Though William Shakespeare is arguably the greatest writer in history, little is known of his personal life, as it is not well-documented. Apart from the names of his wife, the first daughter, and the twins, the aspects of their lives have barely been dramatized in literary works. In this novel, O’Farrell delves into their lives by introducing characters quite similar to them including the death of Hamnet. While the story leads to his death, it focuses largely on Agnes through his journey as a young woman and mother. It is a story about grief and motherhood through a loss that alters the dynamic of marriage and household.
Our main character, Agnes, is a popular figure in the town where she is known as a free-spirited herbalist with healing gifts. The husband’s name is never mentioned but his absence is felt in the home akin to the real Shakespeare. Thereby, the narrative explores the consequences of his creative endeavors on the marriage and the family. Since the novel is named after the twin son who died at a young age, it showcases how grief impacts the parents. The father copes by turning his pain into the renowned magnum opus that sees the reversal of his circumstance in the play. The mother’s pain of losing the child is the crux of the story as it also charts the way her children contracted the bubonic plague.
This reimagining of history offers some sort of closure by empathizing with the pain of a mother through childbirth and loss. Ron Charles of The Washington Post said “A novel told with the urgency of a whispered prayer — or curse…through the alchemy of her own vision, she has created a moving story about the way loss viciously recalibrates a marriage... A richly drawn and intimate portrait of 16th-century English life set against the arrival of one devastating death.”
