4. Hamnet: Love, Grief, and Motherhood

How does Maggie O'Farrell create the historical figures of William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes Hathaway, in her novel Hamnet? What does the film adaptation starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley do differently to the book? How do the themes of fate and loss affect the characters and the reader? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of Hamnet, the world it was born of, and the novel itself. You can order Hamnet and explore our favourite Folio books at https://foliosociety.com/thebookclub Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Lorcan Moullier Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Now, Tabby, as you know, there are some books that you read once, but there are others, you especially, you return to again and again. And those second kind of books, the ones you go back to, they really deserve to last, don't they?

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• 3:19Speaker 00

  "Hamlet," one of the actors said. She heard it again, as clear and resonant as the strike of a distant bell. There it is again, "Hamlet." Anyas bites her lip until she tastes the tang of her own blood. She grips her hands together. They are saying it, these men up there on the stage, passing it between them like a counter in a game. "Hamlet, Hamlet, Hamlet." Anyas cannot understand this. Why would her husband have done it? Why pretend that it means nothing to him? Just a collection of letters? How could he thief this name, then strip and flense it of all it embodies, discarding the very life it once contained?

• 4:01Speaker 00

  How could he take up his pen and write it on a page, breaking its connection with their son? So that was from Maggie O'Farrell's historical novel Hamnet, which is obviously now a major movie starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, and we will touch on that later. But it was published in 2020 and it won the Women's Prize for Fiction that year. It's set in Elizabethan England and tells the tragic story of the death of William Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, at the age of 11 in 1596, with the inference that this was the inspiration for his writing of probably one of his most celebrated plays, Hamlet, which was written

• 4:44Speaker 00

  about three to five years later and named after his son, because the two names, Hamlet and Hamnet, are used interchangeably in the book. It wonderfully embroiders another side of Shakespeare, who crucially is never named in the book, and that is him as kind of the family man. And most significantly of all, she rewrites his marriage, Anne Hathaway, here called Agnes, who's really the main character of the book. And it gives her life and voice and agency and it's kind of her defence, because Anne Hathaway historically has always been quite condemned. And it paints their marriage in a far warmer light.

• 5:22Speaker 00

  But above all, it's kind of a study in grief about a family torn apart by death and about two people torn apart by the unimaginable loss of a child. And Dominic, I know that you read this quite recently because I would catch sight of you sobbing into your lap on our flights in Australia while we were on tour. And you, you thought well of it, didn't you?

• 5:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  I did, actually. I can actually remember coming down when we were on tour in Australia and saying to you at breakfast, oh, I just finished Hamnet, so moving, what a brilliant book.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, you were all puffy and red faced.

• 5:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Red faced. I'm often puffy and red faced, to be fair, so I had nothing to do with the book.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  True, true.

• 6:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's one of the great things about doing this show is I get to read books that I wouldn't naturally read. I obviously knew of the books, I knew it had won the prize, I knew the film was coming out, but I wasn't immediately drawn to it and I really, really enjoyed it. I think, as you say, It's very clever in the way it uses Shakespeare and we'll be digging into that in today's show to look at the history behind it, Shakespeare's life and Hathaway's life, the story behind Hamnet and Hamlet. But actually, you can not be interested in Shakespeare at all and still find it a very moving study of a marriage and of grief in particular and the effect that grief has on a family. And it's a brilliant book if you like stories with kind of interiority. So you're getting so much of this world through Agnes's sensibility

• 6:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  and Maggie O'Farrell, I think, does that so subtly and deftly. Whether the film is quite as subtle, I think, is something we'll go on to talk about because we'll talk about the film in the second half. But you, you love this book, don't you, Tabby?

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Oh, I totally do. I knew from the very start that there was something very special about it. I read it during lockdown and I was drawn to it because I love historical novels and it turned out to be sort of so much deeper and richer than that. As you say, it's, it's kind of a study in people and how terrible, terrible things can transform very ordinary people. But also, it's one of the few times that I've stayed up all night to finish a book. And that's a remarkable thing, given that it is not a dramatic story whatsoever. I just thought as well that Maggie O'Farrell's writing was something quite extraordinary, actually. She never ever patronizes the reader. She leaves so much unsaid and unexplained and yet you always understand what she's saying. And she does this thing where she

• 7:39Speaker 00

  plunges you straight into the middle of a scene, like we'll see that at the very opening of the book. And yet you keep pace with her the whole time. You know exactly what her characters are feeling and it's amazing the depths of emotion that she conjures in words. It's, yeah, I absolutely love it. I think it's superb.

• 7:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you know what? You've absolutely put your finger on something that I was also thinking, that she's brilliant in what is unsaid and what is left out.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  And just a quick word before we get to the plot about the structure of the book. So for the first half, the narrative moves forward and backwards in time and it often gives you different characters' perspectives, their inner minds, their inner thoughts, but mainly Agnes's. And at the start, we have three plots to follow. So we have the past unraveling Agnes's history, her family life, that of William Shakespeare as well. Then we have the present and then we have a parallel plot which traces the Progress of the plague, from a flea in Alexandria to a glass workshop in Venice, to Elizabethan England, which is very, very effective. And the writing is unusually kind of physical. It's all about sensation and sound. And I think that comes across really well in the movie, actually. And it's kind of almost cinematic. For instance,

• 8:42Speaker 00

  she says in one moment when Agnes is getting married, she says, "The ring encircles her third finger, where the groom told her the other day, as they were hiding in the orchard, runs a vein that travels straight to her heart. It feels cold for a moment against her skin and damp with holy water. But then the blood flowing straight from her heart warms it, brings it up to the temperature of her body." So it's very physical.

• 9:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's very detail-rich, loads of details about the natural world, lots of stuff about gloves and bees, domesticity. I think she's brilliant at the sort of physical texture of things. But let's talk about the structure of the book and the plot. So to give you a sense, the book, and indeed the film, tell you what to expect right from the beginning. There's an opening kind of caption in both. "The boy Hamlet died in 1596, aged 11. Four years or so later, the father wrote a play called Hamlet." So you've basically got the juxtaposition of those two things, the grief and the loss on the one hand, and the artistic creation on the other. And interestingly, in the book, though not the film, we open with the titular character with Hamlet. So we open with this little boy. He's our window into Elizabethan England and the story of this family. He's looking for his

• 9:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  parents because his sister Judith, his twin, is really ill, and she's got the plague, as it turns out. There's the first of many clever little tricks. So he thinks about calling out his father's name, but he doesn't. And actually, his father is never named in the whole book, though we know his father is William Shakespeare. We get a real sense of the fear and the uncertainty of the boy, looking for his parents. Something is wrong. He doesn't know where they are. That sort of sense of terror, almost, because suddenly the world has turned upside down with his sister's illness. Of course, we know, you know, great irony, because we've been told a page earlier that he's the one who's going to die. So there's that sort of sense of irony that pervades the whole thing. And

• 10:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  meanwhile, his mother is off looking after her beehives. So then the narrative switches to his mother, Agnes, and she suddenly senses, she has this sort of sixth sense, which comes up again and again. She senses that something is wrong, doesn't she? And there's this lovely passage. Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother's. The boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you have this moment that's foreshadowing a lot of what she's going to think, this sort of the grief. It's as though she's picturing him standing there in the house on his own, calling for the people who'd fed him, swaddled him, rocked him to sleep, held his hand as he took his first steps, taught him to use a spoon, to blow on broth, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 11:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  And all of that sort of stuff, I thought, I mean, maybe this is me being very simplistic. But I thought, that's a parent, that's somebody who's a mother themselves, writing that.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 11:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because that is how you think about your children. This is where they took their first steps. This is where we, you know, they took their first mouthful or whatever. All of those kinds of things that a parent carries with them all the time.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. The small but significant moments in the development of a life.

