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MARIA ANTONIETTA STRUZZIERO¹ DOI: 10.15290/CR.2022.37.2.01
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3783-6832

“Caught in a web of
absence”: Risk, death
and survival in Maggie
O’Farrell’s Hamnet

Abstract. Maggie OʼFarrell s̓ Hamnet (2020) is a reimagining of the death of Shakespeare s̓ only son, and the

existential havoc that the event causes in the protagonistsʼ life. However, the title is slightly misleading

because the novel s̓ central character is Hamnet s̓ enigmatic mother, Agnes Hathaway, better known as

Anne. The narrative oscillates between two timelines: the present begins on the day the plague first afflicts

Hamnet s̓ twin sister Judith and soon after takes away the boy himself, a trauma that risks breaking both

the family bonds and fragmenting the individual psyche. The past swings back to Agnes s̓ meeting her fu-

ture husband about 15 years earlier. Though Hamnet died of unknown causes, OʼFarrell attributes it to the

bubonic plague that raged throughout the country at the time with devastating consequences, an aspect of

the story that is highly topical due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Hamnet is a text crossed by a number of

deaths, both in the family of the dramatist and of his wife. As such, it is argued, the novel explores various

forms of risk: physical, psychological and emotional. At the same time, it examines the different strategies

that the human psyche activates to heal its wounds.

Keywords: plague, risk, death, trauma, survival, safety.

Introduction

“The words exist, if you know how to listen”
Maggie OʼFarrell, Hamnet

Maggie OʼFarrell s̓ Hamnet (2020) is a reimagining of the death of Hamnet, William
Shakespeare s̓ eleven-year-old only son. The tragic event ripples through the calm
surface of the protagonistsʼ daily lives, tips over into psychological devastation, and has
far-reaching emotional, domestic and artistic reverberations.

1 Independent scholar. E-mail: mstruz@hotmail.it

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3783-6832


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The title, however, belies its real subject because, though the text is permeated with
Hamnet s̓ presence, even as an eerily, ghostly creature long after his death, both in the
family and in the pages of his father s̓ theatrical production, the protagonist and pulsat-
ing heart is the boy s̓ mysterious mother, Anne Hathaway, in the novel called Agnes
which, as OʼFarrell explains, is the name that appeared in her father s̓ will. Actually, the
two names, “Agnes and Ann were simply treated as versions of the same name” (2008: 10),
Germaine Greer maintains in Shakespeare’s Wife (2008), adding that scholars found dozens
of examples “where Agnes, pronounced A̒nnis ,̓ gradually becomes A̒nnʼ” (Greer 2008:
10). So, “the child born Agnes Hathaway grew up to be Ann Shakespeare” (2008: 11)².

At the same time, the famous playwright is somehow relegated to a secondary role,
never named directly but only variously referred to, in relation to the other characters,
as “the son”, “the Latin tutor”, “her husband”, “the father”. Actually, he is one of the
many ghosts that haunt the text, moved to the periphery of the novel s̓ geographic world.
He is seldom at home in Stratford-upon-Avon, where the story takes place, and his life in
distant London is little known even to his family; he mostly exists in the memories that
his wife and children cherish of him, a presence kept alive by his letters to them.
Hamnet is a text crossed, and punctuated, by a number of risks to face and deaths,

both in the family of the dramatist and of his wife, shadows that loom large in their lives
and make their presence felt throughout the book.

As such, the article argues, the novel explores various forms of risk: physical, psycho-
logical and emotional, the latter ones triggered by the trauma of loss and grief. At the
same time, it examines the different strategies that the human psyche activates to over-
come and survive a traumatic event and re-emerge on relatively safe existential ground. In
addition to this, at its core, Hamnet is also a tender study of motherhood and family life; an
exploration of marriage, as well as an insightful look into the creative process itself.

A restless boy, a witchy forest girl and a kestrel
Hamnet is a third-person present tense narrative, for the most part focalized through
Agnes s̓ female eyes, but inhabiting different minds. The novel moves to centre stage the
almost obscure figure of Shakespeare s̓ wife, as well as Hamnet, so overlooked and
forgotten by scholars, giving both of them a personality and a voice, and giving voice to
their silenced story.

OʼFarrell s̓ is an important shift of perspective because, as the writer herself asserts in
an interview with Sarah Hughes for The Guardian, Anne Hathaway is usually given no
agency, and “there s̓ so much hostility and misogyny towards her. The narrative is that
she was illiterate, that she was a peasant, that he hated her, that she forced him into

2 The article will refer to Anne Hathaway as Agnes in discussing Maggie OʼFarrell s̓ novel. Germaine Greer
uses the form A̒nn,̓ a spelling that is retained when quoting from her text.



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marriage” (Hughes 2020). A malicious view of her finds space even in James Joyce s̓
Ulysses (1920), voiced by Stephen Dedalus. In the ʻScylla and Charybdisʼ episode, he
refers to her as “the ugliest doxy in all Warwickshire, […] a boldfaced Stratford wench
who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself ” (2011: 244). Then Stephen goes
on to add that as soon as the dramatist realized he had made a mistake, he “got out of it
as quickly and as best he could” (2011: 243), leaving her behind to escape to London,
thus becoming a ghost for his family.

Scholars have frequently used “the distorting lens of what he expressed through his
characters or the speaker of his sonnets” (Shapiro 2006: xvi) as ʻsourcesʼ to have access to
the dramatist s̓ feelings and fill the silences and opacities of his life. To argue their point
and support the narrative that Shakespeare s̓ was an unhappy marriage, critics also
invoke the famous will, in which he left only his “second-best bed” to his wife, as also
Stephen Dedalus does, defining it “the swansong […] wherein he has commended her to
posterity” (2011: 260). However, they tend to ignore that in Elizabethan times the ʻbest
bedʼ was usually kept on view downstairs for visitors to admire. William left the marital
(second best) bed to his wife. That bed surely had more emotional value than the show-
piece bed. On this critical tendency, James Shapiro aptly observes that “the plays are not
two-way mirrors” which can offer a window into the dramatist s̓ feelings where he left
no other documents, such as letters or diaries, to refer to, a critical methodology that is
characterized by “circularity and arbitrariness” (Shapiro 2006: xiv).

