From Hamlet to Hamnet, there was only one step, and a step into an author that I love. The story focuses on Shakespeare’s family, his parents, his wife, and his children, including his lone son, Hamnet, who will pass away at the age of eleven from the bubonic plague. Chapters alternate between young Shakespeare and his strange, mysterious, magical wife Agnes and chapters describing Hamnet’s illness and death and the grief of his parents. The writing is light, fluid, and magical like Agnes and the story follows what we know about Shakespeare and his family. All of this comes together to make a great novel. I have read two other books written by Maggie O’Farrell and have felt cuddled into the story each time, emerging lost at the end. A lovely story.
“She has seen neighbouring women do it, has heard their cries rise into screams, smelt the rusty coin scent of new birth. She has seen the pig, the cow, the ewes birth their young; she has been the one called on by her father, by Bartholomew, when lambs were stuck. Her female fingers, slender, tapered, were required to enter that narrow, heated, slick canal, and hook out the soft hoofs, the gluey nose, the plastered-back ears. And she knows, in the way she always does, that she will reach the other side of birth, that she and this baby will live. Nothing, however, could have prepared her for the relentlessness of it. It is like trying to stand in a gale, like trying to swim against the current of a flooded river, like trying to lift a fallen tree. Never has she been more sensible of her weakness, of her inadequacy. She has always felt herself to be a strong person: she can push a cow into milking position, she can douse and stir a load of laundry, she can lift and carry her small siblings, a bale of skins, a bucket of water, an armful of firewood. Her body is one of resilience, of power: she is all muscle beneath smooth skin. But this is something else. Something other. It laughs at her attempts to master it, to subdue it, to rise above it. It will, Agnes fears, overtake her. It will seize her by the scruff of her neck and plunge her down, under the surface of the water.”