Secret Life of Books

Hamnet: sexy witches replace skulls and soliloquies

• Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole • Season 1 • Episode 18

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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.

Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

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)


Speaker 3:

Every book has two stories. The one it

Speaker:

tells. And

Speaker 3:

the one it hides.

Speaker:

Welcome to the Secret Life of Books.

Speaker 3:

I'm Jonty Claypole, broadcaster and producer.

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And I'm Sophie Gee, academic and writer.

Speaker 3:

In this podcast, we tell the story behind the story of the literary classics everybody wants to read, feels they should read, or has already read and loved.

Speaker:

This week, Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell.

Speaker 3:

Okay, all of us know that Shakespeare wrote Hamnet, and many of us are also aware that Shakespeare had a son with basically the same name. But let's be honest, how many of us have really wondered what, if any, was the connection between these two facts? This, though, is the inquiry at the heart of Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 best selling and multi award winning novel Hamnet. It's one of those books that you read and the proposition seems so obvious and compelling, you wonder why nobody did it earlier. In this episode, we're going to find out how Shakespeare's loss as a parent may have inspired his most famous play, how leaving his wife, Anne Hathaway, his second best bed, might have been the greatest love token of all, And how Shakespeare might, although probably didn't, conceive his first child in an apple shed watched over by a kestrel. Sophie, give us a flavour of O'Farrell's prose.

Speaker:

Yes, and it's beautiful prose. Very, very different from Shakespeare's verse. The letters from their father speak of contracts, of long days, of crowds who hurl rotten matter if they do not like what they hear, of memorising lines, lines, more lines, of scenery that falls, of props that are mislaid or stolen, of carts losing their wheels and pitching all into the mud, taverns that refuse them beds, of the money he has saved, of what he needs their mother to do, whom she must speak to in the town about attractive land he would like to purchase, a house he has heard is for sale, a field they should buy and then lease, of how he misses them, how he sends his love, how he wishes he could kiss their faces one by one, how he cannot wait until he is home again. So this reading is of course about William Shakespeare, here writing to his family from London who are back in Stratford. And actually, it's a bit of a cheat having Shakespeare's voice be the one that we start this episode with because I think one of the things that O'Farrell does so brilliantly in Hamnet is to move Shakespeare to one side. He's the hovering figure. He's sort of the ghost. And the women in his life are in the center. so actually, the hero of Hamnet is Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway, although Maggie O'Farrell, based on some documentary evidence, calls her Agnes instead. And so that's what we're going to be calling Anne Hathaway for the rest of this episode. I really enjoyed the novel. How was it? How was it for you, Jonty, reading it? Yeah, I,

Speaker 3:

so I've avoided reading Hamnet ever since it came out, and I don't know why. I think I just thought It's too impossible a task, right? It's too impossible to bring Shakespeare to life, and as a result of which, it's just going to be a bit kind of awkward.

Speaker:

Monty Python. Right, and because

Speaker 3:

we were doing Hamlet, and we thought it'd be good to look at a contemporary response, I did read it. At the start, that resistance was in me, and then I was just won over. And I think it's a beautiful novel, and it just gets better and better until the extraordinary ending. So I really enjoyed it.

Speaker:

And it really gets you thinking about Hamlet in a cleverly sort of oblique and roundabout way. It's a tough act to follow, Hamlet. and O'Farrell really goes in Fearlessly, I think.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, she does. And as you were saying, I think the brilliant trick is in making Anne Hathaway or Agnes the, the hero and that if, Hamlet is, is a play about father son relationships, Maggie O'Farrell reclaims the idea of motherhood and by putting Agnes and her relationship with Hamlet very much center stage, it actually makes it about the experience of motherhood rather than Fatherhood. and of course, the implication is, what does Shakespeare really know about being a father? Because while he's in London, writing this masterpiece about fatherhood, Hamlet, the rest of his family is in Stratford dealing with the grief and aftermath of the death of a son.

Speaker:

Yes. The other big question is, why have the names Hamlet and Hamnet not had a big resurgence?

Speaker 3:

Right, yeah, why not? Surely

Speaker:

it's time for some Hamlets to show up at daycare.

Speaker 3:

I guess it's a slightly doomed name. I think if you call your child Hamlet Yeah, it's sort of bad vibes. Things don't end well for Hamlet, do they? Maybe

Speaker:

Yorick's a better one to bring back.

Speaker 3:

Yorick would be good.

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Okay. The novel is in two parts. Part one intercuts the 24 hours in which 11 year old Hamnet contracts and dies of bubonic plague with a backstory showing how his unnamed father and mother got together some 14 years earlier. It's very interesting that O'Farrell never names Shakespeare. Yes. He's obviously Shakespeare. Yes. But she never calls him that. She never