In her recent The Private Life of William Shakespeare (2021), Lena Cowen Orlin acknowl-
edges that “the nature of Shakespeare s̓ emotional relationship with Anne […] is a privacy
that will remain intractable” (49); however, she asserts that there was purpose in the
union and that it suited him, even though “the very idea that Shakespeare could himself
have made a positive life choice flies in the face of settled opinion” (49). In fact, she
concludes, marriage freed him from a planned indenture and an unwanted life in trade,
and set him free to become a poet and playwright. As for the long debated issue of the
bed left to his wife, Cowen Orlin claims that “all Shakespeare s̓ bequests hint at the possi-
bility that there was a sentimental significance in the second-best bed as well” (194).

Peter Ackroyd is also very critical of the speculations that Anne Hathaway had coaxed
an inexperienced young man into bed and trapped him into “a mésalliance or forced
marriage” which, instead, he considered “an eminently sensible arrangement” (2006:
83). The whole narrative of their unhappy married life, he argues, is “an insult to Anne
Hathaway who, like many of the silent wives of famous men, has endured much
obloquy” (2006: 84).

In the novel, a disparaging view of Agnes is voiced by Shakespeare s̓ mother, Mary.
Being somehow both puzzled by, and even afraid of, her ability “to look at you, right into
you, right through you” (OʼFarrell 2020: 206)³, Mary considers her daughter-in-law a



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“sorceress [who] bewitched and ensnared her boy, lured him into a union. This, Mary
can never forgive” (207).

However, OʼFarrell maintains, “there s̓ not a single shred of evidence for any of that”
(Allardice 2021) and, as a counter-argument, she adds, “when he retired, he could have
lived anywhere. He was incredibly wealthy but he chose to go back and spend his retire-
ment with her in Stratford. This doesnʼt suggest to me a man who hated his wife or
regretted his marriage” (Allardice 2021).

Actually, in her meticulously researched Shakespeare’s Wife, Germaine Greer, sifting
through the archives, wills and birth records of people whose lives ran parallel to the
young Shakespeares, traces, and exposes, the evolution of the fantasy narrative concern-
ing them. She offers a corrective to all the male biographers who manipulated the
meagre facts known about Shakespeare to construct misogynistic narratives about Anne
Hathaway. Greer pointedly observes: “By doing the right thing, by remaining silent and
invisible, Ann Shakespeare left a wife-shaped void in the biography of William Shake-
speare, which later bardolaters filled up with their own speculations, most of which do
neither them nor their hero any credit” (2009: 4). This tendency resulted in biographies
mostly built on fanciful hypotheses: “All biographies of Shakespeare are houses built of
straw, but there is good straw and rotten straw” (Greer 2009: 8). She goes on to add that
Anne was “like so many young women of her age in being unmarried” (34), and that “it is
her husband who is the exception to the rule, being himself a minor” (88).

OʼFarrell acknowledges Germaine Greer s̓ book as one of the many influences on her
portrayal of Agnes, along with a series of additional sources that she researched in
preparation for the book and to inscribe her ʻotherʼ narrative. OʼFarrell retrieves Anne
Hathaway from obscurity and the disparaging obfuscating sexism of scholars and
scriptwriters of Oscar-winning films, and brings to life a fascinating female portrait of
an unconventional, free-spirited creature who seems to be endowed with special,
mysterious gifts.
Hamnet is divided into two parts, the caesura between the sections being represented

by Hamnet s̓ death. The novel oscillates back and forth between two timelines and the
opposite poles of ʻriskʼ and ʻsafetyʼ that punctuate both trajectories. The present narra-
tive, which actually opens the novel, begins in 1596, on the day the plague stealthily
enters the safe world of the playwright s̓ household, bringing death and devastation. The
past narrative swings back first to Agnes s̓ recollection of her childhood, then the
meeting with her future husband while he is tutoring her stepsiblings, William s̓
courtship and their marriage, followed by the birth of their three children.

Though risk, loss and death are introduced at the very beginning of the novel, on the
day the plague appears in the Shakespearesʼ lives unexpectedly, they also accompany

3 Further references to this book are given after quotations in the text.



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the protagonistsʼ past. So, first the article will focus on the past time axis- which is grad-
ually presented through a series of flashbacks that alternate with the present narrative
thread- both to take readers back into the youthful stage of Agnes s̓ and Will s̓ life, their
respective problematic family relationships, and their encounter, and, above all,
because old traumas shed light on the protagonistsʼ psychology in their adulthood.

Agnes s̓ past story starts almost as a fairy tale: “There used to be a story in these parts
about a girl who lived at the edge of a forest” (45), the narrator recalls. It is a tale that
suggests a deep connection between humans and the natural world and that, repeated
from teller to listener, appears to conceal “a promise, […] a hint that something is about
to happen” (45). The story recounts “the myth of Agnes s̓ childhood” (51), and the
special, fond relationship she had with her mother, who profoundly doted on her baby
girl. Agnes s̓ safe idyllic life is abruptly interrupted by the death of her beloved mother
while giving birth to her third stillborn child, one of the many deaths punctuating the
text. She vividly recollects the appalling sight of her mother s̓ bed soaked in blood, “a
room of carnage, of violence, of appalling crimson” (55), in her arms the dead baby child
with a waxy, wizened face wrapped in a bundle, a priest muttering strange words over
both mother and baby. It is an event that seriously jeopardizes Agnes s̓ psychological
integrity and almost threatens to fragment her self, as “reality-testing has shown that
the loved object no longer exists” (Freud 1917: 244).

The child Agnes feels that “the world has cracked open, [and] the sky above her could,
at any moment, split and rain down fire and ash upon them all” (56). She retreats into
the forest to give free vent to her suffering, piercing her skin with thorny brambles, as if
the self-inflicted physical pain might help attenuate the emotional wound left open by
her loss. Alone with the trees, she cries out her anger at the God of the church they go to
every Sunday: “She calls on him, she bawls his name. You, she says, you, do you hear
me, I am finished with you” (56). This wound disrupts her safe childhood world and
affects her so deeply that she no longer believes in God; it is a trauma that she will relive
with even more excruciating pain when Hamnet dies.

