HAMNET by Maggie O'Farrell

This book falls short when compared with O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and This Must Be the Place.  At least in this example, her historical fiction does not measure up to her superb creative fiction, and I think the same is true of Alice Hoffman and T.C. Boyle.  The first half of Hamnet is a grind—unbearably dreary—as it imagines the early attraction between William Shakespeare and Agnes (aka Anne) Hathaway.  Later, William seeks his fortune in London and becomes a successful playwright, while Agnes remains in Stratford with their three children.  Then we reach the inevitable tragedy—the death of their son Hamnet at eleven years old.  There is no cure for grief, the sentiment which overwhelmingly consumes this novel, nor was there a cure for bubonic plague, which may or may not have killed the real Hamnet, in the late sixteenth century.  This is basically Agnes’s story, and the author depicts her here, inexplicably, as having some supernatural gifts, taking me back to my earlier comparison to Alice Hoffman.  After Hamnet’s death, she is plagued (pun intended) by guilt that she was unable to foresee this outcome, just as she was unable to recognize that she was pregnant with twins before the birth of Hamnet and his sister, Judith.  Her eccentricity also seems a bit inauthentic—having a pet kestrel when she and William meet and delivering her first child alone in the woods.  I’m not buying that her unconventionality explains William’s interest in a woman eight years his senior, whom he marries when she is three months pregnant.  I am fascinated that in Elizabethan England eighteen-year-olds were minors, so that Agnes’s father had to approve the marriage.  I tend to think of our teenagers today as being less mature than they were centuries ago, and yet we consider them to be adults at 18.  I find it even more improbable that Mississippi is the only state in which the parties have to be at least 21 to marry without parental consent.