• 11:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Absolutely. But then we have this thing with the timeline, because we move back in time, like, and that really builds the tension as well, because you want to know what's happening with Hamlet, but then you go back and we pick up with a young William Shakespeare tutoring the sons of this farming family outside of the town that he lives in. And while there, he sees this girl walking out the forest and becomes infatuated with her. And this is a young Agnes, and she is otherworldly and ethereal. She's known to be a witch in the town. And then we move even further back to her girlhood and her beloved mother, who's also very witchy. And this is kind of mythologised. Her mother dies horribly in childbirth, and we learn about how she grows up with a stepmother that she despises.

• 12:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's like a fairy tale, this, isn't it? Maybe we'll touch on this later on.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, it really, really is. Exactly. The style of the writing almost subtly shifts as well. So then she and the young tutor, at this point, William Shakespeare, meet. They fall in love. She falls pregnant and they get married, and they move into his family home. And they are happily married. And then she gives birth to their first daughter.

• 12:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  Susanna, born six months later, because she's pregnant, obviously, at the time that they get married. But the husband, at this point, Shakespeare, is unhappy. He feels oppressed in the house that he grows up in. His father... Is abusive towards him and he just doesn't know what to do. He's stuck, he's trapped. So Anyaz engineers his move to London ostensibly to extend his father's glove business. His father is a glove maker, but while there he moves into theatre and becomes an actor and starts writing plays. She then gives birth again, this time to twins, following a really terrible labour in which she thinks she will die. And these twins are a robust baby boy called Hamnet.

• 13:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, the irony.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  And a sickly girl called Judith, the terrible irony of that. And they look uncannily alike. And the family's very happy. The father returns, William Shakespeare returns as often as he can to visit them. And all seems well. And then we move back to the present, don't we?

• 13:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so we get back to the present and Hamnet has been looking for his mother to help Judith, who is ill. Anyaz comes back to the house from her beehives. She's horrified to find Judith on the brink of death.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, she's even got the kind of buboes on her neck and stuff.

• 13:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, yeah, which you see in the film as well, but they're described in the book. And then, you know, because Anyaz is a kind of witchy kind of person who does a lot of faffing around with herbs.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  Faffing around with herbs?

• 14:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, she's always grinding herbs.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  She grinds up some herbs with no success and everybody thinks, gosh, Judith is going to die. And that night, Hamnet, I mean, it's a very, I mean, such a boring thing to say, but I'm going to say it anyway, just because that's the kind of person I am. In a very Shakespearean way, he decides he will change identities with his sister. Because he basically climbs into bed with her. They're twins, they're often mistaken for each other. He's going to pretend to be his sister so that if necessary, death will make a mistake and will take him instead. And the next day, when his mother comes up to the bed, she finds that Judith has got better and Hamnet has now got the plague.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  The shock of that moment, she's confused. For someone that has a kind of a sense of things before they happen, she can't understand why this has happened.

• 14:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because this is the one thing that's happened that's unexpected, that has defied her kind of sixth sense. And then, you know, big spoiler alert, but obviously it's given away in the very first page of the book, and indeed lots of people will know it. Hamnet does die of the plague and the rest of the book. Is exploring the impact that the loss of that boy has on their family, on Agnes and her husband in particular. In the final pages of the book, we discover the effect that this has had on Shakespeare's play Hamlet and the relationship, as Maggie O'Farrell sees it, of these two things.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  And now, speaking of Maggie O'Farrell, we should explain her background a bit and talk about her because didn't you meet her, Dominic?

• 15:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  I did. A brush with fame. Yeah, so this tells you how some people go on to stratospheric things and other people end up presenting podcasts. In 2007, we were both named as part of an event that Waterstones, the bookshop, did about... I can't believe you don't have to...

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, actually, do you know what?

• 15:57Speaker 00

  You can believe it because you wrote this in your notes.

• 15:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm giving it away.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think because you were keen to be recognised as an author of the future.

• 16:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, that's right. So in 2007, Waterstones named their authors of the future. And I was one of them and Maggie O'Farrell was one of them. And generally, Tabby, authors are terrible people. So there was a sort of drinks party type thing and I went to this, obviously didn't really talk to anybody, as is my wont. And Maggie O'Farrell was there and she was actually really nice. And so she stuck in my mind because I thought, she was a nice person, that lady, I wonder what will happen to her. And she went on and wrote loads of very successful books and I ended up doing this with you.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that's the, you know...

• 16:36Speaker 00

  I don't know who's the bigger loser here, me or you. Anyway, I'm glad that you say that, Maggie O'Farrell, because I found her a very interesting person when I was reading about her. So she was born in Northern Ireland in 1972, but spent part of her childhood in Wales and Scotland, and she now lives in Edinburgh. And her household was very bookish. Her parents were both teachers at various points. And one thing that I thought was really interesting is she described how she had a terrible stammer as a child and that this had a massive impact on her writing. She said that she probably wouldn't have become a writer without it because there are certain words or sounds that you have to avoid because you know that you can't say them, which means that you have to become very agile with language because constantly in your mind...

• 17:19Speaker 00

  You're having to think of alternatives or think of synonyms or think of different ways of rephrasing things. It allowed her to kind of develop a much looser, freer use of language. I thought it was really, really interesting.

• 17:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  But then she actually studied Hamlet, the play, when she was 16. And she said it really got under her skin. And there's actually a photo of her, which I think is excellent, as a teenager, dressed as the Prince of Denmark for a party, holding a skull which she borrowed from the school lab. So there you go.

• 17:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  It was at school, wasn't it? That one of her teachers said to her, her English teacher or whatever, said, oh, by the way, Shakespeare had a son called Hamlet, who died before he wrote Hamlet. And it sort of stuck, she said, like a splinter in her brain. And, you know, she sort of nursed this splinter for years and years. She did English at Cambridge. She wrote loads of books. She actually had the idea for writing this as a novel, but then didn't think the time was right to do it. So she wrote other novels instead. And she would always, I mean, I've read interviews with her where she says, you know, I would read up on Shakespeare. And people would mention in passing, oh, he had this son that died when he was 11. And who knows whether it really upset him and whether he grieved and all that. It's a classic thing, actually, that people say about people in the past. Do they take child mortality as seriously as we do?

• 18:30Speaker 00

  They sap them of kind of modern emotion, don't they?

• 18:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, because there's an assumption that because, you know, a third of all children or something died by the time they entered their teens, that maybe their parents didn't care that much when they died. But actually, all the evidence is that parents did care, you know, poetry, what accounts we have of grief and so on. So she became really interested in this story. It kind of nagged away at her. But there's also a sort of personal dimension. So she was very ill herself as a child, wasn't she? She had viral encephalitis. And she's described how she heard a nurse say, talking about her and saying, that poor girl in there is going to die. And that kind of, the omnipresence of death is a really, really important theme in this book. The death's always lurking around the corner.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  But also the confusion, children don't know, like, they don't understand, they're confused, they don't know what's wrong with them, they don't have the answers. And you get that in Hamnet when he's looking for an adult to kind of save the situation.