Agnes is left alone to cherish the tender, vivid memories of her mother, missing her
hand “that held Agnes s̓, to stop her from falling, and it was warm and firm” (51). She
does not find the same source of safety and emotional support in her stepmother, “the
woman in the house” (56) that her father marries after some time, Joan, a name “that
made Agnes think of a howling dog” (52). Joan has no patience with the children, and
shows no affection for her and her younger brother Bartholomew, who Agnes loves
profoundly. She hits Agnes with a shoe when she is angry with her, “leaving purple
blotches on her skin” (53), a pain that is “so surprising, so unfamiliar” (53) to the child,
who learns the art of invisibility so as not to draw her stepmother s̓ notice to her and
thus avoid being beaten. At this stage the girl s̓ existential trajectory abruptly swings
from the warm safety of family affection to deprivation and risk. There follows “a time



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of confusion, of the seasons following hard upon each other” (53) for Agnes, whose
personal and emotional world has been emptied, leaving only a void, an absence.
However, she forces herself never to cry, but simply keeps asking everyone when her
own mother would come back, unable to accept the idea that she is lost forever. Except
for the old apothecary s̓ widow, everyone denies that she had another mother; she canʼt
understand why they tell lies, because she remembers everything about her and does
everything not to erase her presence from the family and keep her memory alive at least
in Bartholomew.

Deprived of the security of maternal affection, Agnes grows up yearning for an other
to fill the void that threatens to engulf her, counteract the death drive that pushes her
towards the brink of the abyss, and save her. So, when she first meets eighteen-year-old
William at Hewlands, the Hathawaysʼ residence, where he is Latin tutor to her half-
brothers, she recognizes a kindred soul: both abused by one of their parents- Agnes by
her stepmother, William by his bossy father; both misfits, with something special inside
they want to share with the other. She finds emotional safety in him, viewing in him the
ideal signifier that can help her reconstitute the texture of the self on safer grounds.

Will glimpses Agnes from the window of the schoolroom at Hewlands, unaware that
she is the farmer s̓ eldest daughter; he mistakes her for a young man as she emerges
from the forest “with a brand of masculine insouciance or entitlement, covering the
ground with booted strides” (33), holding a kestrel on her outstretched fist. The themes
of mistaken identities, gender-blurring and affinity between girl and boy twins are some
of the Shakespearean themes blended in OʼFarrell s̓ novel, and that at one point will
have a pivotal role with momentous consequences.

In the neighbourhood Agnes has a reputation for being a free-spirited young woman,
by many considered to be “strange, touched, peculiar, perhaps mad” (37). She is often
seen talking to bees or wandering by herself through the forest to collect plants that she
uses “to make dubious potions” (37), so a sort of witchy, quasi-mythical creature. Even at
home they look upon her with suspicion as they believe that, being a gifted herbalist,
she is very good with potions and curses. Indeed, her stepmother feels at risk, and “lives
in terror of the girl putting hexes on her” (37), especially after her husband, the girl s̓
father, dies. He bequeaths his daughter a substantial dowry in his will, an endowment
that, giving Agnes a degree of social safety and financial independence, makes her a
more attractive party than many women of her time, who had to rely on paternal
permission when choosing their future husband. Yet, she is generally thought “to be too
wild for any man” (37), so probably difficult to marry.

However, when the restless young William begins to talk to her, he is strangely
intrigued by the fanciful tales circulating about her, and confused by her combination of
contrasting attributes: dressed like a servant but speaking like a lady, boldly meeting his



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eyes like a man would and yet distinctly feminine in her figure and form. There is an
immediate palpable chemistry between the two, which they do not hide from each
other; almost bewitched by her, he touches her arm and feels her shiver. She finds his
hand and “her fingers grip the flesh between his thumb and forefinger” (43), holding it
as if she wanted to decipher something in the complex text of his mind. When he asks
her name, he mishears her saying “Anne” (42), which reminds him of his dead sister by
the same name, an echo of the ʻghostʼ of the dead haunting the life of the living. Soon
after, however, she corrects him, saying that her name is “Agnes” (44), but pronounced
differently, “Ann-yis. Agn-yez” (44), a linguistic slipperiness that appears to hint at the
deceptively mysterious nature of her identity. Then, unexpectedly, she kisses his mouth,
leaving him dizzyingly stupefied, and after turns to go away. When the reader meets
Agnes and Will next, they are in an apple storage room on the farm, the same place
where they had exchanged their first kiss. It is a marvellous scene of the couple s̓ first
breathtaking lovemaking, a passionate scene of youthful sex and one of the most origi-
nal lovemaking scenes in literature.

OʼFarrell revises the traditional misogynistic narrative of the canny older woman trap-
ping the inexperienced young boy into an unwanted marriage. In the novel, Will, with
his disgraced father and his uncertain prospects, is no catch for Agnes, who is socially
respectable and financially independent. In this perspective, it is she who takes a risk by
making the poorer match with a boy considered to be “penniless and tradeless, not to
mention rather young to be courting a woman who is of age” (73), both by the local
community and by Agnes s̓ stepmother, who speaks openly and contemptuously against
the possibility of their marriage.

A significant difference with the predominant traditional narrative of their life-story
is that in the novel there is an indisputable attraction between the two; they are passion-
ately in love with each other and want to spend the rest of their life together. It is a
certainty that both of them have from their first meeting, each one feeling safe in the
other and trusting the other unconditionally. Somehow, the reader perceives that it is
the meeting of two special individuals who confront and complete each other.

Visible absences and invisible enemies
The present time axis in the novel, as mentioned before, begins on the day the plague
reaches the village and creeps into the Shakespearesʼ life, putting the safety of the
family, and of entire communities, at risk. OʼFarrell attributes Hamnet s̓ death at the age
of eleven, whose real causes are unknown, to the bubonic plague, which is plausible as
the Black Death actually raged through the country at the time. It first makes its pres-
ence manifest with the ominous marks it leaves on Hamnet s̓ twin sister Judith. Soon
after, however, while Judith gradually recovers and is safe, it is Hamnet who falls into its
baneful grip and dies, an event that has momentous emotional and psychological



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consequences, and threatens to break all family bonds, leaving them traumatized and
overcome with grief.

