Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell, Hamlet, Shakespeare, Femininity
Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet focuses on the process of
grieving. She does this by imagining
Hamnet as a twin – both of his sister, but also, I propose, of his father. O’Farrell most completely imagines the grief
of Hamnet, though, through the eyes of his mother, Agnes. Agnes does not overtly, I don’t think,
imagine him to be her twin, but mostly to be her child.
Hamnet is, of course, a version of the name
Hamlet, and O’Farrell is writing about Shakespeare of Stratford's son, a child named
Hamnet who she imagines to be the model for his Hamlet (That said, O’Farrell never calls Shakespeare
by name. To treat Shakespeare as a
character in one of her novels felt
profane to her. I will refer to him
by that name to avoid confusion but also to articulate the ways that the absent
Shakespeare deeply affects the arc of the novel). O’Farrell imagines Hamnet to have been felled
(mild spoiler alert) by the plague. She
imagines this because Shakespeare, apparently, never once mentions the plague
in any of his plays – which just doesn’t make sense.
The plague was rampant not just in England but throughout
Europe. It was the hallmark of the Renaissance;
a symptom of the improved trade routes that the Renaissance afforded, and (from
a very current perspective) perhaps nature’s way of trying to limit the
expansion of the European version of humankind that would, one day, so
perilously endanger her. Be that as it
may, I do wonder about how the plague and its concomitant losses may have
strangely fueled the artistic blossoming of the Renaissance, and that is part
and parcel of O’Farrell musings about this boy.
I
don’t think Shakespeare came from Stratford: I am an Oxfordian. But I do think that the idea that Shakespeare
came from a small town has spawned a great deal of very interesting thinking
about him and about creativity. Maggie O’Farrell’s
vision is less of Shakespeare and more of Anne Hathaway (whom she considers by
the name Agnes – for there is some evidence that was the name of the name of
the woman married to the man whom some take to be Shakespeare). This book turns out to be incidentally, but
crucially about Shakespeare while it is
primarily about Agnes and the ways of women.
Agnes is, in O’Farrell’s imagining, a witch. She is a seer. When she first meets the boy Shakespeare, who
is the loser son of a shady glove maker in a small town coming to her family’s house in
the country to tutor her brothers in Latin, she takes his hand in hers, as she
does with many people, and reads, by pressing between thumb and first finger, him. She discovers within him vast vistas; distant
horizons, and she seduces him, becomes pregnant, marries him, and they
ultimately have three children; an elder daughter and then twins – a boy and a
girl. Having three children confuses her
because she sees herself in the future with only two children.
Agnes is an herbalist.
She grows her own herbs and harvests wild ones. She dries them and makes tinctures with them
(something that is still practiced by women: see the book Educated).
She then dispenses them to the people in
the town, to the consternation of the physicians, whose competence at neither
treatment nor comfort is as great as hers.
She does not accept payment for her cures and treatments, but instead
appreciates gifts that come from the labors of those she serves.
In this she is different from her Shakespeare and from her
oldest daughter Susanna. The two of them
are shrewd business people with heads for figures. They amass broad holdings that Agnes inhabits
but doesn’t value. Agnes, like the younger
twin, Judith, is, in these matters of the world, simple.
Just as in a Shakespearean play (we saw this in Midsummer Night’s
Dream just last night), there is both a symmetrical relationship between the
characters and then something that throws that off. Here, Shakespeare and Susanna are “twins” (alike
in their having urban and urbane sensibilities) and Agnes and Judith are “twins”
(alike in being creatures of the earth – organically rather than transactionally
attuned to others). The twins at the heart
of the story – Hamnet and Judith - are deeply organically entwined with each
other, but Hamnet is deeply grieved by both Agnes and Shakespeare. Oddly, Agnes accuses herself of having been
out of touch with Hamnet when he needed her most (against her character) and
Shakespeare, too, imagined and feared that Judith, not Hamnet, would be lost. Agnes imagines that Shakespeare does not feel the loss of his son, but ultimately they are, of course, united by their grief.
The death of a child is unimaginable. When my son was born, I could not watch TV
for a year. The death of a character
(which happens more frequently than I ever knew) was the death of somebody’s
child. When asked at Julliard to write
about what terrified him, the author of Rabbit Hole said, “I got nothing.” And then his child was born.
O’Farrell
has had to live with the reality of her one her three children being
consistently on the verge of death. When O’Farrell was taught that the death of
Hamnet was not a significant event for Shakespeare, she recoiled from this
idea. She reimagines Shakespeare as
being; yes, a creature of the theater and of London, and therefore urbane, but
also as someone who is tied to the earth, as someone who is resonant with flowers and winds
and water, and she imagined his domestic life – and his marriage to Agnes – as the
conduit for this. And out of this imagining
she conjured what became, for me, a spellbinding tale.
Freud noted the importance of doubling to the sense of the
uncanny. He was describing what causes
us shivers when we hear ghost stories, but also when we recognize something as
true. We feel something Heimlich (Homelike or canny), something
familiar, in something novel. This might
be a version of the link that Aristotle was pointing to when talking about
tragedy – we connect with the hero and feel a sense of catharsis because of an
identification with them. For Freud, the
sense of identification and the sense of canniness are both linked with a sense
of a double – a person in the present who is very much like a person in the
past.
Kohut, a psychoanalytic thinker whose writings in the 1970s
and 80s opened entirely new ways of thinking about people and analysis, noted
what he called a twin transference. I am
imagining the twin transference, in this moment, as a doubling, as it were, of the self. Seeing in someone else not a version of a
familiar other, but seeing in them a version of ourselves. There is an uncanny sense that I am not alone
(the way that I generally feel), but that I am connected with someone who gets
me not because they have some kind of concept of me, but because they are
shaped like me. They get me because they
are living within a bone structure that is the same as my own.