• 19:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  And also, there's an issue with her daughter. Agia Farrell's talked quite movingly about her daughter, who has an immunological disorder. So she suffers like tremendous allergic reactions and things. And she wrote a memoir and she said, you know, I have to live with this thing that you love somebody, but you know that at any moment they could be snatched from you. I mean, to some extent, of course, that is the human condition, but in this case, it's obviously in an entirely different league.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  And actually, when Agnes is with her son in the book, there are lines that reflect on this. What's given may be taken away at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners. Never for a moment forget that they, meaning your children or whatever, may be gone, snatched from you in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistle down.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  And also, Hamnet's death in the book, it feels so personal. It feels like death has come and done this to Agnes, you know, specifically, which is agonizing. And so understandably, she put off writing the book for ages. And she said in part, in an interview in 2005, she said, one of the reasons she kept putting off writing it was because she had this weird superstition about writing it. She wanted to wait until her son was past the age of 11. And she also, for instance, she wouldn't write the death scene and Hamnet's burial scene in the house in which her children lived. She had to go into the garden shed, again, this strange superstition. And she also said that there was a strange vertigo about writing a book about Shakespeare. She was kind of like, can I, can I really do that?

• 20:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, of course, because I mean, the most famous writer in, in, in history, right?

• 20:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, the pressure of that.

• 20:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  But then eventually, she, she did start to write it in 2017 and did extensive research. I mean, if I was ever to write a historical novel, I would do the same. I love this.

• 21:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  She learnt falconry, she cultivated her own Elizabethan herb garden.

• 21:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  So she was faffing around with herbs herself.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, she was faffing around. And also, she actually looks wonderfully witchy, my dear Farrell. So of all of this, I thoroughly approve.

• 21:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  If she's listening, Tabby means that as a compliment, just to be clear.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  Also, I'm looking for a new co-host, so.

• 21:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  And she'd make tinctures and poultices. Brilliant. So you can see from her own experiences there how she climbed into the mind of this wild healer so successfully.

• 21:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  So talking about the research, let's talk a bit about the history behind it because that's what fascinates a lot of people. So the real Agnes, or Anne Hathaway, as she's better known, was born in Warwickshire in 1556. We know so little about her and that's why Maggia Farah is able to, as you say, Tabby, to embroider, to let her imagination kind of run riot. So she's born west of Stratford-upon-Avon. She grew up in Hughland's farm, which is now called Anne Hathaway's Cottage, although it's not a cottage, it's a farmhouse.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  It's quite fine, actually. I mean, they're definitely quite well off.

• 22:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, her father was a yeoman, a yeoman farmer, so relatively affluent. She was unmarried until she was 26, which was not unusual in Elizabethan England, because often the older daughter would care for her siblings. So there's nothing sinister there. And then in 1582, so when she's 26 years old, she appears in a historical record because she marries a glove maker's son from Stratford. And he's only 18 years old, he's the oldest surviving son of his family. He has been educated at the local grammar school where he would have studied Latin, hence the Latin tutor. And his name, of course, is William Shakespeare, then completely obscure, you know, no reason to believe anyone would ever think of him again. And as we've already described, she was pregnant when they were married because

• 22:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  their first daughter was born six months afterwards. So biographers have speculated, oh, maybe it was a shotgun marriage and he didn't really want to marry her. Maybe there was some, you know, who knows. Actually, there is no reason to believe that whatsoever. And she would have been quite a big catch for Shakespeare, wouldn't she? Because she's from a well-off family. And actually, his family are struggling at this point. You know, his father, the glove maker, had been an alderman, there's no longer an alderman, I think. Their first daughter, Susanna, is born six months later. And then they have two more children, twins, Hamnet and Judith, in 1585, who are probably named after family friends. They had friends called Hamnet Sadler and his wife Judith. And the name Hamnet, in case people are wondering, there are different origins of it. So there's an old

• 23:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Germanic name that it comes from, but there's also a place named Hamnet. There's a few Hampnets across England. It means a kind of high farmstead. So there they are, they're in Stratford, they've got Susanna, and they've got these two twins. And we know nothing else at all about their inner lives, although. At this point, or at some point when the twins are pretty small, their father moves to London, and that's the moment that's obviously the making of him.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, and we also know just from the facts of it that by the time the twins were seven, their father, William Shakespeare, his plays were being performed on the London stage. But again, as you say, we know next to nothing about them, except then that on the 11th of August, 1596, Hamnet, then aged 11, was buried at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. But we don't actually know how he died. The idea that he was born of the bubonic plague is just a hypothesis because it was very common of children to die of that in the English countryside, and 1596 was England's most deadly plague year. And it's important to point out here, this is not unusual, about a third of all children died before their teens at this time.

• 24:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  Anne's daughter Susanna ended up marrying a local doctor. Shakespeare's other daughter, Judith, married a tavern owner. Interestingly, they were later excommunicated, but that's a whole other story. Anne Hathaway's and Shakespeare's marriage were spent very much apart. He lived in London and she lived in Stratford. We think returning for a time each year, but we don't know for certain. And this also has fueled speculation that he loathed his wife and lived in London in order to get away from her. But again, this was not uncommon.

• 25:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, no, no.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  Travel at this time was extremely difficult. It was normal for people to stay away for months at a time, and then you generally travel kind of seasonally, I guess, when the roads were better.

• 25:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. And this is a classic example, I think, Tabby, of historians and biographers just desperately piling implications and significance on what very few facts we have. So basically, they say, well, Shakespeare didn't go to Stratford that often, or we don't think he did. Therefore, he must have hated his wife, who was a terrible woman. But there's no reason to think that whatsoever. I mean, his job is in London, and this was not uncommon for people to be apart for long periods.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  But also, in defence of their marriage, we do know that when Shakespeare retired from the London stage in 1613, he came back to live with her in Stratford. And so surely that's symptomatic of quite a sort of genial marriage, at the very least.

• 26:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, of course. To tie up the story, what are the rest of the facts that we know about these two characters? We know that Shakespeare died in 1616, so he's come back to Stratford. He died at about 51. We don't know why he died. A vicar of Stratford was later quoted about 50 years later, saying, "It is said that he died of a fever after he'd been out drinking with some mates." He leaves his will. He leaves most of his estate to Susanna, his daughter. He barely mentions Anne in his will, which is again a great spur to biographers. But most people think, they argue about it, that she probably got a third of his estate, which would have been the norm. But the famous thing is, he left her his second best bed.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  Ah, yes, the mystery of the second best bed.

• 26:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  The one fact that people kind of know about Anne Hathaway. And Tabby, second best bed, do you think this means that he hates his wife or that he thinks she's brilliant?

• 26:52Speaker 00

  I do not, contrary to scholars like Stephen Greenblatt, who doesn't really like Anne, and he claims that this was because Shakespeare hated his wife, so he just said, "I'm not going to give my wife of all these years my best bed. She can just have the second best one, you know, the throwaway." But again, there are plenty of reasons why this is tosh. So according to the National Archives, beds and other pieces of household furniture were often the sole bequest of a wife, and it was common for the children to receive the best items and the widow the second best. Beds were also extremely valuable in Elizabethan England, so it's not the minor bequest that we think of it today. But also, guests were typically given the best bed in a household.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  So married couples would usually sleep in the second best bed, in which case Shakespeare is actually leaving his wife their marital bed, which is quite touching. And Maggie O'Farrell, this is her line, she very much disagrees with the idea that the second best bed means that Shakespeare... Didn't like his wife.