Speaker:

calls him that. And what we learn is that as a young man, Shakespeare, who's never given that name, he's called the Latin tutor, is living with his abusive father. He's getting by doing errands and working as a Latin tutor in a nearby village. And while tutoring some children nearby, he falls in love with their older half sister called Agnes. And it's going to sound completely absurd, but it seems totally plausible in O'Farrell's hands. Agnes has supernatural powers. She's basically a white witch. She can read people's hands, she can see the future, and she can mix natural plants to make powerful medicine. What happens in the novel is that Shakespeare and Agnes marry and they have three children. A daughter called Suzanne and then twins called Hamnet and Judith. But Shakespeare becomes depressed and listless and grows restless and Agnes tells him to go to London to do whatever he needs to do and that she and the children will join him there soon. But Judith is a sickly child and that never happens and instead Shakespeare returns a couple of times for no more than a couple of weeks a year. And when the twins are 11, Judith comes down with the plague. There's a chilling scene of how the virus makes its way from Alexandria to Stratford, which the literary critic Stephen Greenblatt has described as a tour de force of contact tracing. Hamlet catches the plague from Judith and this isn't a spoiler because it's in the novel right from the start, Hamlet dies while Judith recovers. The death of Hamlet drives a wedge between Agnes and Shakespeare. Shakespeare is unable to bear the grief of losing his son. He returns to London and disappears into his work. And now we are in spoiler territory. So we won't say anything more than the fact that four years later, he produces Hamlet and in so doing enables a reconciliation between himself and Agnes. I think it's a little too early in publication history to say whether this book is a classic or not. So we'll, we'll leave that question out. But. Does this book have some secrets for you, Jonty?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it does, and I think a lot of them come from O'Farrell herself, that she gives us the clues for why she wrote the book, at the very start, she quotes Stephen Greenblatt, who pointed out in, an essay many years ago that Hamlet and Hamlet are effectively the same name. They're just different spellings of the same, name. So that was really striking, the idea that when Shakespeare writes Hamlet, he is actually just writing Hamlet. His son's name. And, and the other point, which O'Farrell points out, and she says this is what got her going with the book. Mm. She says in, a brief afterward that Shakespeare, Despite the presence of the plague continually through his writing career, Shakespeare never actually uses the word plague or has a plague scene. It's the thing that's going on. And we've talked in other episodes about how Shakespeare pulls in every issue from his day into his plays. The gunpowder plot, the Reformation, Queen Elizabeth's various playwrights. love affairs and romances. The one thing he doesn't bring into any of his plays, despite it being the one thing that actually repeatedly shuts down his theater, is plague. And, and so O'Farrell's speculation, is that because, his son may have died from plague, it was just something too raw for him to write about.

Speaker:

Yes. I mean, it's hard to really accept a thesis that involves Shakespeare finding something too raw to write about. There's Sort of nothing that Shakespeare won't write about so I'm not sure I mean I'd maybe more want to say that it's it's more like not being able to say the title Macbeth having to call it the Scottish play probably Shakespeare's just horrified by the idea that the theaters are going to shut down and Doesn't want to plant even the suggestion of plague in his readers minds. It's actually really interesting that Hamnet, which presumably Maggie O'Farrell must have been writing for a long time, was actually published in 2020. So it became a COVID novel. It became a plague novel itself.

Speaker 3:

I know. And I think if we're thinking about Shakespeare, the impresario, I think in the same way that after COVID, nobody really wants COVID novels now anymore. A whole bunch came out after the pandemic,

Speaker 2:

but

Speaker 3:

now everyone's saying enough, we want to forget and move on. And Shakespeare ultimately. he's led by the market, what there's a public appetite for, and I guess if the plague is coming most years and shutting London down, when it's not around and people can go to the theatre, they probably don't want to see a play about a plague.

Speaker:

Yeah, and Shakespeare also, when he thinks, when he writes about sort of highly contentious, tough topics like witches, which of course O'Farrell does absolutely go to, he's really interested in Um, social and political problems that bring people together or at least bring communities into kind of interesting, fraught conflicts where there's a lot of kind of interpersonal interaction. Plague is actually very undramatic because it's very isolating.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So if you give us some secrets for you, not real ones from your personal life, I don't want to hear those. That's a shame. Secrets for you from Hamnet?

Speaker:

It completely for me cast new light, not just on Hamlet, which it got me thinking about in new ways, but it actually made me think about the way in which Shakespeare uses twins and identity confusion all the, all the time in his writing. It constantly comes up. So. there are no twins or in fact confused identities in Hamlet, but in Twelfth Night, which was a play that he wrote shortly afterwards, there are these twins, Viola and Sebastian, who are separated in a shipwreck. It's assumed that Sebastian has drowned and Sebastian assumes that Viola has drowned. They turn out not to have, and it's sort of a different way of bringing a twin back from the dead, I think.

Speaker 3:

I know, and those plot devices always seem implausible, but Shakespeare probably on his occasional trip. Back from London, could probably, probably really struggled to tell the difference between his own twins. Yeah, he was probably that absent father who turns up and is Judith Hamlet, Judith Hamlet, Judith. Yeah. So suddenly the Twelfth Night seems to have a strongly autobiographical bent to it.

Speaker:

Yes. And ditto, you know, Hermia and Helena in Midsummer Night's Dream, which we were just talking about last week. They're not twins, but they're described as being like, like a double cherry on a single stem or something along those lines. In other words. You know, basically being twins. and there's also lots of mistake and identity in Shakespeare all the time. So there's obviously something that he, there's obviously something that he was really, really interested in.

Speaker 3:

He struggled with identifying his own children. Yes.

Speaker:

That's, that's the takeaway there, the true takeaway. tell us a bit about Maggio Farrell, Jonti.

Speaker 3:

So I am, as you know, a terrible gossip, but I do have ethical standards and I don't like gossiping about people who are still alive. A dead writer, I'm very happy to trawl through biographies and air their deepest and most embarrassing secrets, but I do want to be respectful to the life of a living person. A living author. I can't

Speaker:

imagine what this is a preamble to.

