Hamnet: sexy witches replace skulls and soliloquies

Secret Life of Books

Ever wonder what Shakespeare got up to in the bedroom? Well, whether you do or not, you’ll find out - along with many other things - in this episode devoted to Maggie O’Farrell’s superb novel Hamnet (spoiler alert: it involves a shed, a kestrel and shelves of bouncing apples, rather than an actual bedroom).

Hamnet was published to critical acclaim in 2020. It brings Shakespeare’s wife - Anne Hathaway (called Agnes in this telling) - out of the shadows, recounting her relationship with a Latin tutor who has an urge to write, the fraught birth of their children, the death of their son Hamnet, the impact this tragedy has on their marriage and, finally, how all this informed the creation of said Latin Tutor’s masterpiece. A play titled - you guessed it - Hamlet.

Most daringly of all, O’Farrell gives Anne/Agnes supernatural powers and suggests that Shakespeare’s meanness in leaving her only his second best bed in his will was in fact an affectionate reminder of the sexy time they had together in said bed.

Sophie and Jonty talk about the long road that brought O’Farrell to this story; the difficulty of bringing historical characters to life; the unique light that O’Farrell’s novel casts on the creation of a literary landmark; and finally ask:does this book about the making of a classic have the potential to become one?

Jonty also confronts Sophie about the sex scenes in her 2007 novel Scandal of the Season, implying a certain gratuitousness, but Sophie ably defends herself on purely intellectual grounds.
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Further reading:

Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet (Tinder Press, 2020)

Maggie O’Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death (Tinder Press, 2018)

James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (Harper Collins, 2005)

Stephen Greenblatt, Will In The World (WW Norton, 2004)

Sophie Gee, Scandal of the Season (Chatto & Windus, 2007)