O’Farrell’s really good story telling becomes movingly,
powerfully excellent when Hamnet offers himself to Death, who is walking around
the room as Judith is dying of the plague. He trades himself for her. As he and Judith are lying, entangled in her
sheets as she is fighting with the plague, “He feels again the sensation he has
had all his life: that she is the other side of him, that they fit together,
him and her, like two halves of a walnut.”
Perhaps those of us who are not twins imagine this connection more
powerfully than those who have lived as twins and sense the yawning differences
between each other as well as the similarities – and I have no evidence that
O’Farrell herself is a twin – so perhaps this is the wish, the hoped-for
twin transference rather than the thing itself, but it is a convincing rendition
of the sense of not being alone that the yearning for another or the feeling of
connection with them can bring.
And I think this is an important part of the intense love
that is part and parcel of becoming a parent.
There is the sense of this other creature – a creature that is dependent
on me in a way that no other creature ever has been; a creature that is deeply
connected to me – and yet is an autonomous being – and there is a sense of
caring for this creature in a way that is unlike any caring that we have
experienced before. We would, as Hamnet
does for Judith, offer ourselves up to death so that this creature could go on
living. When God asks Abraham to
sacrifice Isaac, there is no greater sacrifice that can be asked – and part of
the power of the Christian narrative is God’s sacrifice, in turn, of his only
son.
In O’Farrell’s imagination, this loss is so great that it
drives Shakespeare away, he cannot bear to be in the presence of the reminders of his lost son, but Agnes is therefore left to suffer her grief alone – losing her
connection to Shakespeare in the process.
She then imagines him as unaffected, and we imagine him (in our psychoanalytically informed minds) powerfully
defending against this immense loss.
Agnes can sense the hands of other women on Shakespeare when he returns
home, and we don’t doubt those hands to have been there. But we also glimpse his care for her – his concern
– including the way that it is expressed in his careful wooing to win her back.
We also see his transactional
care as he directs Susanna to acquire more and more things for them in his home
of Stratford - only at the end of the novel do we appreciate that London has never become his home, despite the time that he has spent there.
It is the play; however, that stands as his testament of
love to a child he could not have known – a boy, eleven at his death, who had
not become a man. O’Farrell provides an interesting portal into that
play. She posits that Shakespeare
imagined his son having grown. She
imagines (I think – this is not explicit) that the father has imagined that he has been able to
sacrifice himself so the son can live.
He returns then, in the play, as a ghost. A ghost who is able to direct his son, perhaps
as he could not have done in a real life cut short.
OK, now I am going to play a bit with the play itself in a
way that O’Farrell does not.
Shakespeare, imagining a child whom he did not see to manhood, imagines
him as a fatherless child – one who did not benefit from having known his
father. As such, he is uncertain. Visited by his father’s Ghost, he does not
trust the ghost, nor himself. He does
not know how to proceed; he does not know how to manage the powerful feelings
that are moved inside him by the machinations of his uncle and the treachery of his mother.
To mix a bit more of O’Farrell’s backstory into the play, Shakespeare’s
betrayal of Agnes (falling into the arms, though apparently not the hearts, of
other women in the wake of Hamnet’s death) is reversed. He distances himself from his own
philandering by accusing her – Hamlet/Hamnet’s mother - of betraying him with
the uncle. He absolves himself of the sin,
while preserving the feeling of the necessity of it.
How can two parents who, together, created this child not be
reminded of that child whenever they are intimately in contact with each
other? Must they not distance themselves
from each other in order to manage the intensity of the feeling of loss? But doesn’t this seem like a further betrayal? An additional loss heaped on top of an
already unbearable loss?
Is Shakespeare also imagining himself into the role of
Polonius, the foolish father of Ophelia and Laertes, who, despite his foolishness
offers some of the sagest advice ever, including “To thine own self be true”
and “Never a borrower nor a lender be”?
Might this be the longed-for advice that Shakespeare would have liked to have given Hamnet?
Is Shakespeare mocking himself when he characterizes Polonius
as someone who cares only about appearances (Polonius states, “Clothes make the
man”), as O’Farrell imagines Shakespeare is mocked by Agnes for putting on the
airs of the city and is Shakespeare mourning having run off to London when
Polonius pines for his earlier life ("Old friends are the best
friends")? And as Shakespeare, the
writer, is finally able, after a period of intense but distant mourning, to re-inhabit
the mind of his son, does he experience himself as spying on him the way that
Polonius spies on Laertes and, ultimately fatally, on Hamlet himself?
I offer these O’Farrell inspired musings not to substantiate
her particular take on Shakespeare (and Agnes), but to acknowledge that they
fit into a tapestry of mystery that surrounds the transition that Shakespeare
marked, the transition that the
Renaissance promoted in the arts more broadly of taking the individual as
an article of study – to know more about what it means, in its particulars, to
be an individual human; and to value that perspective.
I remain an Oxfordian, but I am appreciative of the ways in
which O’Farrell clarifies that Shakespeare’s voice can be better understood by
wrestling with the ways that it is influenced by his feminine identity – the
self that I am viewing O’Farrell as having embodied and split off from him in
the person of Agnes.
O’Farrell portrays the young Shakespeare as ignorant, even stupid about plants. Who taught him? Did a woman? A witch? Is his appreciation for the subtleties of the human condition informed by the desires of women, not just of men? Was he, as a passive observer of the human condition, twinning with a woman? With his own feminine perspective? Isn’t the world of hearth and home, the world of deeply felt connection, the world of women? How did women shape the mind of the man who allowed humans to think so differently about themselves? This book offers interesting and arresting ideas about this while telling a poignant and evocative tale that would stand well on its own.
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