Speaker 3:

I'm not going to say much except for what's freely available, but Maggie O'Farrell, she was born in Derry in Northern Ireland in 1972 and grew up in Wales and Scotland. She had a very pronounced stammer as a child. Oh, so that's very interesting for you. Very interesting for me as a recovering stutterer and this makes her our second stammering author in this podcast. We had Lewis Carroll.

Speaker:

That's right.

Speaker 3:

The author

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of Alice in Wonderland.

Speaker 3:

And she helps confirm my theory that many of our greatest writers are all people who have dealt with stutters. So,

Speaker:

I can imagine that that must have given you a thrill. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Hamnet is her eighth novel. Interestingly, it followed her memoir. So her previous book was a memoir, called I Am, I Am, I Am, 17 Brushes with Death, which was published in 2017. And that book does pretty much what it says on the tin. It is about 17 brushes with death, looking at times she almost died, but also her own experiences of miscarriage and caring for a child with a dangerous. illness. And so you can see how from writing that, mortality and parenthood were subjects very much on her mind in the years before starting work on Hamnet. And I think that becomes very evident.

Speaker:

Very evident. That's very interesting. I didn't know that. And sort of explains much about why she writes so movingly and so beautifully about, about ill children and motherhood.

Speaker 3:

We did Wolf Hall a couple of weeks ago and we talked about how prior to writing Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel also published her memoir. And Interestingly, these are both writers, Hilary Mantel and Maggie O'Farrell, who there's been something about writing a memoir or writing autobiographically which enables them to take a creative leap forward to write their, their best books. And

Speaker:

they're also both writers, it sounds, I didn't know this about Maggie O'Farrell, but it sounds as though they're both people who have struggled with enormous amounts of adversity. chronic pain in their lives. because of course, Hillary Mantel suffered from endometriosis from a young age and it was really a big part of her story. It makes me think about this idea that in the early modern period that both Mantel and Oh, Farrell are working on death, mortality and untreated pain are just much more present to people than they are now we live lives very remote from our bodies. And these are obviously women who have really been brought into their bodies in ways that not everybody is. Let's get into the book itself. and why don't we start, let's start by talking about the character who Most of the world knows as Anne Hathaway, but who, O'Farrell, in this novel turns back into Agnes, which was probably her baptismal name. And it's actually, that in and of itself is an interesting move, isn't it, because Anne Hathaway has the celebrity and the sort of fame of Shakespeare surrounding her. Agnes is, um Is a, is a woman in her own right? She is her entirely her own self,

Speaker 3:

and I think she does it to defamiliarize the reader for many preconceptions about who Anne Hathaway might be by giving her an alternative version of her name. Agnes, she's creating a new character.

Speaker:

Yeah, and it's, Agnes is at the absolute center of the book. Isn't she? It's not, it's not And nor is Shakespeare the central character at all. We're getting into the nitty gritty of what running a household and raising three children, basically on your own, while Shakespeare is asking about in London, would have been like in late, in the late 16th century for a woman like Agnes.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and because she's the hero, let's describe her. And There's a very nice moment in the book when Mary Shakespeare, so that's Shakespeare's mother, is observing Agnes. And O'Farrell writes, Agnes is, Mary is forced to admit, a striking woman. But it is an unsettling wrong sort of beauty. The dark hair is ill matched with the golden green eyes, the skin whiter than milk, the teeth evenly spaced but pointed like a fox's. Mary finds she cannot look at her daughter in law for long. She cannot hold her gaze. This creature, this woman, This elf, this sorceress, this Forrest Bright. Because she is that. Everyone says so. Mary knows it to be true. Bewitched and ensnared her boy, lured him into a union. This Mary can never forgive.

Speaker:

Yeah, she's a very sort of mesmerizing, fascinating woman, Agnes. She's obviously, The novel sort of focuses on her as a mother, but she's obviously sexually very compelling because Shakespeare's, you know, incredibly intensely attracted to her when he first meets her. And another thing that I think O'Farrell has done so well in this book is to let a woman have both compelling sexuality and be very maternal, be a great mother. there are many, many wonderful descriptions of motherhood in this novel. and you know, many of them are organized around moments where her children are very sick because first Judith and then Hamnet catches the plague. There's this extraordinary description of Agnes with Judith when she's in the grip of the plague. What is given may be taken away at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors. They can leap out at you at any moment like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard, never think you're safe, never take for granted that your children's hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget that may be gone, snatched from you in the blink of an eye. born away from you like thistle down. It's a lovely description. Well, it's a heartbreaking description of motherhood. It's quite Shakespearean actually. It's using a lot of that sort of sense that's permeates so many of Shakespeare's plays, this longing to create a gap between the living and the dead,

Speaker 3:

and yes, it's done from a mother's perspective, which Shakespeare Could not have written that particular moment. so we need to talk about the elephant in the room as well.

Speaker:

On

Speaker 3:

one hand, O'Farrell uses Agnes to bring to life the daily reality of parenting in late 16th century Britain. England. the other thing about Agnes is that she's basically a witch. So. Yes. She has supernatural powers. Yes. Which is incredibly bold. And. And very Shakespearean. And very Shakespearean.

Speaker:

And I think O'Farrell sort of pulled that out of nowhere, right? Yeah.

Speaker 3:

She, well, I don't think it's true that Anne Hathaway was a witch, so she must have pulled it out of nowhere.

Speaker:

Yeah!

