on a chair, and he would be talking to her - how he loved to talk - about his day at school, things that the master had said, who was whipped, who was praised. He would be sitting there and his cap would be hanging behind the door and he would say he was hungry and what was there to eat?'
'How he loved to talk'.....ah, such skill, to evoke the sentiment without the cliché, to give just enough detail that the mind's eye is satisfactorily furnished, without boring the reader with too much unnecessary history. This is great writing and accomplished story-telling.
O'Farrell claims that her initial inspiration for the novel stemmed from a curiosity as to why Shakespeare, alive at a time when Plague featured greatly, never mentions the pestilence, as it was referred to then, once in all of his thirty-nine plays or one hundred and fifty-four sonnets. Although we do not know for sure how Hamnet Shakespeare died, the Plague is a reasonable theory as it was recorded in Stratford at the time of his death, in August 1596. The Plague was often at its most virulent in the hot Summer months. O'Farrell's conclusion is that it was a deliberate omission on Shakespeare's part, that he was so traumatised by grief for his dead child that he could never bring himself to write of the pestilence that sporadically swept through the country and killed his only son. It is a fair conclusion. The play of 'Hamlet' is more difficult to ascribe to grief. The novel's suggestion is that Shakespeare is re-writing history so that it is he who dies instead of his son but the near name troubles me and I think that link is more tenuous. However, reading this novel some four hundred years after the events described, has been a sombre experience as we battle against our own pestilence. Our means of controlling our twenty first century pandemic are not so different from the methods used in the 1590s: stay at home was the prescribed strategy then, as now. In this way, the past seems more alive than ever.
