I recently read Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, which I think is a great novel. Hamnet is O’Farrell’s last novel before The Marriage Portrait and was published in 2020 to much acclaim, so I decided I had to read it as well. If you were required to read William Shakespeare’s plays when you were in high school, you may recognize the name Hamnet. Hamnet was Shakespeare’s only son and he died at the young age of eleven. Hamnet is a sad and moving story about how the death of Hamnet affects his family.

Although Shakespeare is one of the most famous writers ever known and his plays are still performed today, Hamnet is not really about Shakespeare. In fact, he is never referred to by his name in the novel. He is referred to as the Latin Tutor, son, husband and father – all the roles he played in the lives of his family members. Instead, Hamnet is mainly told from the perspective of Shakespeare’s wife, known historically as Anne Hathaway even though she was called “Agnes” in her father’s will.

The misogynistic view of Agnes that I was taught in high school is that she was an older woman who trapped Shakespeare into marriage, and he could not stand to be around her, which is why he spent most of his time in London. The truth is that Shakespeare did not have a trade, so he could not be gainfully employed in his hometown of Stratford. He was a writer and he needed to be in London where he could write and perform his plays, but he visited his family when he could. Much ado has been made of Shakespeare leaving his wife the “second best bed” in his will, but in Shakespeare’s time, the best bed was reserved for houseguests, so mostly likely the second-best bed was his marital bed.

O’Farrell presents a very different portrait of Agnes in Hamnet, one that is not steeped in misogyny and feels like it could be closer to the truth. O’Farrell’s Agnes is a strong, independent woman with the gift of foresight and a talent for helping people with her medicinal remedies. She is a loving and supportive wife and mother. O’Farrell’s Shakespeare is very much in love with Agnes and wants to marry her, just as she wants to marry him.

There are two different timelines at play in Hamnet. The first tells how Hamnet’s twin sister, Judith, falls sick from the plague and of Agnes’s desperate attempts to keep her alive until, in a cruel twist, Hamnet falls sick and dies. The second timeline looks to the past and tells how Shakespeare and Agnes fell in love, married, and started a family together, and how Agnes could sense that her husband’s spirit was being crushed in Stratford and contrived it so that he could go work in London.

The titular character, Hamnet, is not a fully formed character as he is just a child, but from the opening chapter as O’Farrell describes this young boy stumbling down the stairs and then going through his last day in confusion and fear as he watches his twin sister slowly die, it makes the realization that his death is coming all the more tragic.

Anyone who has ever felt the crushing loss of someone or something they loved will understand Agnes’s terrible grief after her son had died. It is painful to read, but so poignantly written that you feel comforted knowing that you are not the only one to experience that terrible grief, and you grieve Hamnet’s death with Agnes. Hamnet is another great novel by O’Farrell.