Speaker 3:

But she's a witch in that, from the start, Agnes, can see the future. Yes. And when she first meets, Shakespeare, she has a little trick where she sort of cups with her thumb and finger, the skin in between his eyes. Thumb and finger webbing and she does this with everyone meet so she can sort of read their mind Yes, their futures which she does incredibly accurately. Yeah, she's very good

Speaker:

at that.

Speaker 3:

And she also spends a lot of time gathering together herbs Yeah forest and she's got a reputation, people come to her when they're sick, knowing that she'll whip out her pestle and mortar. She's big

Speaker:

on the homeopathics.

Speaker 3:

She's going to grind up some rosemary and other things and give you a cure all. She

Speaker:

does amazing things with rhubarb, doesn't she? In fact, I think rhubarb is what cures Judith's plague,

Speaker 7:

so in, in, in all of the episodes that we've done on Shakespeare so far, we've talked about his interest in witchcraft and magic and, the kind of preoccupation in the late 16th and 17th centuries with witchcraft. So this hovering presence in the Renaissance world of darkness, of superstition, of this idea that the devil is crossing over into human life all the time, and that just as God is. a constant presence in 16th century Britain. So too is the devil. of the things that I think is so terrific about the idea is that it sort of brings a sense of the diabolical into this, story about, someone who's basically just a very good mother. I had to laugh when I realized that she was a witch because I realized it was going to give me an opportunity to mention yet again, a text that Shakespeare ends up being quite obsessed with demonology by King James,

Speaker 8:

so for the listener who hasn't listened to all the other episodes, Demonology is a very obscure text, which happened. Deeply

Speaker 7:

obscure.

Speaker 8:

Which, despite this podcast not being very old yet, has still come up in four episodes so far. And somehow Sophie manages to shoehorn King James I's Demonology in.

Speaker 7:

Yes, is this mention number five?

Speaker 8:

I don't know.

Speaker 7:

Yeah. So basically, I'd love to give you a demonology highlights reel, but I don't have it at my fingertips. King James was obsessed with witches, and I suppose the reason he's obsessed with witches is the same reason that Shakespeare is and that Maggie O'Farrell is. Namely that witches, especially in the early modern world, They occupy this very fascinating relationship to people's inner lives, to their secrets, to the things that are uns, shareable about being human. And somehow witches can kind of pull this out of people and know it. And understand it. And in a way it gives Anne Hathaway, Agnes, a kind of quality of the magical, of, of the marvelous that is. and I suppose in some ways a sort of rival to Shakespeare, who was not, I think, a wizard. Could do very miraculous things with language. He's a

Speaker 8:

wizard of words. He's a wizard

Speaker 7:

of words.

Speaker 8:

I think that's right. I When O'Farrell decided to make Agnes the hero she needs them to be equally matched, right? she can't have yeah, Agnes is a sort of second rate citizen to Shakespeare and his his talent and but Agnes cannot have the way with words that Shakespeare has because nobody in the world has ever had the way with words Shakespeare. So it's a very clever move to give her this telepathic power instead because puts her on an equal level. And it's reminding us also that Shakespeare's talent is something we can't quite explain either that there's a quality of magic about him.

Speaker 7:

Yes, it's very nice. And so, you know, this kind of brings us to Shakespeare, who, as we've now said on numerous numerous times during this recording is very much not at the heart of this, story. But, what do you think, uh, O'Farrell is, is trying to do with Shakespeare? I mean, for example, is she saying Shakespeare's hugely overrated? Let's look at the bigger picture around him.

Speaker 8:

No, she's not saying he's overrated by any means, but she is saying he's a human being who sits down and there's an alchemy that happens when he's with his quill and parchment. But we have to recognize that he was a human being. And so, yeah. It's, you know, it's a very bold thing for a writer to take on to try and bring to life, bring to life Shakespeare. I sort of worried at the start of the book, I, there was a lot of him sort of standing around fiddling with the gold earring in his left ear because it's one of the only things we know about him from that famous portrait. Yeah. So there was a lot of him sort of staring soulfully out of windows while fiddling with his gold earrings and I thought uh oh. Yeah. But then A

Speaker 7:

few too many quills.

Speaker 8:

But then it becomes very effective and just to give a flavour of how she brings Shakespeare to life, a lot of it is just through very simple domestic scenes. So there's one that comes early on which just describes him waking up. up and looking out outside his window. And it just situates him in the world of, England and Stratford in the late 16th century. So, in Henley street, he wakes, he spends a while staring up at the dark red curtain above him. Then he gets up, walks to the window and gazes down into the street, absently scratching at his beard. He has two Latin tutorials this afternoon. He is aware of the stifling boredom of them, as you might be of the stench of a nearby carcass. The drowsing boys, the squeal of slates, the flutter and crease of the primers, the intoning of verbs and conjunctions. He yawns. leans his head into the wood frame of the window, glares at a man yanking a donkey by its bridle, a woman pulling a wailing child by its jacket, a boy running in the opposite direction with a bundle of firewood under his arm. So that's a scene in which nothing happens, but I kind of love it because you, you're there with him. Yeah, I know, it's

Speaker 7:

really nice. It's also really bringing, Shakespeare into the world of the novel. Obviously it goes without saying that Shakespeare is a dramatist, a playwright. So that kind of descriptive stuff like the squeal of slates and the flutter increase of the primers and all of that stuff that always has to be implied in Shakespeare's plays. And it's one of the things that novels do so incredibly well is to sort of use circumstantial detail to carry part of what, who a character is. And I think O O'Farrell is kind of using that to claim Shakespeare as it were for the novel. She also, I think, treads a nice line between not getting too kind of Monty Python and cutesy funny about quoting or almost quoting Shakespeare, but she she plays with it a little bit, bringing up some sort of famous Shakespearean things. so she has Shakespeare almost say, all's well that ends well, and it's kind of fun in and of itself that, you know, of all the lines that you can have Shakespeare almost say that he would make a reference to one of his sort of less successful, less compelling plays. But anyway, here's the moment where it happens. Are you ill, she asks him. Me, he says, No, why do you ask? She touches his forehead, which feels clammy and cool like the skin of a frog. He twists irritably out of her grasp, waving away her hand. All's well, he says, and his words are heavy, as if he is spitting out pebbles as he speaks. Don't fuss.