• 27:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, she does. And basically, there's a bit in the book, isn't there, where basically, they've been given a new bed, but she wants to keep their original beds.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  And all of this, you know, she doesn't want the fancy new bed, she wants the bed that they've always slept in together.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  And this is Maggie O'Farrell saying this is why she gets the second best bed.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Well, more specifically, she says that to say otherwise would be bollocks. So.

• 28:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Really?

• 28:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow, that's strong words from Maggie O'Farrell.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  But also, she points out that Shakespeare sent all the money that he earned from the stage back to Anne in Stratford. And it was quite, it was a significant amount.

• 28:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  And that's not something that you do if you regret your marriage.

• 28:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, of course.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  Anne died in 1623, she was 66, and she was buried next to Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church. So this is where Hamlet was also buried.

• 28:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, here's the thing, Maggie O'Farrell was often struck, wasn't she, there was no monument to Hamlet or indeed to Judith. And so she took it upon herself.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  I think this is lovely.

• 28:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  To plant two rowan trees in the churchyard in Stratford, one for Judith, one for Hamlet. And they've both got kind of plaques with quotations from Shakespeare, don't they, which relate to this period that we're talking about in the book.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  For Hamlet, she chooses a song from Hamlet, a Phileas song, "He is dead and gone, lady, he is dead and gone." And that's actually appears at the front of the book. And then for Judith, she used a line from The Twelfth Night, when the twins Sebastian and Viola reunited, and it's, "An apple cleft in two is not more twin than these two creatures", which is lovely. Anne has lived on in literature and not particularly favourably, I would say. Unsurprisingly, writers have used her because so little is known about this person, married to this titanic figure, you know, they use her to project their own concerns onto her, or like, sort of colour in the tension between them, colour in the gaps in their marriage. So in James Joyce, in Ulysses, he suggests that she's given the second bed because she

• 29:39Speaker 00

  was an adulteress. Many early 20th century writers portray her as cold, money hungry, a cradle snatcher. The famous movie Shakespeare in Love, which I love, by the way, but in that, she barely appears, she's barely mentioned, and only then to say that their marriage is dead.

• 29:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's basically. Shakespeare and Shakespeare in Love has got this thing going on with Gwyneth Paltrow.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, the inspiration for Viola, no?

• 30:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and Anne Hathaway, who cares about her? She's just some boring old person off in Stratford, right?

• 30:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a mark against that movie.

• 30:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Definitely. I can't believe you're defending that film. Do you know what people now say?

• 30:11Speaker 00

  I love that film.

• 30:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Tabby, do you know what? It's the famous, it's like the big example that people give when they say the Oscars give it to the wrong. They say it should have gone to Saving Private Ryan.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, no, I agree with that. That was actually, that was actually Harvey Weinstein's work.

• 30:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  It was Harvey Weinstein's work.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, he got her the Oscar.

• 30:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  I find Saving Private Ryan a bit lacrimose, so.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  Seriously, I love Saving Private Ryan.

• 30:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  The bit at the end with the flag over, you know, all of that? No, no, that's terrible.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  This actually reflects your views on the Hamlet movie, so we're going to have to get to that later. But in defence of Anne Hathaway, Jermaine Greer. Yeah, I read a bit of this. She wrote a book called Shakespeare's Wife, which defends her. And I think well, actually, I read a bit of it yesterday.

• 30:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, you think well of Jermaine Greer?

• 30:52Speaker 00

  I do. Well, I do now.

• 30:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, that's nice.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  I do on this particular subject.

• 30:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you know what? I don't think that badly of Jermaine Greer personally. I actually find her very amusing, so there you go.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  God, we've been all over the place.

• 31:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  That promise, shall we? God, we've packed a lot into that half that I didn't expect. Jermaine Greer, Saving Private Ryan, it's all happening. In the second half, well, let's get into the book. Let's get into the novel, talk about the character Agnes, talk about Hamlet, the character. Obviously, talk about Shakespeare and address this question of whether or not Hamlet's death really did inform and inspire Shakespeare's greatest play, Hamlet.

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• 33:02Speaker 00

  Welcome back to the book club. Before the break, we promised you that we would discover whether or not the death of William Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, really did inspire his play Hamlet, as Maggie O'Farrell suggests in her book, Hamnet. So Dominic, what do you think? What's your consensus?

• 33:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  We're discovering it. You're making it sound like it's an absolute definitive verdict.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is the ultimate reveal.

• 33:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, wow. Okay, so, Hamnet and Hamlet. Hamnet died in 1596. And actually, when you look at what William Shakespeare is writing in the following years, they're mostly comedies. And actually, there's a scene in the book where someone says to Agnes, "Oh, by the way, he's writing a comedy." She's like, "A comedy?" And she's like, "How can he be writing a comedy when our child has just died?" But we know that he did. A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night. I mean, they're actually the most celebrated Shakespeare.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  They're his best ones, yeah.

• 33:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they're his best work. Then he writes Hamlet. He wrote it between 1599 and 1601. And obviously, running right through Hamlet, Shakespeare's darkest, in many ways, and most sophisticated play, are the themes of grief and vengeance. And it's all inspired by this relationship. Of the ghost of a murdered father and his son. Now, just on the name, the issue of the name is actually a little bit more complicated than people think. So in the epigraph to her book, Maggie O'Farrell quotes the great Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt, whom Tabby has already

• 34:28Speaker 00

  dissed.

• 34:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  dissed in the first half.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  Sorry, Stephen.

• 34:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  About the second best bed.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  Admire much of your work.

• 34:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Stephen Greenblatt says Hamlet and Hamlet are the same name and they were interchangeable. But there is a different derivation for the name Hamlet in the play, which is that it comes from a character called Amlet or Amleth, who is a prince in medieval Scandinavian legends recorded by Saxa Grammaticus. And basically, there's this story of Amlet, who is a Scandinavian prince who avenges his father, feigns madness, does all Hamlet-style things. So in other words, you don't need Hamnet, the child, to get the name Hamlet. You can get it from this Scandinavian legend. So scholars actually still disagree about how much the title of that play, the name of the character,

• 35:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  how much they really are informed by Shakespeare's son. I have to say, if it's not informed, it's a hell of a coincidence. I mean, it definitely would have occurred to Shakespeare himself when he was writing it.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  But also, it seems bizarre that Greenblatt writes that in the 16th century, those names were interchangeable. I mean, it's definitely no coincidence then that he names that play after his son. I just think that's

• 35:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, okay.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  There's something in that. Or maybe he combined Amlet and Hamnet.

• 35:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Maybe combined. And now there's other ways in which the death of his son may have influenced Shakespeare. Harry, our social media guru, was reprimanding us in the break for not talking about the sonnets.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  I know, apologies, Harry.

• 35:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  And now I'm going to make Harry very happy by talking about Sonnet 33. Even so, my sun one early morn did shine with all triumph and splendor on my brow. But outer lack he was but one hour mine, the region cloud hath masked him from me now. And the pun there is sun and sun. You know, Shakespeare's talking about the sun as in the ball of fire.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Thanks for that.

• 36:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, thanks, everybody. Everyone really appreciates me explaining that. There was a moment where I thought, Christ, I'm going to have to explain what the sun is, and I don't really know. It's a star, isn't it? It's a star that's really close and that's why it seems different from other stars. I'm actually taking over the rest of science next week.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. We're kicking you off this show.

