In unison, they raised the apple slices to their lips, Hamnet with his right, Judith with her left. They put them down, as if with some silent signal between them, at the same moment, then looked at each other, then picked them up again, Judith with her left hand, Hamnet with his right. It's like a mirror, he had said. Or that they are one person split down the middle. Their two heads uncovered, shining like spun gold.
With both an introductory “Historical Note” and a concluding “Author's Note”, it is explained in Hamnet and Judith what little is known of William Shakespeare's family: That his wife (popularly remembered as Anne Hathaway but named as Agnes [apparently pronounced Ann-yis or Agn-yez] in her father's will (so that is the name that author Maggie O'Farrell uses for her) and three children (Susanna and the younger twins Hamnet and Judith [with the explanation that “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were the same name, used interchangeably in written records at the time) remained in Stratford (living in the home of William's father, a glovemaker) while the playwright lived and worked alone in London. In 1596, Hamnet died of unrecorded causes at age eleven, and four years later, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. With this scant information (and something like thirty years of intermittent research), O'Farrell attempts to flesh out this cast of supporting players; these “historical footnotes”, with their uncertain names, but once upon a time, very real and fully human existences.
This is not so much a story about William Shakespeare himself – he is not even properly named here, only referred to as “the Latin tutor” or “Agnes' husband” – but he does appear in the story: as a loving and playful husband and father, but mostly, as an absence. Losing a child is unimaginably tragic to me, but O'Farrell captures the pain and grief of everyone so well that I felt I had really gotten to know these people (and keeping in mind this idea that her project was to breathe life into the supporting players, it worked well to only experience Hamlet as a finished work through Agnes' eyes, rather than watch William Shakespeare's process of working out his own grief on the page). I don't think that everything about this book works, but it made me smile and it made me cry and I am going to emotionally round up to four stars.
Later, and for the rest of her life, she will think that if she had left there and then, if she had gathered her bags, her plants, her honey, had taken the path home, if she had heeded her abrupt, nameless unease, she might have changed what happened next. If she had left her swarming bees to their own devices, their own ends, instead of working to coax them back into their hives, she might have headed off what was coming.In O'Farrell's imagination, Agnes is a healer and seer – daughter of a rumoured gypsy – whose everlasting sorrow will result from not only being unable to save her own child when the time comes, but also not seeing the looming threat to his life beforehand. I kind of get why O'Farrell gave Agnes these powers – not only for these ironic narrative purposes, but to make her a strong and independent woman of her times; not some mindless rube abandoned in the sticks by her genius of a husband – but these powers (and especially her ability to “read” people by grasping their hands) had a whiff of trope about them; must Agnes have been superhuman for us to see her as human? I found so much of the writing to be lush and lyrical – so evocative of sixteenth century sights and sounds and scents – and while I found the love story between the wild girl and her brothers' Latin tutor to be thoroughly charming and electric, I was also flummoxed by the following:
It was his hands that undid the bows at her neckline, that pulled down her shift, that brought out her breasts into the light – and how startled and how white they had looked, in the air like that, in daytime, in front of another; their pink-brown eyes stared back in shock.(That encounter gets better from there; it would need to.) Mostly, however, I appreciated the writing around Hamnet's death and how the others in his family responded:
Agnes finds she can bear anything except her child's pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusion, but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief. For the first time, the tears come for Agnes. They fill her eyes without warning, blur her vision, pouring forth to run down her face, her neck, soaking her apron, running between her clothes and her skin. They seem to come not just from her eyes but from every pore of her body. Her whole being longs for, grieves for her son, her daughters, her absent husband, for all of them, when she says, “No, my love, he will never come again.”I did cry while reading this book, more than once, and I reckon that's a sign that I was connecting with the humanity of these people and their experiences. And as that seems to have been O'Farrell's objective, I would say she achieved it.
