Portrait of a Marriage

Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O’Farrell.  Vintage.  305 pp.  $16.95 *****

I was absolutely stunned by this novel.  I’d read that it was about Shakespeare’s son Hamnet dying of the black plague (though no one knows how he died, and Shakespeare never mentioned the plague in all his writing), then a few years later his father composed his greatest play, entitled Hamlet (an epigraph to the novel states: “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries”).  It was pure coincidence that the novel came out just before the world experienced yet another vast pandemic.  The timing seemed fortuitous, a plague novel just as our plague was beginning.

Yet it is much more than a plague novel; the plague actually seems incidental to the story.  It is a story about a marriage between two unlikely people, a young man who is the son of an abusive father and who, at the age of eighteen, had not even begun to find his way in the world, and a woman who, five years his senior, was illiterate (as many people were in those days) but who had already found her way, as an intuitive healer who not only knew the various healing herbs and the way they worked, but also could read personality just by touching someone, specifically by touching that part of the hand between the thumb and forefinger.  She touched that place and saw into their soul.

It’s startling to say, about a book that concerns the greatest writer in the English language, but his wife is the more interesting character in this book, and one of the most fascinating characters I’ve come across in any novel.  (That seems like a strategic move on Maggie O’Farrell’s part.  There’s no accounting for as great a talent as Shakespeares’s.  But it’s safe to say that, at least in this novel, his wife saw it before he did—though she wasn’t sure in what way it would flower—and pushed him into his career, into leaving his poisonous birth family and getting himself to London, where he could discover what he needed to do.)

O’Farrell is a brilliant writer herself; her prose would be an enormous pleasure even if she hadn’t created this fascinating narrative.  I have no idea if it’s in any way accurate to the real lives of Shakespeare and his wife (though O’Farrell has done her homework, and read various biographical accounts, including a biography of Shakespeare’s wife by Germaine Greer).  But it is an enthralling story, beautifully told.

For much of the story, the book is told in alternating narratives.  One concerns the twelve-year-old Hamnet, who has discovered that his twin sister Judith has come down with a severe and mysterious illness (he also has an older sister, Susanna), and the other relates the early relationship of Shakespeare and his wife, when he was a tutoring the sons of a local family to pay off a family debt, and she was the older stepsister of the boys being tutored, widely regarded as weird because she spent a lot of time in the wild, communing with nature and collecting herbs.

They both came from difficult families; Will’s father was a glover whom nobody liked and who was physically abusive, even to his grown son, and Agnes (we think of her as Anne Hathaway, but the two names were virtually the same in those days of variable spelling, just like Hamnet and Hamlet) had a domineering stepmother who didn’t understand or appreciate her.  Will is attracted to the older woman, and she seems to see—after taking a quick reading of him—that their fates are intertwined.  We slowly see their relationship proceed, until she is pregnant with Susanna but they still haven’t announced the relationship to either family.

In the meantime, in the chronologically later narrative, Hamnet has no luck; his abusive grandfather is no help, his mother is out collecting herbs, and when he finally finds a doctor the man’s wife is immediately suspicious that the girl might have the plague.  Doctors were not anxious to get near such people, or to treat them.  If anyone could save the girl, we imagine, it’s her mother, but she takes her time getting back, unaware that anything is wrong.  The suspense of that plot—which keeps getting interrupted by the earlier story, which of course interests us equally—is agonizing.

Eventually it is Hamnet who dies; he had always intervened for his twin sister (whose face looked like his, but who was much smaller at birth), and got in bed with her to try to protect her; by that time their exhausted mother had done everything to save Judith, but didn’t even know Hamnet was ill.  Her grief when her son eventually dies—and that of the whole family—is horrible to behold.  As beautifully as that part of the story was told, I found it difficult to read.  I’ve never read such a visceral description of sheer grief.  Shakespeare—who by that time was a successful playwright in London—didn’t get back until his son was dead.  His grief too was monumental, and difficult to absorb.

Agnes wants her husband to stay in Stratford after their son’s death, wants him to stay there forever, but he insists he must go back to London, that the acting company can’t survive without him.  She believes it isn’t the acting company that pulls him back.

“‘You are caught by that place, like a hooked fish.’

“‘What place?  You mean London?’

“‘No, the place in your head.  I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape.  You have gone to that place and it is now more real to you than anywhere else.  Nothing can keep you from it.  Not even the death of your own child.  I see this.’”

She sees it, but she doesn’t like it.

I don’t know that I’ve ever read a better description of the thing that drives a writer to write.  O’Farrell obviously knows by her own experience.

Later in the book—and a year later in the relationship—Shakespeare lets us know what things are like from the other side.

“‘You know,’ he says . . . ‘it is always a pleasure for me to be able to surprise you.  An unaccustomed, rare pleasure.’

“‘What do you mean?’

“‘I mean,’ he says, ‘that I don’t think you have any idea what it is like to be married to someone like you.’

“‘Like me?’

“‘Someone who knows everything about you, before you even know it yourself.  Someone who can just look at you and divine your deepest secrets, just with a glance.  Someone who can tell what you are about to say—and what you might not—before you say it.  It is,’ he says, ‘both a joy and a curse.’”

This is one of the most fascinating portraits of a marriage I’ve ever read, not one, but two brilliant people, somehow married to one another.  Maggie O’Farrell has created a magnificent novel.  It’s a book that is worthy of its subject.