• 36:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Getting Maggio Farrell.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  I'm taking on the science guy.

• 36:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, really? Yeah, brilliant.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  Anyway, Hamnet is also reflected, though, in a much more famous Shakespearean work, which is his play A Twelfth Night.

• 36:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Twelfth Night, great play, yeah.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Great play, I love it. Written in 1599 or roughly, and in that, a girl, Viola, believes her twin brother Sebastian has died. And so dresses up as him and passes as him because they look so alike and it's believable. And obviously, you know, Shakespeare's children are twins. And in the book, Hamnet and his twin sister Judith do just that. They dress up as each other.

• 37:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Can I ask you a question, Tabby? Did you ever dress up as your brother?

• 37:16Speaker 00

  No, I didn't, but, um, God, he's going to kill me for this. My brother, I did once dress up my brother as a girl. Yeah, and very striking.

• 37:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  How old was he? Twenty-six?

• 37:27Speaker 00

  He was about, yeah, he was about nineteen. Anyway, my poor beloved twin brother. Anyway, let's talk about another male twin. Let's talk about Hamnet himself as Maggio Farrell portrays him in the book.

• 37:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  So here's a big difference with the film. The film is really all about Agnes, as in Anne Hathaway, Jessie Buckley's performance that has got so much attention and praise.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  And rightly so, I think. Her performance is brilliant.

• 37:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Although, actually, I don't want to get bogged down in the film, but I think she's not quite the Agnes of the book.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  No, I agree.

• 37:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Not how I picture her.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  It's a brilliant performance, but it's not for me the Agnes of the book.

• 37:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  We start with the boy and we see everything at the beginning through his consciousness. It's the narrative experience of a child. He's reflecting on his life, on his schooling, on the Latin and Greek that he does, the high expectations that his family have of him. So, you know, again, that kind of irony, he's the one who's going to take over the glove business. He's the great scholar, the great businessman, the only one of them with any sense, all of this. And of course, we know he's going to die. But there's also that he has some of his mother's witchiness, doesn't he? So there's this wonderful line, "He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real tangible world around him and enter another place." Actually, I say his mother's witchiness, but that's also true of his father.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Who has this landscape in his head that he's always kind of disappearing to.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  And he loves his father, like he's always looking for him. He's imagining him.

• 38:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  He totally idolises.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, he does, definitely. So there is that. So we know that this boy is bright and. Really kind of adding to the tragedy of the story is that there are constant references to his vibrancy and his health, particularly in contrast to his twin sister Judith's sickliness. And, you know, as we said, she's born the more frail of the two. But, you know, he describes having this golden hair and how he struggles to keep still. And he's constantly looking around him. And that's just, I mean, that's the opposite of death. But that highlights another massive theme in the book, which is particularly for children, the frailty of life.

• 39:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, that you can seem so vital and so dynamic, but death is, I mean, this idea about death lurking around the corner. At one point, William Shakespeare's mother reflects this, she has these lines about like death being around the corner. You know, your children can be taken away from you, like a thistle down, this lovely image kind of blowing away in the breeze. And yes, has this concept of death herself, doesn't she?

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is very potent, I thought.

• 39:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Go on, Tabby, you talk us through it.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  Well, she kind of describes it as being a room lit from within and within the room are the living and around the outside are the dead. And they're kind of pressing their faces against the windows, looking in. And so there, you know, you can see how death is painted as something almost conscious. It's prowling just a wall away. And then equally, the plague, I thought, interestingly, its journey to England, it's invisible, but it's sentient. It travels across the seas and enters Hamlet and Judith. And there it becomes death and death, it's almost anthropomorphic. The book says, he can feel death in the room hovering in the shadows over there beside the door, head averted. It is waiting, biding its time.

• 40:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, that's the sort of image, if you think about, I don't know, engravings and pictures and stuff in Elizabeth in England, they would have pictured death, you know, effectively, you know, with this kind of scythe or whatever, the image of the skeleton. Well, that brings us to Hamlet's death. We always know it's coming. You know, we've known it's coming from the moment we opened the book. You know, it's coming, but by the time when you buy the book, frankly. But it's part of her achievement as a writer.

• 41:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, the sensitivity, the nuance, the power of the emotions in her prose.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  When that death scene comes, it's really, really difficult to read, isn't it? Because it's so physical and so agonizing.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Until the very end, you think, oh, come on, he's going to be able to get out of this. They'll save him, even though you know what's coming. She said, and I completely see why, that this was very difficult to write. That was a tough couple of weeks.

• 41:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  For a parent, writing about the death of a child from the perspective of the mother.

• 41:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hard to do.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  So Hamnet, in some strange way, it's not clear whether or not, you know, as with his mother, Agnes's witchery, it's not clear whether or not this is actually happening or it's in his own head. He believes that he can switch places with his twin sister one last time and trick death into taking him instead of her. As a twin myself, it was quite painful to read in a way because you know, you know that feeling when you're a child and you see that your sibling or someone is very, very ill and you kind of sit by the bedside and you don't really know what to do. And yeah, so it kind of reminded me of that. So he exchanges his life for Judith. And so he says, it occurs to Hamnet as he crouches there next to her that it might be possible to hoodwink death, to pull off this trick he and Judith have been playing on people since they were young, to exchange places and clothes.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  And then there's this bit, you know, it kind of puts you right in the moment. And she writes, he breathes in, he breathes out. He turns his head and breathes into the worlds of her ear. He breathes in his strength, his health, his all. You will stay, is what he whispers, and I will go. He sends these words into her. I want you to take my life, it shall be yours. I give it to you. They cannot both live. He sees this and she sees this. If either of them is to live, it must be her. He wills it. He grips the sheet tight in both hands. He, Hamnet, decrees it, it shall be. Such spectacular writing, really powerful.

• 42:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Really, really powerful writing. But then you have that, so that's in, that obviously in his head. And then you have, his mother discovers the trick. She discovers that he's dying rather than Judith. And then the physicality of it, we talked about the physicality of the writing.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, the hard, real physicality of what actually is happening to him.

• 43:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  So his death, she smells it on him. Plague, it has a musty, dank, salty smell. It has come to them from a long way off, from a place of rot and wet and confinement. You know, in his head, he's in a landscape of snow and ice and it's cold and he kind of closes his eyes and sits down. And then this very moving ending to the scenes halfway through the book, and you can absolutely feel, I mean, this is maybe a very trite thing to say as a, you know, parent myself, but you can absolutely feel how Maggie O'Farrell's investment as a parent in writing the scene. 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, ham that takes his last breath. He draws it in, he lets it out. Then there is silence, stillness, nothing more.

• 43:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very moving.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, very, very moving. They actually did that slightly differently in the film. I thought they did kind of the build up to that quite well. You cross between, you know, what's happening in the present, his, his plague wracked body, and then you see him kind of walking into death, but it almost looks like a theatre. But I thought that moment when he actually dies, the agonising stillness that Maggie O'Farrell conjures in the book, I thought it was a shame that they made it so visceral in a funny way in the film. It's all about the mother screaming.

• 44:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you know what? I actually think that's true generally of the film. I think that the book often prioritises stillness and silence and kind of emptiness. And we said at the beginning, what's not said and whatnot, and understatement. And the film is not an understated film. The film is very, dare I say, tabby, a little bit heavy handed at times.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I disagree, but I will, I will give you my defence later. First of all, let's talk about Anyez in the book, because I just, I love her character. So let's start with her name. So obviously O'Farrell uses Anyez and not the more famous Anne Hathaway. And that's very effective because it gives her a distinct identity. You know, you get to learn about her, you get to know her afresh.