Speaker 8:

I mean, that would have been a better play than All's Well that Ends Well, wouldn't it? Very much. All's well, don't fuss.

Speaker 7:

Yeah.

Speaker 8:

And I think O'Farrell there is reminding us of the difference between art and life. So in, in theatre, all's well that ends well, right? the end of a play, at the end of Act Five, everything's wrapped together. Everyone who's not married gets paired off and they all leave the stage. But in real life, that's not the case at all. Yeah. So the best he can say is all's well. Don't fuss. Yeah,

Speaker 7:

definitely. Uh, that's the sort of Beckett rewrite, Samuel Beckett rewrite.

Speaker 8:

Yes.

Speaker 7:

I was on the fence about whether we should do a full episode on Hamlet. I thought maybe we could add it to the Hamlet episode or something. But you won me over to this book, which I hadn't read before, though I immensely enjoyed it. You won me over, with promises of a fantastic sex scene.

Speaker 8:

Yeah, how do we feel about the sex scene? Because we've talked about there being a number of bold moves in writing this book, but having Shakespeare getting down to it is pretty up there. Getting Anne

Speaker 7:

Hathaway pregnant.

Speaker 8:

Yeah. Does O'Farrell manage to pull off a Shakespeare sex scene?

Speaker 7:

Yeah. So by the time I read the scene, there was an enormous weight of expectation on O'Farrell from me. It wasn't just that it was Shakespeare. Uh, it wasn't just that it was Anne Hathaway. It was also that Hugh Jaunty had said that it was one of the, one of the greats of sex scenes. and then there's the sort of incidental interest of the fact that they're being watched by a bird of prey. Prey, I think you mentioned this, have you mentioned this yet? I

Speaker 8:

did, that a part of the scene is from a kestrel's point of view, which I also love. Oh, nice touch. Let's have a sex scene from a kestrel's point of view.

Speaker 7:

Yeah, do, do we dare read it?

Speaker 8:

Well, yes, we will read a bit. But you were a bit underwhelmed, first of all, by the scene because your expectations were so high.

Speaker 7:

Well, I just thought it was going to be very explicit, which would have been the Shakespeare move. Shakespeare's often, he's got a lot of bawdy in the plays, including in Hamlet. There's that moment where, Hamlet asks Ophelia if she wants to get down into his lap.

Speaker 8:

Right. Yes. Yes. Which we talked about last episode. So I should say I'm a literary prude in that I get very uncomfortable about sex scenes in literature. Yeah. I just want to say, for the listener's benefit, who might not know where Sophie is coming from in her perspective on this, that Sophie, your novel, Scandal of the Season, which you published about 15 years ago. Yeah, it was a long

Speaker 7:

time ago.

Speaker 8:

When I read it last year, I was really shocked at how racy it is. I mean, it's packed full of sex.

Speaker 7:

Yeah.

Speaker 8:

And you go into a level of detail that, really took me by surprise.

Speaker 7:

Yeah, and actually I was tempted to make a joke, but I'm, I'm actually not going to. I'm going to say the reason I did that in that novel was that I really wanted to disrupt this idea that the 18th century, which is when my novel was set, was a sort of Jane Austen land. It was not a period of sexual modesty or chastity or, or anything like that. And then actually that the writing from the period about the period itself is sexually incredibly explicit. But actually, I think one of the things you could say that O'Farrell's doing with with sex and female, sexuality in this novel is actually sort of bringing it back from that misogynistic representation that it gets in, in actual Renaissance texts. So we've really teased the reader, the listener here. We've been teasing the listener for some time. Let's hear the sex scene.

Speaker 8:

Am I doing it or you? Well, it's,

Speaker 7:

it's, it's Shakespeare's, POV. Oh, no, it's her POV.

Speaker 8:

So you'd better, I'd better do it. This is very heteronormative of us.

Speaker 7:

Yeah. In the narrow space between her and the opposite shelf is the Latin T. He stands in the pale V of her legs. His eyes are shut. His fingers grip the curve of her back. It was his hands that undid the bows. At her neckline, that pulled down her shift, that brought out her breasts into the light, and how startled and how white they had looked, in the air like that, in daytime, in front of another, their pink brown eyes stared back in shock. It was her hands, however, that lifted her skirts, that pushed herself back onto this shelf, that drew the body of the Latin tutor towards her. You, the hands said to him, I choose you.

Speaker 8:

Yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty good.

Speaker 7:

it's hard to transition gracefully out of that moment. I think that the next thing for us to talk about is the connection between Hamnet, the The child, the 11 year old boy in O'Farrell's novel, who's very much a child, very much a son in relationship with his mother and his sister and his grandmother, and the moody Dane Hamlet. Because it's a sort of a, it's a mixed blessing, isn't it, having Hamlet the play written in your memory?