The novel closely follows the spread and devastating consequences of the virulent
pestilence in a section in which OʼFarrell charts how the plague reached Agnes s̓ chil-
dren, reconstructing “the chain of random events and haphazard encounters that could
have led the fatal bacterium Yersinia pestis to the Shakespeare house” (Greenblatt
2021: 2). The description of the progression of the plague is an astounding narrative
sequence, “a tour de force of contact-tracing” (Greenblatt 2021: 2), of the kind we have
become familiar with out of necessity.

OʼFarrell follows two separate sources of the plague – a glassmaker in Murano and a
cabin boy on a merchant ship – that at one point will meet. The pestilence makes its
way from Alexandria, Egypt, via fleas, a monkey, cats, rats, and a cabin boy to infected
rags wrapped around a glass necklace from Murano, Italy, that will reach a seamstress
in Ely street where Judith gets infected unwrapping the box containing the millefiori
beads. It is a narrative that, in this historical moment, resonates with tragic topicality; as
we still live in the ghastly shadow of the global Covid 19 pandemic and its succession of
risky variants, despite scientistsʼ constant efforts and progress to track the contagion
and prevent its riskier mutations, we are gripped by a growing sense of precariousness
and insecurity, deprived of the certainty of a safe future to look forward to. However, the
topicality of the novel should not mislead readers into thinking that it was OʼFarrell s̓
deliberate attempt to capitalize on the surge of interest in books dealing with epidemics.
It is pure coincidence that Hamnet was published when the world was in the grip of
Covid-19; actually, the novelist had begun researching for the novel three years before,
and would never have imagined that “a fatal disease could at any moment be sweeping
towards you, from far off continents” (OʼFarrell 2020), and change people s̓ daily life.

OʼFarrell also traces to the cataclysm of Hamnet s̓ death and its traumatic aftermath
the source of inspiration for Shakespeare s̓ Hamlet (1603), a tragedy written four years
later in which the playwright, looking for his dead son everywhere and fathoming the
depth of his grief, at last finds him in the alchemy of his most famous play. If Shake-
speare s̓ loss of his son is behind the composition of his most famous play, it is not to be
easily ascertained. Some critics feel confident that, unlike Ben Johnson, who left poems
on the death of his children, Shakespeare s̓ failure “to memorialize Hamnet betrays a
much deeper grief; others, a comparative callousness”. Maybe his silence is simply
evidence that “he did not write autobiographically” (Cowen Orlin 2021: 6).

However, the correlation established by OʼFarrell between Hamlet and the child s̓
death as the source of inspiration for the composition of his play is persuasive. First of
all, it rests on the similarity between the two names, Hamnet and Hamlet; they were “in
fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries” (Greenblatt 2004: 3), according to both Steven



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Greenblatt and Germaine Greer, scholars who are also quoted by OʼFarrell in the novel s̓
foreword. Furthermore, it is implausible to think that the playwright was unaffected by
the boy s̓ death, which, according to Greenblatt, “could have caused a psychic distur-
bance that helps to explain the explosive power and inwardness of Hamlet” (2004: 17). In
ʻThe Death of Hamnet: An Essay on Grief and Creativityʼ (2009) Eugene Mahon goes
beyond the similarity between the dead child s̓ name and the play s̓ title, focusing
instead on the language of Hamlet. He observes the presence of frequent linguistic twin-
ning and variations on the theme of doubling which, he contends, are unconscious
references to the dead twin, whose loss is even accentuated by the presence of the living
sibling. Surely, the child s̓ loss “was a brutal, existential assault on the playwright s̓
psyche” (2009: 426); language, then, is “a supreme act of sublimation” (2009: 425) used
“as an attempt to repair the broken heart through the dual ministry of mourning and
art” (2009: 435).

Greenblatt openly traces the composition of Hamlet back to the playwright s̓ experi-
ence of grief for the loss of his only son, a traumatic event that seems also to be reflected
in Shakespeare s̓ other works of the period, specifically among them King John (1596). In
this play there is the portrayal of a mother, Constance, who is so frantic after her son s̓
death that she tears her hair and even contemplates committing suicide:

“Pand. You hold too heinous a respect of grief.
Const. He talks to me that never had a son.
K. Phi. You are as fond of grief as of your child.
Const. Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form”. (III.4.90-97)

Peter Ackroyd observes that, even though it is impossible to gauge the effect that
Hamnet s̓ death had upon the dramatist, in the period immediately following the loss of
his child Shakespeare rewrote King John, and Constance s̓ lament on the untimely death
of her young son was one of the additions to the play. In such cases, Ackroyd maintains,
“it may not be appropriate to draw strong lines between the art and the life, but […] it
defies common sense to pretend that Constance s̓ lament has nothing whatever to do
with Shakespeare s̓ loss of Hamnet” (2006: 271).

The idea that there is a connection between Shakespeare s̓ tragic hero, Hamlet, and
his dead child is also at the heart of a contemporary avant-garde play, Hamnet (2017), co-
written and co-directed by two Irish dramatists and directors, Bush Moukarzel and Ben



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Kidd, staged by the Irish theatre troupe Dead Centre, in Dublin, to rave reviews. In the
play, Hamnet actually hopes to meet his father and, in an effort to impress him and gain
his approval, he is “learning the most famous speech in the world” (Moukarzel & Kidd
2017: 12), the soliloquy from Hamlet. Then, when the dramatist finally shows up via a
video apparition, symbolically crossing the threshold separating life and death, he asks
his son to stop haunting him, a request to which Hamnet retorts: “But you’re haunting
me” (44) (emphasis in the original). The boy also reproaches his father for having
neglected him and never been with him, so actually being a ghost in his life.