• 45:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  When I think about Anne Hathaway, I think.

• 45:11Speaker 00

  Woman in a, woman in a kind of white cap.

• 45:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think National Trust.

• 45:14Speaker 00

  Quite matronly, yeah, exactly.

• 45:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think National Trust, scones. I think about that and also I think about Anne Hathaway and her teeth coming out in Les Miserables.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  But anyway, so Maggie Farrell brilliantly and beautifully gives Anne Hathaway Agnes, you know, an identity of voice and an interior life, a rich interior life and agency. And the character is wonderfully witchy. She's immersed in the natural world. And some of my favourite passages are these kind of dreamy lyrical descriptions of trees and birds. She keeps a hawk. She spends long hours in the forest. She actually gives birth to her first child in the forest.

• 45:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  She has her herb garden. She's always mixing up healing lotions and potions.

• 45:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Faffing around with herbs, as I said.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  That is so patronising though. She's not faffing around with herbs.

• 45:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  What? I can't believe this.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  She keeps bees, which is lovely. And she even looks ethereal. She's tall, pale. She has long dark hair. She's very slim.

• 46:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is me just being a pest about the film again. Do you not think Jessie Buckley is too earthy?

• 46:08Speaker 00

  I did think that, actually. Yeah, I did. But I still thought she was superb. But she wasn't quite the Agnes of the book. So she's said to be too wild for any man. And I think maybe it's that, you know, she's an outsider. And I think maybe it's that that draws her to William Shakespeare's character in this, who's also an outsider and kind of lives in another world in his own head. And she has this sixth sense. She has a sense of what will happen to people and herself before it does. She claims that she can learn everything about a person by squeezing their hand between thumb and forefinger. And if you are watching this rather than listening, I'm, Dominic is demonstrating for it.

• 46:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  I am demonstrating.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  Right now. Yeah, with his, with his typical witchiness. You're so zany.

• 46:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  What would I see if I did that to you, Tabby? Boredom, a deep sense of regret that you'd ever agreed to do this. Exactly.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  You'd see worlds, worlds and layers and depths.

• 46:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  I don't think I would.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  I think that's wonderful. I love that. I love that little detail about her.

• 47:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I think that's a cool detail.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  And it's that that means that she's first drawn to this kind of slightly feckless nobody, the young Latin tutor who turns out to be William Shakespeare. Because when she touches him like that, she sees that there's so much inside him.

• 47:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you want a profound literary point?

• 47:15Speaker 00

  Uh, sort of.

• 47:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, I'm gonna give it anyway. Well, actually, you'll never get one from me on this show. She watches people the whole time. She's observant. She's like the novelist. She's like a writer.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  You're right, actually. She has the eye of a novelist. You're right.

• 47:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Maggie Farrell says specifically, she is a gatherer during this time of information of confidences. The daily routines, of personalities and interactions. She's like a painting on the wall, her eyes missing nothing, which I guess is what a writer needs to be.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's definitely the case. And it's interesting because when we get her backstory, her life with her mother before she dies, you're in Anya's head, but Anya's is taking you back in time. And she almost tells you the story of her mother as a fairy tale. So she's writing that for us. And that's wonderful. So she, her mother is also kind of witchy. She says, the women in my family see things. And those forest sequences, this woman walking out the woods with long hair trailing leaves in her skirt, it kind of recalls some of Shakespeare's plays. It's very kind of the forest in a Midsummer Night's Dream.

• 48:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, kind of ancient mystery and enchantment. So then you have her mother, this kind of diaphanous wood witch, and then that's contrasted with the hard, material stepmother. And that's also quite Shakespearean. You get the kind of very, you get the comical characters. They're like, um, characters from Chaucer or something, like the wife of Bath.

• 48:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  The yokels.

• 48:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, contrasted with these kind of more fairy-like, elf-like, uh, characters. And, um, she has a wonderful quiet to her. And I think this is what allows her to watch, as you say.

• 48:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, exactly. So I think there's that. There's her stuff in the woods, whatever. There's also the stuff in domestic spaces, which is really great. The stuff about being a mother, about what it's like to be a wife and mother in Elizabethan England, how, how the motherhood ends up defining you to some degree.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Definitely. And it kind of, those sequences, the, the domesticity, it kind of melds the rituals and practices of Elizabethan England with kind of today, the modern day, the role of the mother today, which I loved. And so much of the book operates within these spaces. So we are in this book in the jurisdiction of women, in a sense. The only exception really is the journey of the plague that I mentioned, which actually really effectively takes you out of this quite claustrophobic, small world, and introduces you kind of into the world of men, in a funny way. But her domesticity and the tiny observations that she makes, her, you know, role as an author, as you said, is a massive contrast with that of her husband, who is much more learned, and who writes worlds that are much bigger

• 49:36Speaker 00

  and broader and adventurous, whereas Anya's world is like, small and tight and confined. And I think that's really, really nice. And obviously, motherhood is a huge, huge theme in this book. I mean, it's kind of, it's beating heart in a way, you know, and Interestingly, I thought Maggie O'Farrell has described how she had a very traumatic experience with childbirth in 2003 when her cesarean section went wrong. And you can feel this in the second birth scene when Agnes gives birth to the twins. The trauma of that, the desperation for the children to survive. So I definitely, definitely felt the echoes of that.

• 50:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and then you get from there to the grief, obviously, when she loses her child. And I think, I mean, we were talking actually in the break and Nicole, our producer, was saying, God, it sounds great, but it sounds so bleak.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  I guess, I don't want to make it sound bleak because it's not a...

• 50:28Speaker 00

  It's not. It's a warm and colourful book, actually.

• 50:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is a really warm book, but it doesn't shy away from, you know, traumatic feelings and emotions and grief is obviously a huge theme of the book.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  I think it's really clever in the aftermath of Hamlet's death. The writing, the actual words on the page, the paragraphs become very, very short.

• 50:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 50:49Speaker 00

  So you have a paragraph here, tiny, tiny detail observation, then she moves you to another point in time. And then, so it's like the shock, you know, of grief, like you don't know what's happening.

• 50:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's brilliant about reflecting how grief changes you, how you're not the same person. So she's been somebody who's quite a potent figure, you know, as we, you talked about her sixth sense, the herb business, you know, all of that stuff. She's somebody who's in control in many ways for a lot of the book. Then she has this terrible sense of powerlessness when her child is dying or is tired of ill. And then the grief breaks the old Agnes. To quote, "Agnes is not the person she used to be, she's utterly changed. She can recall being someone who felt sure of life and what it would hold for her. She was able to peer into people and see what would be for them. But that person is now lost to her forever. She's someone adrift in her life. She's unmoored at a loss.

• 51:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  She's someone who weeps if she can't find a shoe or overbores the soup or trips over a pot. Small things undo her, nothing is certain anymore."

• 51:48Speaker 00

  I think that's one of the great passages, just in literature.

• 51:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Completely. It captures the disorientation, the sense that you've lost something that was yours, that you're not who you were, that nothing... Will be the same again once you've lost a child.