Speaker 8:

Well, yes. The whole problem about the theory of Shakespeare writing Hamlet as a response to the death of his son is that it's not necessarily the story you would write. If you had lost a son, it's definitely not a puff piece. It's not. And Hamlet in Shakespeare's play, it's about a whole lot of things. It's, and it's not about the death of a 11 year old and Hamlet is not a particularly appealing character either. So to have your son die. And then a couple of years later, use the same name. And it was an unusual name as the title of a play about a compromised and not entirely pleasant individual is psychologically curious, so I was very intrigued at how O'Farrell was going to take themes and ideas from Shakespeare's Hamlet play and put them into this story about his, his son. And some of it happened, I think, On a incidental level, there are little moments of connection just in the language. So famously, when Hamlet dies at the end of Shakespeare's play, he says, the rest is silence is that famous last line. And O'Farrell uses that language when Hamnet dies of the plague, she writes, And there by the fire held in the arms of his mother, in the room in which he learnt to crawl, to eat, to walk, to speak, Hamnet takes his last breath, he draws it in, he lets it out. Then there is silence, stillness, nothing more. So that's the rest is silent, silent moments. I realised as well that, O'Farrell makes Agnes a sort of avatar for Ophelia, or in fact that Shakespeare in O'Farrell's version makes Ophelia an avatar for Agnes because in Hamnet, Agnes is obsessed by natural herbs, part of her witchiness is she's a witch. So. Constantly out in the forest and garden, collecting herbs to make into healing potions. And of course, when Ophelia goes mad in Hamlet the play, she just starts obsessing about plants and herbs and listing them as well. And actually, I did a bit of cross checking and O'Farrell's using a lot of the same herbs deliberately, putting them into Agnes's hand.

Speaker 7:

It's really nicely done. And, of course, one of the initial points of connection between Agnes and The unnamed Shakespeare in O'Farrell's novel is that Shakespeare, as a Latin tutor, is able to read to her the Latin text of the botanical, um, compendium to plants that she has been studying. had and has been interested in for a long time. So they're sort of brought together by their mutual interest in, well, I suppose, what, Latin and botany. But let me read a snippet from the novel, actually, where I think we really do see Agnes as Ophelia. And it adds a kind of depth to Agnes's character. And it also sort of redeems Ophelia in the sense that Ophelia is, you know, such a blighted character in Hamlet. She's so unhappy. She's, she's given so little life scope. And so here's the moment from O'Farrell. Agnes selects rue, comfrey, yellow eyed chamomile. She takes purple, lavender and thyme, a handful of rosemary, not heartsies because Hamnet disliked the smell, not angelica because it's too late for that. And it did not help, did not perform. It's task, it did not save him, did not break the fever, not valerian for the same reason, not milk thistle for the leaves are so spiny and sharp enough to pierce the skin to bring forth drops of blood.

Speaker 8:

So I'm just going to cross reference some Ophelia after that, that reading. So there's in Act 4 in Hamlet, when Ophelia has gone mad and she's wandering around the court, handing out, plants and herbs to various courtiers, she comes wandering through and says, there's fennel for you. And columbines. There's rue for you, and here's some for me. We may call it Herb Gracer Sundays. Oh, you must wear your rue with a difference. There's a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. So the difference is, is that Ophelia has no agency by this point. She's, she's gone mad. She's wandering around handing out flowers and speaking nonsense. And Ophariel gives Agnes a similar obsession with, plants and herbs. But she has complete agency and total

Speaker 7:

control. And it's also actually taking it, you know, we did meant midsummer night's dream last week. So we're really thinking about the sort of frequent flower references in midsummer night's dream. And it's Oberon in that play who gets Puck to use what I think is the sort of juice of a, like a pansy or heartsies, which is mentioned in this little. clip here, to create the love potion that is then going to sort of manipulate, Titania and other characters. And so again, O'Farrell sort of taking that back for Agnes, for Anne Hathaway, that sort of power over plants.

Speaker 8:

Yes, and Another way in which Hamlet and Hamlet connect is that, and I think this is a very clever piece of writing by O'Farrell, but Shakespeare dashes back from London, he doesn't make it back in time, Hamlet is dead by the time he gets back, and Shakespeare cannot cope with the grief. And after a few weeks, he makes his excuses and he just leaves. He leaves Agnes on her own to pick up the pieces. And the implication is that he then spends the next few years distracting himself. He can't process the grief, so he just throws himself into business. But by this reading, Which I think feels completely plausible, Hamlet is a play in which Shakespeare is, in a sort of obsessive compulsive way, working out every permeation of father son relationships. There are so many father son relationships in Hamlet, which have aspects which are functional, aspects which are dysfunctional, and it's like Shakespeare is trying to work out what went wrong. What went wrong in his own, in his own family, and in his own, you know. experience. It's so interesting.

Speaker 7:

Yeah.

Speaker 8:

And. Of course in, in Hamlet, Shakespeare writing Hamlet becomes the great process of catharsis by which he comes to terms with his, his grief and I, I, I don't want to say too much about the ending but there is a scene close to the end, well at the end where Agnes sees Hamlet being performed and, and of course one of the things we feel fairly certain of, because it was a actorly tradition passed down over the centuries, is that Shakespeare himself played the ghost in Hamlet's father, and it was his greatest role. It was seen to be the one moment he really nailed it as a actor. And, and so O'Farrell describes Agnes seeing the play, and, and When the king addresses him as Hamlet, my son, the words carry no surprise for her. Of course this is who he is. Of course. Who else would it be? She has looked for her son everywhere, ceaselessly, these past four years. And here he is. 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.