OʼFarrell s̓ novel opens with the image of the adolescent Hamnet, who “is coming
down a flight of stairs” (3); he moves through his family s̓ empty apartment, then on to
the street and into his grandparentsʼ neighbouring house, puzzled by the unusual
silence and absence of life in all the rooms. At first, the reader is unaware of what the
boy is searching for; after a few pages, there are textual traces that gradually tilt the
apparent tranquility of the scene into an atmosphere of tension, hinting at something
that is amiss: “If this were a normal day” (10), the narrator remarks, implicitly suggest-
ing the opposite. Other dark forebodings of risk are sown in a short paragraph standing
by itself, where a third person external narrator observes events and comments on
them: “Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows, to
which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother s̓: the boy, the empty
house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry” (8). It is a cluster of words pointing to some
impending crisis. After a few pages the reader discovers that Hamnet is in a frantic
search for help because his beloved twin sister, Judith, is unwell, and he is utterly
confounded to be so alone in a house that is usually teeming with life and activity. He
keeps calling out the names of all the family members, especially his mother, but
nobody answers, so he runs back to his house, where Judith lies on the pallet, sick and
feverish, with a pair of buboes showing at the base of her neck and her shoulder.

The narrator s̓ eyes linger on the description of the girl, almost a copy of Hamnet:
“They are as alike as if they had been born in the same caul” (15). There is a constant
insistence on the similarity and deep affinity between the two, of oneness, so much so
that they like tricking people, “exchang[ing] places and clothes, leading people to
believe that each was the other” (200). This will reach a tragic climax when Hamnet
himself is seized with the plague, and the last membrane of separation between the two
seems to be lacerated to tragic effect.

Seeing his beloved sister s̓ swollen neck and shoulder, he decides to go and look for
the physician; he is somewhere else with another patient, and Hamnet walks back home
in very low spirits, hoping that, in the meantime, his mother has come back. “But there
is nothing: only silence” (27).

Hamnet s̓ thought of his mother shifts the narrative onto Agnes, who is, “in fact, more
than a mile away” (16), intent on her routine activities in the fields, tending to her bees.



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Yet, small, almost imperceptible, signals appear to intrude upon and disturb the peace-
ful atmosphere of the place: “There is a sensation of change, an agitation of air” (17).
The agitation turns into “an incoming storm” (18), and sends the reader s̓ attention back
to “the unheard cry” (8) that Agnes has not heeded and that will haunt her for the rest of
her life because of what would happen shortly thereafter.

Swapping places to trick death
When Agnes comes back home at last, she sees that Judith has a high fever. Hamnet,
shaking, his face stricken and wet, reproaches her angrily for her long absence, and
looks at her with an inquisitive expression to find confirmation of what he is dreading,
aware that his twin sister s̓ life is at risk. However, though Agnes can see into people s̓
mind and read their future, at this critical moment she fails to notice that Hamnet
himself is not well, so she sends him out to call his sister Susanna and his grandmother
Mary for help.

When Hamnet enters his grandmother s̓ cookhouse he is overwhelmed by the unbear-
able heat, which conjures up in his mind the “fumes from the gates of Hell”, and he has
a weird vision: “He sees, or seems to see, just for a moment, a thousand candles in the
dark, […] goblin candles” (126), though they soon disappear once he blinks his eyes.
Susanna, on seeing him, frowns as she vaguely senses that there is something wrong
with him; she is puzzled by his appearance, “white-faced, shocked, quite unlike himself ”
, so she tries to attract her grandmother s̓ attention. Mary herself is caught by surprise
and is frightened by the boy because he “look[s] like a ghost” to her (127).

While attending to her sick granddaughter, Mary remembers her own psychological
devastation at the loss of three of her children, other ghostly presences in the novel. The
view of Judith in bed, full of buboes, inevitably brings back to her mind her own dead
daughter, Anne, who also died of the pestilence when she was only eight, “covered with
swellings and hot with fever, her fingers black and odorous and rotting off her hands”
(128). She fears that Judith will be added to the other losses in the family, as she knows
all too well that “cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners”, and “the trick is
never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe” (195-96), because nothing is
given to us to possess forever. On seeing that Judith s̓ condition is very serious and
convinced that the girl will die, she decides to send a message to her son in London,
urging him to come back home before it is too late.

For her part, being acutely aware that the layer separating the world of the dead and
of the living is frail, almost “indistinct from each other, rubbing up against each other”
(129), Agnes seems to perceive the presence of the dead Anne in the room. She even
addresses the child in her mind and has a silent conversation with her, repeating to
herself that “she will not let Judith cross over” (129) into the other world, to convince
herself that things are not as bad as they appear to be.



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Ghosts have a central role in the text: they are powerful signifiers of the ever-present
risks in human life, metaphors of lost futures, as well as a way of representing the
turmoil of dramatic, psychological conflicts. Above all, their presence in the novel can
be decoded in light of Jacques Derrida s̓ notion of hauntology formulated in Spectres of
Marx (1994) which, interestingly, begins with a reference to Shakespeare s̓ Hamlet.
Derrida considers the ghost as a metaphor that pushes at the boundaries of thought,
flouts established certainties, and challenges basic binary oppositions. So it is a decon-
structive figure hovering between life and death, presence and absence, “always a
revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back”
(Derrida 1994: 11). The ghosts in the novel pervade and disrupt every aspect of the
protagonistsʼ life; they are a ʻpresenceʼ in their unconscious that cannot be silenced or
ignored, and that testifies to the weight of an unacceptable, unprocessed loss. Attending
to these ghosts becomes a sort of ethical injunction, an otherness that the protagonists
are responsible for preserving.

When the physician arrives at last, he refuses to enter and remains on the doorstep to
avoid contagion; to Hamnet, he is “a terrifying sight, a creature from a nightmare, from
Hell, from the devil” (146). Cloaked all in black, to protect himself against the risk of the
pestilence the physician wears on his face “a hideous, featureless mask, pointed like the
beak of a gigantic bird” (146), a sight that makes Hamnet scream. The mask is a precau-
tionary measure we have come to know all too well, used both by people at large and by
nurses and doctors in hospitals against risks of infections, and nowadays part of our
daily attire when going out.

