'She’s like no one I’ve ever met... She’s like fire and water all at once.'
words by Millie Harris
photo of Ajani Cabey (Hamnet) and Alex Jarrett (Judith), from the Royal Shakesepare Company's 2023 production of O'Farrell's Hamnet. Photo by Manuel Harlan
When Hamnet was published, it was framed as imaginative restoration: a novel that gives flesh and emotional weight to the largely undocumented life and death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, who died in 1596 at the age of eleven. The book was instantly acclaimed and praised as O’Farrell’s finest work to date, celebrated for its historical intimacy and named among the most notable books of 2020. The premise is undeniably compelling as it promises to shift the light towards the people who, due to an early loss, never made it into the canon, something that instantly drew me in. It is a story on how one of the greatest works in the English canon, Hamlet, might have been derived from such a truly heartbreaking and life-changing experience.
O’Farrell’s sentences are often undeniably striking; at times her attention to grief feels genuinely intimate and harrowing. But the novel leans so hard on that beauty that it begins to confuse wordy-embellishment for depth. From its opening pages, O’Farrell’s prose establishes itself as ornate and lyrical, heavy with simile and metaphor. The writing is lush to the point of suffocation with almost every page filled with descriptive flourishes. There is no doubt that O’Farrell is an accomplished writer, but this novel’s prose just seems so determined to be beautiful that I struggled to find the heart of it all. O’Farrell’s writing, simply put, dazzles at the level of sentence but falters in sustaining narrative and emotional clarity. It is effective sensory work, however, it is not always clear what it is in service of.
Agnes/Anne Hathaway, as O’Farrell envisions her, is a familiar type: the untameable, otherworldly woman of literary imagination. She is described as being a healer, in tune with the natural world, occasionally gifted with something close to second sight. This approach could have offered an interesting counterpoint to Shakespeare's own creative imagination, with her intuition mirroring his written artistry, but this is never truly explored to its fullest. Agnes’ affinity with nature quickly settles into stock characterisation. Agnes is not implausible as a character, but she feels entirely constructed from tropes that have already been used to death in historical fiction.
Then there is William himself who, pointedly never named ‘Shakespeare’ in the book, is quite vague as a character. His relationship with his abusive father is never developed, and his marriage to Agnes shifts from passionate to strained without much emotional progression. His life in London is also treated almost as an afterthought. The supporting cast — Agnes’ stepmother, her brother, her children — seem to exist to service the atmosphere of the novel rather than to add any meaning to the narrative. The novel chooses Agnes as the emotional centre and sidelines William in what seems an intentional reframing of Shakespearean mythology, actually becoming one of the most interesting aspects of the story. The novel’s aim seems to be prioritising Agnes’ perspective, yet that does reduce William to a vague non-person.
It is clear that O’Farrell wants to pull the emotional centre of the story away from the playwright and towards the figure of the mother. That’s an interesting corrective in theory, but in practice it leaves William underdeveloped rather than reimagined. Even Hamnet, the boy whose death gives the novel its title and emotional hinge, is more a symbol than a character. By the time he dies, we know as much about him as we did when we first met him: he is blonde, kind and close to his twin sister Judith. It is the same problem the novel has elsewhere. Agnes becomes the mystical mother, William becomes the absent genius and Hamnet becomes the lost child. Everyone is given a role. Almost no one is allowed to simply be alive on the page before they’re asked to suffer.
The first two-thirds of the novel’s structure alternates between past and present, moving from Agnes’ courtship and marriage to the events leading up to Hamnet’s death and the aftermath. I did initially enjoy this structure — O’Farrell used it so effectively in The Marriage Portrait — but here it never quite delivers the same emotional layering. The alternating of past and present is clearly meant to build tension: we move towards Hamnet’s death in one timeline while watching the family form in the other, so that the loss should feel layered and inevitable. However, the pacing is so slow, with entire pages spent describing a single gesture, a change in light or the movement of air in the room.
In theory, this attention to detail may build atmosphere but, in practice, it drains the momentum of the story. This overindulgence is particularly evident when Hamnet dies. Hamnet himself was never developed or fully realised, so his death registers more as a narrative obligation rather than a tragedy. O’Farrell’s intention seems to be making the reader weep simply because a child has died, not because this child has died. The language describing such grief is utterly raw and powerful, yet I felt no personal connection to the events unfolding in the novel before me. It seemed that Hamnet functioned less as a child and more as a narrative hinge: the pure, loved son whose death justifies Agnes’ anger and William’s art. The grief around him is described in intense, physical language, but he is mostly there to be lost.
The plague itself, the reason why Hamnet died, is also handled quite strangely. The plague was one of the most devastating events in early modern Europe, yet, in Hamnet, is used passively, its historical significance largely ignored so it could become an easily manageable narrative device. There is a single chapter in which the spread of the disease is described, very interestingly, through the perspective of a flea. This chapter became a favourite of mine, reigniting a spark to carry on reading. Yet the plague is such a minor part of the story that it is a struggle to see how it makes it to subtitle ‘A Novel of the Plague’. When the plague finally claims Hamnet, it feels almost arbitrary. The emotional weight of this is contained within Agnes’ personal experience, making it feel more intimate but still observational. Much of the book is written in an almost hovering, watchful register. We’re positioned just above the characters, studying the way they move, the way the air shifts around them, rather than being placed within their thoughts. The plague all in all seemed like it could have been any illness and nothing much would have been different.
The final pages, which link Hamnet’s death to Shakespeare’s creation of Hamlet, show the true beauty within this novel: the idea that art may be the only means by which unbearable loss is transformed into meaning. It is one of the places where the emotion feels earned rather than assumed. The link between Hamnet and Hamlet gives the story weight that the earlier character work didn’t quite manage to build. The ending is not really interested in the myth of the great playwright producing a masterpiece out of brilliance. It is interested in the idea of a man trying to do the only thing he could still do for his son, which in this novel is to make him impossible to forget. This is one of the only places where the novel allows something to matter, because it mattered to these people, not just because it is sad.
As a piece of historical fiction, Hamnet is a curious case. Its premise encourages a reconsideration of Shakespeare’s family life and the world that shaped it, yet the novel keeps that world slightly out of focus. The novel gestures towards the social and material realities of Elizabethan England, plagued with illness, the fragility of status, and the constant threat of losing a child, but never lingers on them. The domestic spaces are described in detail, but their historical value is vague; the religious tension and the practical realities of the plague are largely sidestepped. That choice seems to be a deliberate trade rather than an immersion into the political and religious tensions of late 16th-century England, the focus of the book being narrowed almost entirely to the domestic sphere. This fits the novel’s preference for atmosphere, but it also keeps it from feeling fully lived, limiting the book’s force.
For all its flaws, Hamnet is not without merit. O’Farrell’s command of atmosphere is extraordinary and her refusal to sensationalise grief is genuinely admirable. There are passages where she writes loss with a rawness that feels unbearable. However, beauty alone cannot be a substitute for connection. Too often the novel seems preoccupied with crafting an exquisite image of sorrow rather than allowing its characters to exist as full, difficult and contradictory people. I could see the beauty in almost every line, but I struggled to feel the life underneath.