Letting Hamnet Net Hamlet

Awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, a finalist for the Irish Novel of the Year, and included among numerous “best of 2020” lists by the likes of the BBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet was “the critics’ pick of 2020.” No wonder its publicist was crowned the Lockdown Campaign of the Year.

This tale of overcoming grief moved many readers to tears, but what’s Hamnet to them? (Spoiler alert, made by the author herself: Hamnet Shakespeare dies at the age of 11; his parents eventually reconcile through the play Hamlet.)

While we don’t know what Shakespeare thought about Hamnet, we do know that he never wrote an elegy for his child, as many of his grieving peers did for their deceased children. Instead, he seemed to have “that within which passeth show” — that is, a reluctance to translate a period of personal crisis into immediate literary form. This makes it all the more curious that a writer would attempt to fill in that dark “gap of time” left blank by the poet.

The publication’s timing didn’t hurt: a plague novel, appearing just as pandemic lockdowns were implemented across the globe, when “What Shakespeare did during the plague” became its own comic meme. Reviewers said Hamnet felt “timely,” “ever-relevant,” even “eerily prescient.” They commended its vignettes: flying a kestrel, preparing herbal remedies, apple-shed-rocking sex.

Hamnet feeds an apparently insatiable readership…