None of the family members, concerned about, and focused on, Judith s̓ conditions,
observe Hamnet closely. At one point, unnoticed by the rest, the boy decides to lie
down; he is not well and his head is filled with a strange, confusing kind of pain that
makes his head “enormous, significant, bigger than him” (198). After some time, with a
tremendous effort, he crawls from his bed and makes his way down the stairs to be with
his mother and Judith, who has been moved close to the fire. Unable even to speak, he
crouches next to the little girl. Seeing that she is worse, he begins to cry because he feels
death s̓ presence in the room, ready to snatch his twin sister away and leave him frac-
tured by his unbearable loss. When Judith tries to comfort him, murmuring “You shall
be well”, he grips her fingers in anger: “I shall not. […] Iʼll come with you. Weʼll go
together” (199). It is at this point, in his feverish last hours, that “the idea strikes him”
(200) and the novel reaches the eerie climax of the first part.

Thinking of their playful ability to swap places, Hamnet imagines he can hoodwink
death into believing that he is Judith, and take her risk on himself to save her. He slides
into Judith s̓ place and pulls the sheet over their bodies, so that “it will be easy for Death
to make a mistake, to take him in her place” (201). He breathes his own life and strength
into Judith s̓ ear, whispering to her “you will stay, […] and I will go. […] I want you to take



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my life. It shall be yours. I give it to you” (201). And that is exactly what happens: by an
extraordinary, mysterious act of will, and an extreme gesture of love, he saves Judith s̓
life and he himself dies.

Hamnet s̓ is a form of love in which, as Kristeva observes, “the individual is no longer
indivisible and allows himself to become lost in the other, for the other” and, she adds,
in such psychological conditions, “a risk that might otherwise be tragic is accepted,
normalized” (Kristeva 1987: 4).

Facing the loss
The pages recounting the family s̓ gradual awareness of Hamnet s̓ true condition fore-
ground with great emotional impact one of the central themes of the novel: how, by
ignoring or failing to see an imminent risk at the edge of a person s̓ vision, devastation
and tragedy can unfold against the banal everyday routine, and lay bare the fragility and
precariousness of the edifice on which human life rests. The section is dominated by the
same hushed atmosphere that opened the book, a tone of “great soundlessness [that]
falls over the room” (251), to signify the silence of death into which Hamnet has fallen.

In this section, OʼFarrell s̓ narrative perspective resembles “the way a film might use a
camera, stealing up on scenes from unexpected angles” (Allfree 2020), shifting in and
out of the different charactersʼ minds, both to allow us to closely follow their thought
processes and give a direct insight into their fears, and to draw the reader into the
emotional and psychological turmoil provoked by the tragedy that befalls the family.
This is also rendered visually, adopting a perspective that resembles the technique of
some painters; Agnes wakes up abruptly, when “it is the deepest part of the night, the
most lethal hour” (244), a darkness which is the objective correlative of her state of
mind. She has dreamt of being whipped by the great, invisible force of the wind, a
symbol of her subconscious fear for Judith s̓ condition. She lights a candle and its flame
slowly pushes back the darkness in the room and illuminates the scene, an image that
has an almost Caravaggesque touch, and mirrors the process by which the truth gradu-
ally surfaces in the individual consciousness.

Agnes approaches Judith s̓ pallet and at first is befuddled by the image confronting
her: she sees a strange intertwining of feet and clasping of hands that she cannot under-
stand, “two Judiths, curled up together, in front of the dying fire” (245). Then she realizes
that it is Hamnet and his twin sister, fused into each other, their body parts switched and
mixed up. When she uncovers them, she understands that Judith has been spared but,
in exchange, Hamnet s̓ life is at risk and “a strange, dementing confusion starts up
inside her” (246). She reproaches herself for having been such “a fool, a blind idiot, the
worst kind of simpleton” (248), falling into the cruel trap that fate had set for her; she
feels irrationally responsible for her child s̓ present state, having failed as a mother to
protect him. None of the potions she keeps giving him seems to pull him back and



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restore him to life because, unbeknownst to her, her son has tricked death into taking
him in place of his twin. The image of the reversal of the twinsʼ conditions- the one
slowly returning back to life, the other slipping away into the clutches of eternal dark-
ness- poignantly renders how vital it is to be constantly aware that risk, devastation and
death are just one step away from safety and life, and closely interknit.

Holding Hamnet in her arms, Agnes s̓ mind reflects on how vicious the plague is and
how it manifests itself on the child s̓ body: “It has wreathed and tightened its tendrils
about her son, and is refusing to surrender him. It has a musky, dank, salty smell. […] it
feeds on pain and unhappiness and grief. It is insatiable, unstoppable, the worst, black-
est kind of evil” (249). It is another narrative segment that, at this historical moment, has
gained accidental pertinence and reverberates with great emotional impact on readers
who still have in their eyes the sight of the many lives that have been, and still are,
snatched away by Covid 19.

Agnes realizes that her son is actually beyond the precipice upon which human life
teeters: “Her son s̓ body is in a place of torture, of hell” (249), and there is nothing more
she can do for him, if not comfort him. Hamnet s̓ final moments see him struggle
between opposite pulls: on the one hand, his need “to lie, to surrender himself ”,
covered by the white blanket of the “snow […] falling, softly, irrevocably, on and on”
(250) and rest “in his place of snow and ice” (251). This section, with its cluster of images
and range of lexical choices, echoes the final paragraphs of James Joyce s̓ short story
“The Dead”, from Dubliners (1914). On the other hand, the pull of life is still strong: “He
is not going to sleep, he is not. He will carry on” (251); yet, he is too weak to struggle, “he
needs to rest, for a moment” (251), and at last “he takes his last breath” (252).

The first part of the novel ends with the moving image of Hamnet cradled in his
mother s̓ arms, as when he was a baby: “In the room in which he learnt to crawl, to eat, to
walk, to speak, Hamnet takes his last breath. […] Then there is silence, stillness. Nothing
more” (252), words that clearly echo the last words from Hamlet: “The rest is silence”.

