Hamnet: Maggie O’Farrell’s Novel of Shakespeare's Female Sensibilities

 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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