• 52:01Speaker 00

  It also shows how much of her had become motherhood. If half of you is cut away, you know, you're not the same person. And she falls into a terrible depression and I found this bit hot, like horrible and kind of harrowing. And it made me feel depressed when I read it. How she doesn't see the point in sweeping the floor anymore and how she doesn't see the point in cooking. And she was so rooted in this domestic sphere. She was so good at it and now, you know, she's, she's disheveled and careworn and she can't be bothered to live. It's interesting because her grief is so immediate and consuming. It's rooted in her body and it's kind of rooted in place. She wants to remain in the home where he died. She says, there'll be no leaving, there will be staying, there'll be the closing of doors.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  Whereas her husband kind of transposes his grief into something untouchable, into art, into words and into writing. And he needs to get away from that place because the grief of being there, his grief is claustrophobic. And the house full of grief is claustrophobic. And so the moment when he tells her that he's going back to London after Hamlet dies. Her puzzlement and her confusion at that is just heartbreaking, actually.

• 53:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, something I think breaks in their relationship when he does that. And you can completely see how it would. I mean, everybody knows if you've, you know, read about bereaved parents, how difficult it is for them to keep their relationship alive. How, you know, everything almost becomes tainted by, by grief and people find it very, you grieve individually. You know, and it's, and it can be hard to reconcile that with your, with your other half. And when he says, you know, I'm going back to London, he really shocks her because he says, there are people, you know, life doesn't stop. There are people who depend on me in London. My company is coming back from Kent and the season is starting and they depend upon me being there.

• 53:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  How many people reading that book would have recognized something in their own lives where, you know, something terrible has happened? And then one person says, look, I have to go back to work.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Let's move on.

• 54:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  I have to move on. And I think that is really, really, again, it's not heavy handed in the book at all. It's very well observed. She's shocked, she's really disappointed and something has snapped in her.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  It actually says, how were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him, they would all fragment and fall apart like a cup shattered on the floor. All of that, his leaving and stuff, is not to say that he is not grieving. I mean, he is grieving. There's this terrible moment when he gets a letter, basically, to say that Judith is very ill and likely to die. So he rushes back home to see her before she dies. And he bursts into the house and sees his little girl standing there. So he's like, oh, it's all fine. Judith's alive and well. And then he looks behind her and he sees this shroud and this corpse laid out. And his shock, his confusion, realizing that it's Hamnet that's dead is, god, it just, it rips you apart.

• 54:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he makes this noise.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, and Paul Mescal does this very well in the movie, I have to say.

• 55:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, although it's diminished in the film, god, I'm just being so harsh on the film.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  You are.

• 55:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  People who like the film would have switched off by this point. It's diminished in the film, I think, because they both do it in the film. Jessie Buckley gives a sort of animal cry first and then Paul Mescal does. So they've both done it. Whereas in the book, if I remember right, only the husband does it. You don't see her give this great howl of anguish.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  Well, it's because Hamnet's death scene itself in the book is kind of from Hamnet's perspective in a funny way. So I guess it's fair in the movie to then show what we, the audience, are seeing. But yeah, in the book, the sound that comes out of him is choked and smothered, like that of an animal forced to bear a great weight. It is a noise of disbelief and anguish. Anyas will never forget it. At the end of her life, when her husband has been dead for years, she will still be able to summon its exact pitch and timbre. Oh.

• 55:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  So talking of the husband, I mean, we have called him William Shakespeare at times. He has never called that in the book. And I think that's a really, really good trick. Because as soon as you hear the words William Shakespeare, you think of his little beard and his rough.

• 56:05Speaker 00

  And you think of the playwright, you know, the most famous writer of all time. I mean.

• 56:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  By denying him his name, you actually restore his humanity in a weird way. You make him a rounded character again. He's just the father or he's the Latin tutor.

• 56:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's, you know.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  He's defined, interestingly, by other people in relation to other people, kind of in a funny way, as Anne Hathaway historically has been. She's always been defined in relation to him, but also by never referring to him as Shakespeare, by denying him his Titanic reputation. It means that she can get him to do very trivial, mundane things that could be really comical, like the idea of William Shakespeare, I don't know, polishing his boots or whatever, or making a pair of gloves is kind of silly. And it also shows you that he's not the point. She is the point. Anya is the point in their family.

• 56:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, that's right. The glimpses we have of him are quite mundane, you know, or they are, they're ironic. So his father saying to him, you'll never amount to anything, you're a waste of space. His father being abusive towards him. Later on, of course, we really feel for him. He's depressed, he's puffy, he's grey, he, he doesn't eat. You accuse me of being puffy at the beginning.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  I did, and that's why, that's why I giggled.

• 57:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  That Shakespeare comparison has dogged me all my literary career. But then actually, she is the person who is the prime mover in getting him to London. It's her idea that he goes to London to become a playwright. So that's Maggie O'Farrell very much placing her centre stage. And basically, not exactly saying that he's a subsidiary character or her puppet or anything like that.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  No.

• 57:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  But he's not the, I mean, as you said, he's not the point. She's the point, really.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  His character is actually wonderful in this. I like the, kind of the contrast between this kind of teenage boy wanting to sleep in, can't hold down a job, and then the kind of destiny almost, or whatever it is, the layers that she sees in him, because he is a man of extraordinary depths, you know, his inner world. Maggie O'Farrell does hint at the genius underneath it all, because, you know, as we described, Anya says, you know, there's more hidden away inside him than anyone she's ever met. And that's why she marries him, despite his kind of disliked family, his age, his poor work ethic and all that.

• 58:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  There are layers and layers within him that maybe only she can see.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 58:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  And there are kind of landscapes inside his head. There's that bit where she's doing that thing with pressing. The muscle between thumb and forefinger when she sees into you.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  Her magic power.

• 58:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  And she says his mind is crammed with a cacophony with strife, with overlapping speech and cries and yells and yelps and whispers. And she can feel all this and there's fear, there's a journey, something about water, perhaps a sea. I think all that's anticipating Hamlet's where he goes on the sea journey and all that kind of thing.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  But also the book so cleverly anticipates his plays altogether. So you say a journey, water, the sea. You know, that calls to mind for me, The Tempest.

• 59:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Tempest, yeah.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  Twelfth Night or whatever. Then also the way that she uses ghosts. There are constant allusions in Hamlet to Hamlet as a ghost. You know, early on, his grandmother is startled by him, says, oh, you look like a ghost. His sister Judith, after he dies, actually sees his ghost and follows it home and feels like she's lost him all over again. And then Anyas, after he dies, is constantly looking for his ghost. And she hears a knocking and thinks it must be him, you know, some spectre, like a ghost rapping on the door, like Wuthering Heights or whatever. And it turns out to be Shakespeare returning from London. And then that obviously ghosts in Hamlet is a massive part of the play. It sets the play in motion.

• 59:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 59:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night just before Hamlet. And Twelfth Night's so different. But the a huge theme there is twins, is doubling, is the reuniting of twins who believe that the other is lost. So you can absolutely see that. There's the whole stuff about witchcraft and.

• 59:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, my best.

• 59:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  My Beth, yeah, the witchery.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  Summer Night's Dream.