A ‘new’ Hamnet
The second, shorter, part of the book is dominated by the central theme of grief, of how
different family members try to cope with the trauma of loss, its terrible costs, its endur-
ing emotional wounds and psychological damage. It opens with the scene of all the
family gathered to mourn Hamnet, the only exception being William who is still on his
way to Stratford. As disease and death haunt the country, Bartholomew urges the
motionless Agnes to wash and lay out the body of her dead son who must be buried
quickly, as decreed by the town authorities, for fear that the plague might spread with
enormous risks for the whole population of the village. It is a devastating scene that sees
Agnes losing touch with both herself and the people around her; actually, the narrator
introduces her as “a woman” curved over “the body of a child” (257-58) lying on a



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wooden surface, a condition of existential and psychological alienation that takes hold
of her and plunges her into utter anguish and grief.

Hamnet s̓ death opens a void that puts a serious strain on the bond between husband
and wife, because Agnes s̓ despair is mixed with anger at her husband for not being
there to support her. The whole family seems to fall apart, no longer held together by
the boy s̓ presence, all of them fragmented, shattered, each one trying to retrieve a
semblance of life.

Agnes, tormented by guilt, “is a woman broken into pieces, crumbled and scattered
around” (277). So, she falls prey to depression and melancholia, a psychological condi-
tion that lasts for years and that can be analyzed in light of what Kristeva writes in Black
Sun: “Those who are racked by melancholia, [try] to address an abyss of sorrow, a
noncommunicable grief that at times […] lays claim upon [them] to the extent of having
[them] lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself ” (1989: 3). The ʻblack sunʼ of
melancholia pins her down “to her bed, for the first time in her life” (345) and deprives
her of any will to live. In fact, Agnes s̓ is a “devitalized existence that […] is ready at any
moment for a plunge into death” (Kristeva 1989: 4); she faces the emptiness of psychic
space and the failure of language to voice, and compensate for, the loss. She searches for
her son for weeks and months, goes outside in the yard and calls his name aloud, but
her call is lost in silence.

Susanna, instead, finds it hard to be in a house that has become a living memorial to
Hamnet s̓ presence, and with her mother who is “adrift in her life, […] unmoored, at a
loss” (299), disconsolate and aphasic, who weeps even for the most irrelevant reason. So,
in order to save herself, Susanna spends her time helping her grandmother.

Judith, like her mother on the one hand, looks for and feels Hamnet s̓ ghostly presence
around her; on the other hand, she finds her own way of continuing to be together with
her twin by taking refuge in a “gap” (295) between two walls, a place that was always theirs
when they were children. Then, when the family moves to the new house that her father
has bought for them, the midwife tells her that at night, along Henley Street, she has seen
a figure “running like the wind” (337), between the old and the new house, hinting that it
was Hamnet. From that moment on, without telling anyone else in the family, at night
Judith slips out of the house and waits for him, all by herself, begging him to come and let
her see him “even if only for the last time”, because she is “only half a person without
[him]” (337). To all the family, Hamnet is a “non-present present, [a] being-there of an
absent or departed one” (Derrida 1994: 5); his absence is actually a presence at least as
powerful as when he was alive, and each one seems to be waiting for his materialization.
Each one, then, has her own strategy to survive and keep the self safe.

As for the father, he continues to feel his sons̓ presence everywhere he turns; every
object, gesture reminds him of his dead son. Feeling “caught in a web of absence” (281),
which he finds intolerable, shortly after Hamnet s̓ burial he decides to return to London,



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leaving his wife furious to wonder how he can even think of departing from his family at
such a moment, when they need him most. During the first year, in distant London, he
fears he may run mad, and keeps wondering where his child is, bent on looking for him
everywhere, “to find him, or a version of him” (315), and bring him back to life. And, four
years later, he does it in a way that shocks his wife at first. At home in Stratford, Agnes
sees the London playbill of a tragedy written by her husband that bears the name of her
dead son. She cannot understand how this is possible and is so upset that she takes to her
bed, refusing to get up and eat, or look after herself. She manifests the distinguishing
psychological features that Sigmund Freud discusses in ʻMourning and Melancholia,̓
where he argues that “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside
world, […] inhibition of all activity” (1917: 244) are the reactions to the loss of the loved
object, whose existence is psychically prolonged in memories. According to Freud, in
normal mourning one introjects the dead, that is, one s̓ mind takes the dead into itself and
assimilates them, a process that involves the idealization of the deceased person.

What Judith Butler observes on mourning sheds further light on Agnes s̓ long-pro-
longed psychological dejection and vulnerability after Hamnet s̓ death. Butler maintains
that when we lose “some of the ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we
are or what to do” (2004: 22) because these ties compose us and we are transformed
forever by such severances. So, she adds, we do not simply lose someone, but we go
missing as well. In fact, this is what happens to Agnes, who is so splintered and even
diminished by her loss as to be other both to herself and to the rest of the family. At last,
she decides to leave for London, to see the tragedy for herself and confront her husband
who, to her, is proving to be callous in his exploitation of their intimate family tragedy
for mass entertainment.

Once in London, she goes to the playhouse, where OʼFarrell sets the climactic and
cathartic scene of the second part of the novel. During the performance, Agnes only
begins to concentrate when a ghost appears on the stage, actually her husband in
disguise, and an actor calls the dead man “Hamlet” (362). Disgusted, she decides to leave
the theatre but is transfixed when a boy, actually a young man, arrives on stage, and “the
King addresses him as ʻHamlet, my sonʼ” (364). To her great shock, she realizes that,
though her own son is dead, “yet this is him, grown into a near-man, as he would be
now, had he lived, […] talking in her son s̓ voice, speaking words written for him by her
son s̓ father” (364-65), a revenant that has taken on human form in her son s̓ body. Her
husband has ʻresurrectedʼ their child in Hamlet, even schooling the boy actor to move
like him and speak in his voice. The Hamlet she sees on the stage “is two people, the
young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead” (366).

As she watches, Agnes realizes that her husband “has changed places with his son. He
has taken his son s̓ death and made it his own; he has put himself in death s̓ clutches,
resurrecting the boy in his place” (366). It is, she thinks, “what any father would wish to



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do, to exchange his child s̓ suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in
his child s̓ stead so that the boy might live” (366).