Speaker 7:

Yes, it's nicely done.

Speaker 8:

I found the, the way that this novel builds towards a close and a resolution very affecting and powerful. But I wanted to on, on that point to pull out and ask the question, does it work? Does she pull it off?

Speaker 7:

Yeah. One of the things that I think she really gets right about Hamlet, the play, is its preoccupation with grief. And without giving away the book, she does really wonderful things with the injunction that the ghost makes to Hamlet in Shakespeare's play. The ghost says to Hamlet, Remember me, remember me. And Hamlet says, Remember thee, yea, from the tables of my memory I'll erase. kind of everything else because all I will do is remember you. All I'll do is stay in this relationship with a lost parent. That's what happens in Hamlet. and O'Farrell, I think, is really thinking about that. You know, how do we sustain this relationship between the living and the dead, um, in a world where death is all around us? And I think that's really beautifully done. The parts, I suppose, that I had more questions about were, Agnes and Shakespeare's relationship, which, was, almost certainly a very, very fraught, probably very distant relationship.

Speaker 8:

It's very hard to spin the possibility that their relationship was a close and loving one so that we know that Shakespeare spent most of his married life. Not living in the same town. Yeah,

Speaker 7:

and had relationships both with men and women.

Speaker 8:

Yes, we know from the sonnets he was having relationships in other ways. And we also know that in his will, he famously didn't leave her anything other than his second best bed. O'Farrell sort of ignores all that or spins it. She makes a pretty good fist at trying to explain those. She does things, so, so in her version, she's the one who thinks that they should go to London. so she, she can see that. Shakespeare's unfulfilled, he's living under the shadow of his father, she says, go to London, it'll give you independence, I'll come down with the kids once you're settled. And what stops her is that Judith of the twins, Hamnet and Judith, Judith is very, very unwell. And it's clear if they move to a city as unhealthy as London, Judith will die. And so there's this idea that They're trapped in this situation where Shakespeare's built a career in London, but the family can't move to be with him. So, I buy that to an extent. It's a nice

Speaker 7:

reworking of that, because apparently in, actual early modern London, it was the convention that the wives and children of these, artists of these artisans and playwrights and people, they would come and live in the city with them. And, it's probably quite contemporary for us as readers for it to be Anne Hathaway's idea that Shakespeare would go to London. And I sort of like that, that O'Farrell has sort of taken control of Shakespeare's creative choices for his wife, for his, for the woman in his life. So that's all very successful.

Speaker 8:

I think one of the areas where it starts to get a bit tenuous is O'Farrell makes an attempt to explain the second best bet. Yeah. And. Because if her idea is that they had a loving relationship, how do you explain the awfulness of his will? It's so mean. It's

Speaker 7:

worthy of Hamlet, actually.

Speaker 8:

And it turns out her spin on this is that, in fact, the second best bed was the older bed in their household. They bought, after Shakespeare got rich, they bought a grander bed, which they would let guests sleep in. But the second best bed was the bed they got married in, if you catch my drift. Oh, nice. It's the Their sexy bed. Yes. And so by Shakespeare leaving her his second best bed, he's leaving her their special, sexy, sexy token and a reminder. So,

Speaker 7:

so it's a special shout out to sexy times.

Speaker 8:

Yes. But I, but, but

Speaker 7:

that's a nice piece of recuperation. I, I think she, everything, she, all the decisions she's made makes, I think, a very canny. They're very plausible and they're very much in the service of her reclaiming the story for a woman, for marriage, for domesticity, for the social value of motherhood. And, you know, I think all of that's incredibly interesting. She does refer to Shakespeare's infidelities, doesn't she?

Speaker 8:

She does. There's a scene after Hamlet has died where Shakespeare's thrown himself into life in London, and he comes back and, you know, For Agnes can, in her telepathic powers, can sense the other women he's been with, but it's positioned very much as it's a terrible thing he's done, but he's done it out of grief but I was, you know, obviously, A big influence on this book, I think, is Hilary Mantel and, um, and particularly Hilary Mantel's use of ghosts in her, her fiction, which comes from the fact that Hilary Mantel claims to have seen ghosts. Yes. And the ghostly presences in this book, coupled with the fact it's a piece of historical fiction reimagining real characters, really gives it a Mantel flavor. Yes. But I think a big difference is that You know, what Mantell does so well in Wolf Hall is she recasts all of the characters. Henry VIII is not as we imagined Henry VIII to be. Thomas Cromwell is different to how we previously imagined him to be. But she makes us think it's completely plausible. No one can read Wolf Hall and think about Henry VIII or Thomas Cromwell in the same way again. I think with Hamnet, you accept it as a work of fiction on those terms. I don't come away thinking Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway were deeply in love and devoted to one another. I feel that it's much more of a work of fiction and you have to suspend disbelief and go on that journey. And then it works wonderfully on its own terms. Yeah. But I don't buy it as an accurate proposal of what their relationship was. So

Speaker 7:

in that sense, it's sort of, it's taking the story of Shakespeare, but in some ways also taking the story of Hamlet, which is, it's quite a misogynistic play. or at least the misogyny is never really recuperated in it. And it's kind of claiming it back and turning it into a novel that's organized around women, childbirth, maternal devotion, and you know, sort of women sustaining and caring for one another. It's that as opposed to a kind of actual rewriting.