• 1:00:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. So, so all of this, I guess, brings us to the point where the two strands meet. The grief, the family story, Anyas's loss on the one hand, and William Shakespeare's Titanic reputation is literally career on the other. She discovers from her wicked stepmother that her husband in London has written a new play. It's a tragedy and it has this title, Hamlet. She's gutted by this. She's horrified. She's bewildered. She's so shocked. How could you take? Our son, his name, and distort it, and as you said in the reading, flinch it of its meaning and just use it to sell your dopey plays with your company of actors. And so she goes to London with her brother to see it.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, she writes to London and she enters the Globe, the theatre, it's obviously not referred to as that. And she is actually unimpressed by what she sees. She doesn't get the spell under which the audience seems to have been cast, the anticipation, the excitement of it all. She's so angry. And then we get to the passage that this whole episode started with, that I read at the beginning. Hearing these actors on stage speak her beloved son's name. And she says, it's just as she feared, he has taken that most sacred and tender of names and tossed it in among a jumble of other words in the midst of a theatrical pageant. So she's prepared to go. She gathers her skirts, ready to walk out. And then

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  the actor playing Hamlet walks onto the stage and she realises the truth.

• 1:01:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you know what? This is such a moving scene.

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Perhaps one reason why I'm a bit more critical of the film than you are is that I actually found this so moving in the book. I even found it moving when I was writing down the notes for this episode.

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:01:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  I watched the film. I didn't find it moving at all. And so I was disappointed. The actor comes on and there's these lines, she's looked for her son everywhere, ceaseless through these past four years. And here he is, you know, basically her husband has trained this guy to play Hamlet as her son, as her son would be if he'd grown up. Here, 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. Her husband has pulled off a manner of alchemy. He has written words for him to speak and to hear. Her husband has changed places. So her husband is dead, playing the ghost, playing the ghost of Hamlet's father. And Hamlet is alive.

• 1:02:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it's an immensely moving scene that she's standing there surrounded by all these people. And it's as though her husband has brought her son back to life. For her and for everybody.

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  That's what he's done. He's he's brought him back to life and this frees both Anya's and actually kind of the ghost of Hamnet from his spectral form, you know, it means that he's not frozen in time, a frail, sick, pale little boy. He's kind of born again as flesh, you know, golden and beautiful and grown up. And so he's liberated him from this painful death and afterlife. You know, he's given him, he's allowed him to grow up. Yeah, it's agony. God, I felt like I was tearing up there.

• 1:03:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, no, it's so moving. It's actually really moving. I knew it would be it would be moving to talk about it.

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  You mentioned the movie. Let's discuss that a little bit. So you didn't like this scene in the movie. And I remember you said when we discussed this that you didn't think it needed the music that they used, you know, it's it's the classic sad music. Is it Max Richter?

• 1:03:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Max Richter, he used it in Arrival.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's the sad song. And I read a lot of reviews saying this as well, you know, did you really need to beat the dead horse?

• 1:03:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's the equivalent of playing Coldplay at the end of the film.

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  It's not. I think this scene is so beautiful and sad. And in fact, I would say this about the movie altogether. Maggie O'Farrell, the genius of this book, as we said, is the things that she doesn't say, it's the gaps between the words. That's very, very hard to put on screen because it's very hard. This book exists in the interior, not on the exterior. So you have to show that. And I think with a story as so obliquely tragic as this, how could it be anything other than, you know, hammed up a little bit? And I actually do think that the movie got the silence of the book.

• 1:04:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  To use a very tabby phrase, I felt sometimes the film insisted upon itself, which is your favorite phrase. I think I think there were a couple of moments that were too heavy handed. So for example, in the book, she clearly feels deserted by her husband and feels gutted that he wasn't there when Hamnet died. But she doesn't explicitly say that to him, whereas in the the film, she says, "You weren't here when Hamlet died. Where were you?" blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's, I mean, that could have happened, sure, and it's not a dramatically implausible scene, but it's not in the book. The book doesn't do that. It suggests it rather than overstates it. There's also a moment I really didn't like, where it shows Shakespeare. He's gutted,

• 1:04:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  his son has died, he's he's riven with grief, he's depressed, he stands looking into the Thames, and a knight, and he says, "To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler," et cetera, et cetera. When they actually did that, I actually said out loud in the cinema, "Oh, no, don't do this."

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I agree with that, but I would say, and I agree with, you know, the movie is much more on the nose, it's far less subtle, but I can understand why you'd have to do that with a book like Hamlet. And I thought that kind of overall, it was very moving, and I came out with a profound sense of catharsis.

• 1:05:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  And you've said that in such a profound way, that who can doubt it?

• 1:05:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, listen, I mean, it's basically a question of taste, because I think, although there's loads of people absolutely adore this film.

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  Is your heart shriveled? Are you cold and cynical? Or do you have a bit of soul?

• 1:05:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Dude, I can't believe you're accusing me of being cold and cynical, when, as you know, I was fighting back tears in that last section.

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  You were, and that redeems you.

• 1:05:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, because we are such profound people, we always like to give books a mark out of 10.

• 1:05:54Speaker 00

  Like prep school teachers.

• 1:05:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  And what are we marking this one in?

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  I think we should rate this in ghostly apparitions. So, ghostly apparitions out of 10.

• 1:06:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay. Are we going to give them up to the film as well?

• 1:06:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, go on then.

• 1:06:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  That'll be exciting.

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's mix it up.

• 1:06:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, I'm gonna give, I'm gonna give the book, I'm actually gonna give the book a nine.

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  Nice, good for you.

• 1:06:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it. I'm mad that I've given it more than I've given like Frankenstein or whatever, which is this great kind of canonical monster of a book.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  You go, girl.

• 1:06:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm gonna give this nine, and I'm gonna give the film a shocking six.

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  Wow, brutal.

• 1:06:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, go on, what about you?

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  I am gonna give the book a 10. I think once in a while you stumble across a book that you feel is almost touched by, I don't know, some kind of a grace. And I felt that of this book. It has, the writing is beautiful. It's wonderfully subtle and disciplined, but beautiful. And the characters are superbly wrought. And it left its mark on me for months after I read it.

• 1:06:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, you were desperate to do it on this show.

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  I was, yeah.

• 1:07:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  And you talked about it loads, so.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, so 10 from me. And then for the movie, I'm gonna give an eight point five.

• 1:07:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  You'd have the point fives.

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  I do, I do.

• 1:07:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Eight and a half. Okay, so brilliant. What are we doing next week?

• 1:07:13Speaker 00

  So next week, we have a very different book. We have 1984 by George Orwell.

• 1:07:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  God, I'm looking forward to that. All right. So please get ahead with your reading. Send us your thoughts.

• 1:07:23Speaker 00

  If you wish to read them.

• 1:07:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, or don't read them. I don't care what you do, frankly. But do send us your, but do send us, send us your thoughts. We'd love to hear them because we're absolutely transfixed with excitement when we hear from our listeners, aren't we, Tabby?

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, and some suggestions for future books because we're all ears.

• 1:07:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'd love suggestions. I'd love nothing more. All right, on that, Barmshell, thank you very much, Tabby. Bye, everybody.

• 1:07:42Speaker 00

  Bye.

• 1:07:53Speaker 06

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• 1:08:23Speaker 04

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• 1:08:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Real buttermilk and ghee. It's the perfect flatbread for any occasion.

• 1:08:56Speaker 06

  I put out stone fire naan with dips at every dinner party.

• 1:08:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  I make naan grilled cheese when my daughter has friends over. I use stone fire naan to reward the humans who do my bidding.

• 1:09:06Speaker 06

  Right, it's perfect for camping trips.

• 1:09:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Dance for it, feeble mortal.

• 1:09:11Speaker 06

  Sorry, is he talking to me or?

• 1:09:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Dance. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. From our tradition to yours, stone fire. Together we naan.