So, at last Agnes realizes the emotional toll their child s̓ death has taken on her
husband, and that the boy may be gone, but he is not forgotten. By writing the play,
using the miraculous power of his art, her husband has pulled off the very feat that is
impossible in ordinary life and redeemed himself; he has brought back the dead child in
the only possible way he could, offering both of them a safe outlet for psychic survival,
and also saving their marriage. Hamnet s̓ memory lives on in the play and, through the
ghost, speaks his final words in the novel, looking straight at Agnes and meeting her
gaze: “Remember me” (367). At this point, the family can gradually leave behind a
season of grief and mourning, and move forward to a safer season of change.

Conclusion

“He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone;

At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone”.
Hamlet, Act IV, sc. v

The article has offered an in-depth analysis of OʼFarrell s̓ novel and identified various
forms of physical, psychological and emotional risks. All of them, it has been argued,
are connected to a loss that traumatizes the protagonists, takes time to be healed, and
confronts them with a double terrible existential truth: the rapidity with which life can
be extinguished when least expected, and the awareness that the selfsame act of loving
another also demands an inevitable confrontation with death. At the same time, the
discussion has also identified the various forms that resilience can take, and has exam-
ined the individual strategies that different characters activate to face and overcome the
ensuing trauma in order to resume their life and re-emerge on relatively safe existential
ground. The most notable, and enduring, form of working-through mourning in the
novel is the artistic process that in the end leads Shakespeare to the composition of
Hamlet, a terrifying psychic and creative journey that enables the dramatist “to rein-
force his inner representation of the deceased son and to nourish their ongoing rela-
tionship” (Bray 2008: 107). It is a cathartic act of creation through which he delves deep
into his psychological and existential crisis and emerges from it. This critical hypothesis
is corroborated by what Freud writes about Hamlet in his The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900), where he observes: “It can, of course, be the poet s̓ own psychology with which
we are confronted in Hamlet”, remarking that he is trying “to interpret only the deepest
stratum of impulses in the mind of the creative poet” (51). Freud also infers a



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connection between Hamlet and Hamnet as, he adds, “it is known, too, that Shake-
speare s̓ son, who died in childhood, bore the name of Hamnet (identical with Hamlet)”
(160), and suggests that the creation of the play was a therapeutic process for the
dramatist.

Kristeva s̓ observations on the process of creation will help draw the conclusion of the
article: in Black Sun, talking about the mood of sadness connected to separation, she
observes: “Literary creation is that adventure of the body and signs that bears witness to
the affect”, in the case of “sadness as imprint of separation and beginning of the
symbol s̓ sway”. She goes on to add: “But that testimony is produced by literary creation
in a material that is totally different from what constitutes mood. It transposes affect
into rhythms, signs, forms” (1989: 22), imprints of an affective reality.

In OʼFarrell s̓ Hamnet, that is what Shakespeare does when composing Hamlet,
succeeding in transmuting grief into richly evocative rhythms and signs, and transform-
ing loss into artistic creation of the highest form. And that is what OʼFarrell s̓ text also
does, the paper maintains, by using the power of language and imagination to extol the
salvific power of love even while speaking of risk, loss and grief.

References
Ackroyd, P. 2006. Shakespeare: The Biography. London: Vintage Books.
Allardice, L. 2021. Maggie OʼFarrell: ʻSevere illness refigures you – it s̓ like passing

through a fire. The Guardian, 27 March. https://www.theguardian.com/books/
2021/mar/27/maggie-ofarrell-severe-illness-refigures-you-its-like-
passing-through-a-fire. Accessed 10 October, 2021.

Allfree, C. 2020. Book review: Hamnet by Maggie OʼFarrell. Evening Standard. 19 March.
https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/books/hamnet-by-maggie-ofarrell-
review-a4392241.html. Accessed 26 September, 2022.

Bray, P. 2008. Men, loss and spiritual emergency: Shakespeare, the death of Hamnet and
the making of Hamlet. Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality. Vol. 2, no. 2, June:
95-115.

Butler, J. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.
Cowen Orlin, L. 2021. The Private Life of William Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.
Derrida, J. 1994. Specters of Marx, transl. P. Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge.
Freud, S. 1917 [1945]. Mourning and Melancholia. Transl. J. Strachey. In: The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XIV. London:
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Freud, S. 1900. The Interpretation of Dreams. https://psychclassics.yorku.ca.
Accessed 28 June, 2022.



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Greenblatt, S. 2004. The death of Hamnet and the making of Hamlet. The New York Review
21 October. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/10/21/the-death-of-
hamnet-and-the-making-of-hamlet/. Retrieved 26 September, 2022.

Greenblatt, S. 2021. A wisewoman in Stratford. The New York Review 14 January.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/01/14/hamnet-shakespeare-wise-
woman-stratford/. Retrieved 27 January, 2021.

Greer, G. 2008. Shakespeare’s Wife. London: Bloomsbury.
Hughes, S. 2020. Maggie OʼFarrell: ʻMy children s̓ feedback could be pretty brutal .̓ The
Guardian, 12 December. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/12/
maggie-ofarrell-my-childrens-feedback-could-be-pretty-brutal. Retrieved
28 December, 2020.

Joyce, J. 2011. Ulysses. London: Penguin Classics.
Kristeva, J. 1987. Tales of Love. Transl. L. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Moukarzel, B. & B. Kidd. 2017. Hamnet. London: Oberon Books.
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***

Maria Antonietta Struzziero is an independent scholar. She completed a PhD in
Linguistic and Literary Studies at the University of Salerno with a doctoral dissertation
on Jeanette Winterson and the love discourses in some of her novels. She has published
several articles and book chapters on different topics and authors, and given papers at
Italian and international conferences. Her main fields of study include: modernism;
post-modernism; gender studies; auto/biographical writing; feminist theories; trauma
studies. Her current research interests focus on experimental life-writing in two
contemporary memoirs by Hilary Mantel and Maggie OʼFarrell, as well as on the re-
reading of mythology in some recent novels by Pat Barker and Madeline Miller. She has
co-edited “Voci ed echi: Quaderni di letteratura comparata” and translated two novels.


	MARIA ANTONIETTA STRUZZIERO1 DOI: 10.15290/CR.2022.37.2.01
	“Caught in a web of absence”: Risk, death and survival in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet