Many writers write well.
There is, however, something about those with an Irish or Scots heritage that can give them a leg up right from the start. I think it lies in the odd, soul-deep connection between the English and Irish/Scots languages (and maybe climates!) that can somehow result in glorious written expression. Especially among the Irish writers (whose work I know better than that of the Scots) this ability can almost make the language they use a character in its own right. Sometimes you can find this in the dialogue. But it more often comes to glistening flower in the descriptive prose that surrounds that dialogue. For examples, look at the work of Edna O’Brien, William Butler Yeats (yes…a poet, most of whose work, though, could be said to be of pure descriptive genius), the James Joyce who wrote Dubliners and Mollie’s monologue in Ulysses, Sebastian Barry, Brian Moore, Frank O’Connor, and even, although rarely, Samuel Beckett. Countless others.
Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet is a novel in which this linguistic strength is on display always.
The real Hamnet, of course, was William Shakespeare’s son, who died, possibly of the plague, at the age of eleven in 1596. The main character of this novel is not Hamnet himself. But his life and especially the consequences of his death provide the swirling stream of events through which the story surges. The real main character is Hamnet’s mother Agnes Hathaway, more familiarly known to posterity as Anne Hathaway. (At that time, the names Agnes and Anne were interchangeable.) The real Agnes is barely known to history. There are just a few mentions of her anywhere…most famously in Shakespeare’s will, where he bequeathes to her his second-best bed. But in Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, Agnes is a formidable woman with many, many talents, some of which cause consternation within her own family and among her in-laws, even the suspicion of witchery. She was twenty-six and pregnant when she married the young Latin tutor Will, who was eighteen and a frustrated doodler with a quill pen. Their first child Susanna was born six months after the wedding, and the couple went on to have a set of twins, Judith and Hamnet.
The novel’s character Agnes is a marvel. As a child, she is already very involved in the plant world and the medicinal effects it can bring to those who are ill. This complex knowledge and her own curative talents are displayed throughout the book. Agnes becomes a kind of doctor to the local rural populace, offering all manner of plant cures for whatever ails them. O’Farrell often pauses to explain what some particular plant or combination of plants can do to resolve a particular illness. This catalog is by no means plain or dull. O’Farrell uses her descriptions of the plants’ powers to reflect various aspects of Agnes’s personality, knowledge, and temperament. Her suggestions make of her great knowledge of the plant-world a fascinating aspect of her entire being.
Agnes is no pushover. She loves her husband Will deeply and resents his abandonment of the family for a life on the London stage. But her unhappiness with the situation does not keep her from the constantly growing strength of personality that makes her such a fine bother to everyone. She is often besieged by doubts and hatreds. She disappears in the night, wanders in the forest, dives into introspection, self-avowal, seeming defeat, and the refusal to be defeated. She loves her children passionately.
All these events, which take up the first half of the novel, are described in O’Farrell’s emotion-driven language, always clear in its descriptions of Agnes’s personal strength. Will’s abandonment of Agnes directly affects her. She resents his absence mightily. Her love for him persists, although very altered by his absences and the lack of any news from him. Agnes being Agnes, she continues on, her unlettered personality always contrary, complicated, and deep.
And then, Hamnet dies, painfully and slowly, the description of which from his mother’s point of view will break your heart.
With this, the second half of the novel begins. The language and doings of the first half, as compelling as they are, are suddenly taken over by Agnes’s grief. Her sorrow becomes the main plot event of the rest of the book, and O’Farrell’s talents as a storyteller seem simply to grow. The depth of Agnes’s feelings is explored continuously by O’Farrell and becomes so important to the book that any worries I might have had that so much bereavement could turn me away simply did not appear. In this book, with this particular character, bereavement is fascinating.
Here is a sample. It is an example of one of O’Farrell’s other talents, in which she uses the simplest of language to explore the deepest of troubles. Such language does not appear often in the novel, but when it does, as in this passage, I had to take a moment to admire its simplicity and emotion:
“It is hard to know what to do with his clothes.
“For weeks, Agnes cannot move them from the chair where he left them before being taken to bed.
“A month or so after the burial she lifts the breeches, then puts them down. She fingers the collar of his shirt. She nudges the toe of his boot so that the pair are lined up, side by side.
“Then she buries her face in the shirt; she presses the breeches to her heart; she inserts a hand into each boot, feeling the empty shapes of his feet; she ties and unties the necklines; she pushes buttons into holes and out again. She folds the clothes, unfolds them, refolds them again.
“As the fabric runs through her fingers, as she puts each seam together, as she flaps out the creases in the air, her body remembers this task. It takes her back to the before. Folding his clothes, tending to them, breathing in his scent, she can almost persuade herself he is still here, just about to get dressed, that he will walk through the door at any moment, asking, Where are my stockings, where is my shirt?, worrying about being late for the school bell.”
It takes her back to the before…. All the details in this passage, one after the other in such short phrases and simple language, so revealed Agnes’s sorrow to me that I could barely read them without sinking into sorrow of my own. Hamnet lives for her in these pieces of clothing, in the smells she gets from them, in the way her fingers caress the inside of his boots. Everything is simplicity. The whereabouts of the shirt; the sound of the school bell; the worry about being late. No one could get more prosaic in the description of these things. Yet I myself could not be more taken by regret for Hamnet’s passing and his mother’s sadness.
One element in Agnes’s resentment of Will is explored once she discovers that he has written a play titled Hamlet. Having been shown the playbill for it, she talks her brother Bartholomew into escorting her to London to confront her absent husband…still a scribbler, but by now a considerably successful one. The names Hamlet and Hamnet were also interchangeable in those times, and Agnes is taken over by angry resentment of Will’s featuring of their son’s name. She assumes that the play must be about young Hamnet’s death and the consequences it had for his family, a death from which Will himself was so notably absent. She resents the probable exposing of events that should be private to Hamnet’s family.
In a rage, she attends the play and discovers that her husband is also acting in it, the character of The Ghost of Hamlet’s father. Anyone who knows this play knows of the extraordinary emotional complexity of the Act One scenes in which The Ghost appears to Hamlet. It is the darkest of fog-bound nights on the cold castle ramparts. The Ghost’s description of his death at the hands of his brother Claudius, and of Hamlet’s mother Gertrude’s “incestuous” and over-quick marriage with Claudius, set the play on its difficult way to inevitable disaster.
But in the novel, Agnes seems to understand that the story of Hamlet is not really about Will’s abandonment of the family and his absence from Hamnet’s death. She recognizes something in the writing for The Ghost that maybe tempers her anger with Will. Although the phrase does not appear in O’Farrell’s novel, readers who know the play will remember that The Ghost says to Hamlet that he is “doomed for a certain term to walk the night/And for the day confined to fast in fires.” Could this have been an admission on Shakespeare’s part to his own departed son Hamnet…and perhaps his wife Agnes?
It is The Ghost’s line as he finally departs the rampart, sent away by the approach of morning, that affects Agnes the most. The reader wonders, is this The Ghost speaking, or Will?
“Remember me!”
A plea from an anguished father—both a playwright and a ghost—stuck darkly within himself.
© Copyright 2023. Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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I liked it very much myself. Thank you for this article.