Historical note
In the 1580s, a couple living in Henley Street, Stratford, had three children: Susanna, then Hamnet and Judith, who were twins.
The boy, Hamnet, died in 1596, aged eleven.
Four years or so later, the father wrote a play called Hamlet.
This prefatory note just before the story proper begins is unusual among such modern examples of such prefatory material in that it really is genuinely significant for understanding the novel. This is, in a nutshell, everything about the story to be told that truly needs to be understood before proceeding. The book belongs to the genre of historical fiction. Specifically, it is an example of that type of historical fiction which takes the broad strokes of a known historical event lacking in details and proceeds to create from the imagination of the author a seemingly legitimate fictional story which aligns with sketchiness of known facts. Kind of like Oliver Stone’s film JFK except that O’Farrell’s invented history is far less an absurd fantasy and far more rooted in actual historical possibilities.
If the plague comes to London, he can be back with them for months. The playhouses are all shut, by order of the Queen, and no one is allowed to gather in public.
The novel was published in one of the most significant years in recent history: 2020, the year Covid-19 came to town. It was also the year—the first in recorded history—that people around the world, but especially in America, chose to reject and ignore the knowledge and experience of those trained and experienced in dealing with viral epidemics in favor of their own imaginary expertise. The historical record referenced here is clear: even people living in an era barely removed from the Dark Ages knew enough not to gather in large crowds in public places where disease could be easily transmitted from one to the other. This particular wave of the Plague to sweep across London in the 1590’s is of supreme significance to the narrative as it will be the predatory monster which claims the infelicitous Hamnet while, possibly, stimulating the creation of sesquipedalian Hamlet.
It is him. It is not him. It is him. It is not him. The thought swings like a hammer through her. Her son, her Hamnet or Hamlet, is dead, buried in the churchyard. He died while he was still a child. He is now only white, stripped bones in a grave. Yet this is him, grown into a near-man, as he would be now, had he lived, on the stage, walking with her son’s gait, talking in her son’s voice, speaking words written for him by her son’s father.
The words are the narrator’s, but they describe the thoughts of the grieving mother of Hamnet, Agnes. But wait, you might ask: didn’t the mother of Hamnet and wife of William Shakespeare share the name of a popular 21st century movie star? The answer is yes, the wife of Shakespeare is more familiarly known as Anne Hathaway. Just after the Historical Note mentioned previously, there is a quote attributed to Steven Greenblatt in which he claims that during the period described in this book, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were “entirely interchangeable.” The same holds true, apparently, for Anne and Agnes. Whatever she is called, it she and not her famous husband who takes center stage in this drama. The Bard has his own way of dealing with the tragic loss of his only son. All his wife can do is grieve and grieve again.
