Hamnet Study Guide

Maggie O’Farrell was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a long-running conflict between those who wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom and those who wanted it to return to the Republic of Ireland. During a childhood spent partly in Northern Ireland and partly in other corners of the United Kingdom, O’Farrell faced racism for her Irish heritage. In childhood, she suffered from a stutter. She also once fell gravely ill with encephalitis, a life-threatening illness that causes inflammation of the brain. She missed an entire year of school, but eventually recovered. After studying English Literature at Cambridge University, O’Farrell went on to become a journalist who worked in Hong Kong and London. Her first novel, After You’d Gone, was published in 2001 and to date she has written nine books of fiction and memoir. She has been short-listed for and received many literary honors, including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which she won for her novel Hamnet in 2020. She lives in Edinburgh with her husband and three children.

Events in the novel are anchored to the few biographical and historical details we know about William Shakespeare, who was born in 1564 to John and Mary Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon. He attended grammar school in the town, married Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway—a woman eight years his senior—in 1582. The couple had three children, Susanna, Hamnet, and Judith. Shakespeare’s son died suddenly in the summer of 1596, four years before he wrote one of his most famous and enduring works, the play Hamlet. The novel Hamnet imagines that Shakespeare’s son died of the bubonic plague, a virulent illness caused by a bacteria carried by fleas. Expanding networks of trade, exploration, and colonialism brought England into greater contact with the wider world during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and increasingly common outbreaks of plague were one consequence of the country’s expanding sphere of influence. There were five major outbreaks in England during Shakespeare’s life, but though many other topical and historical references can be found in his plays, the plague is never mentioned once in all his works.

Because William Shakespeare’s stature within English Literature contrasts so sharply with the scarcity of historical and biographical information he left behind, his life has proved to be fertile creative ground for fictional biographies like Hamnet. These include Anthony Burgess’s 1964 Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love Life, which also draws on the play Hamlet (and the sonnets) to imagine what could have inspired a genius like Shakespeare—although Burgess is far less sympathetic to Shakespeare’s wife Anne (or possibly Agnes) Hathaway. Hamnet imagines a compelling love story and a rich, complex, and often convention-defying marriage between Agnes and her husband. Wallace Stegner’s 1971 Angle of Repose explores a similarly rich, complex, and not always easy but nevertheless enduring marriage, set against the backdrop of the American West in the late 1800s. Finally, Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 Sing, Unburied, Sing examines the way that communal trauma and individual grief and loss affect not just individual family members, but the entire structure of a family. William Shakespeare, who’s never explicitly named in Hamnet but who is nevertheless a majorly important character, is one of the best-known English-language poets and playwrights. In addition to Hamlet, a play the novel mentions, Shakespeare’s most famous works include Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado about Nothing.