Speaker 9:

writing of history, which I think is what Hilary Mantel is possibly much more doing. One of the things that I thought was very successful about Hamnet, and I thought O'Farrell did absolutely beautifully, was to remind us of the constant, fear and pain and difficulty of just being a mother, the child, the child birthing scenes are amazing. There's the scene where, Agnes has the twins. She has Hamnet first, and then she has Judith. And, of course, in those days, you wouldn't have known that you were having twins. So she has this quite difficult transition. first labor with Hamnet. And then they realized that there's another baby there and she has this sort of impossible second labor. and you know, reading those scenes, remembering my own labor, which was unbelievably painful. I was just, it was, it was, it was a great description.

Speaker 10:

Yes. It's a bit, the moment when they realize there's another baby coming, that's, it's extraordinarily well, well done.

Speaker 9:

Yes.

Speaker 10:

I was going to suggest we end with, on that note, the description of Agnes attending to Hamnet's body after his death, but I think that's such a downer to end on. Yeah. I think maybe we should just end with This rather lovely moment where Shakespeare is about to come on stage as the ghost of Hamlet's father and he reflects about the process of writing the play, which I think is a brilliant image of what it must have been like writing Hamlet, not really knowing what you're doing or if it's successful or not. So. I think we should end on a slightly more positive note.

Speaker 9:

I agree with you. Let's do that. Yeah. And let's bring it back to Shakespeare for heaven's sake.

Speaker 10:

Yes. He cannot tell as he stands there whether or not this new play is good. Sometimes as he listens to his company speak the lines, he thinks he has come close to what he wanted it to be. Other times he feels he has entirely missed the mark. It is good. It is bad. It is somewhere in between. How does a person ever tell? All he can do is inscribe strokes on a page. For weeks and weeks, this was all he did. Barely leaving his room, barely eating, never speaking to anyone else. And hope that at least some of these arrows will hit their targets. The play, the complete length of it, fills his head. It balances there, like a laden platter on a single fingertip. It moves through him, this one, more than any other he has ever written, as blood through his veins.

Speaker 9:

Yes, that's very good. And there is something about Hamlet, the play, where you do feel that it meant more to Shakespeare, perhaps, than the other plays.

Speaker 10:

I think that definitely comes across.

Speaker 9:

Well, we're, we're coming to the end, Jonty. We're about to go into everyone's favorite part of the show. The worst, best bit, worst bit, and the overrated, underrated. If you've enjoyed listening to this episode of The Secret Life of Books, or any other episode for that matter, we're asking our loyal listeners to text one friend right now and say, give it a listen, give them a link, ask them to give it a listen. Thanks very much.

Speaker 10:

Okay. Sophie, what was the best bit, worst bit for you?

Speaker 9:

Well, the best bit. were the wonderful, very moving descriptions of motherhood, which I do always feel are missing from Shakespeare. And, I found them very affecting and just brought me into the world of early modern England, in a way that is not often available through the literature of the period. So that was wonderful. The worst bit, yeah, I found it a bit unsatisfying that Shakespeare's full self, as we, I mean, we don't know a ton about Shakespeare, but the, the, the Shakespeare who had many appetites, who had many desires, who had, who apart from the else was queer, as well as having relationships with his wife. I wanted to be able to have a full, Um, a marriage that in some sense or other could accommodate all of that because obviously in reality that is what happened.

Speaker 10:

Yes. For me, the best bit I think is the ending actually. I think it builds up beautifully to the ending and it's a very powerful, very powerful ending. I think the worst bit is I agree with that. I think there's, there's not enough friction in their marriage or relationship and the moments where it happens, you're very grateful for. So there's. There's a wonderful scene where after the death of Hamnet, Shakespeare's gone back to London, he's just totally absent. And he writes these letters that don't even comment on what's happened. And there's one where he just airily writes, Oh, we're putting on a new play. It's a comedy. And in this moment, Agnes talking to her, her family just pauses. She can't process how he could have written a comedy after the death of his son. And she just says, A comedy? And I think those moments are great and you want more of them. The relationship doesn't need to be as perfect as, as it's laid out. It's irreverent, yeah. overrated or underrated? I

Speaker 9:

the scales are overwhelmingly tipped in the direction of overrated, right? Because it was hugely successful, it was hugely popular, it's rewriting Shakespeare's greatest play. When I read it, I came away feeling that it was absolutely appropriately rated. I think it deserves to be read. be as popular as it is and, have this really important place for contemporary readers who are trying to re encounter Shakespeare and also think about the place of women in Shakespeare's world.

Speaker 10:

Yeah, I think it's underrated and that it's still a recent book and I think its reputation is going to grow. I think O'Farrell is poised to occupy the role that Hilary Mantel played in our culture over the last decade. 25 years. So I think it's early for this book, but I think it's a heavyweight. And, and Sophie, I was going to ask a last question, uh, which is, does this book have classic potential?

Speaker 9:

It does. It has all the ingredients that a book needs to become a classic. It's got compelling characters. It's got a great story. Uh, it's got big feelings. I, I I'm, I'm going to say yes. What about you?

Speaker 10:

Yeah. And it's about the classics. And it's about the classics. Yeah.

Speaker 9:

Classic of the classic.

Speaker 10:

You've been listening to the secret life of books.

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Jonty Claypole

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Sophie Gee

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