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Friday
As this is my last weekday post of the year, I went rummaging through past 2023 essays and came across one was particularly heartfelt. While I had many sublime reading experiences this past year—Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water, Min Yin Lee’s Pachinko, Richard Powers’s Overstory, Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, George MacDonald’s Sir Gibbie, the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh and multiple novels by William Faulkner (Light in August, Sanctuary, Absalom, Absalom!) and Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton, North and South, Wives and Daughters)—none had the emotional impact of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. As I read her novel about Shakespeare using his famous play to process the grief over losing his son Hamnet, I remembered how I had turned to literature after my eldest son died 23 years ago.
This was before I learned, as I did later in the year from Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, that Hamlet may be above all a play about grieving—and that, through it, Shakespeare taught us a new and more powerful way to grieve than had existed previously. When I reached the end of Hamnet, I cried for Justin for the first time in over two decades. As you will see, I was profoundly moved by a book that reaffirmed how I had used art to work through my own sorrow.
Reprinted from March 6, 2023
I have just been emotionally blindsided by a powerful Maggie O’Farrell novel about Shakespeare’s wife and children. Hamnet (2020) is a fictional account of the bard’s marriage to Anne (Agnes) Hathaway and how the two processed the death of Hamnet, their one son. (According to Shakespeare expert Stephen Greenblatt, “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” are in fact the same name.)
While some speculate that the marriage was troubled, that is not how O’Farrell sees it. Or at least, it is not troubled until Hamnet dies, at which point Shakespeare starts avoiding the family and burying himself in the theater. Feeling abandoned, Anne journeys to London when she hears (not from her husband) that he has written a play bearing their son’s name.
It is when she is responding to the play that Hamnet hit me with its hammer blow. Of course, the novel had to set me up for the final scene. As I read about Hamnet’s death and the family’s mourning, I thought of my own Justin, who drowned 23 years ago and who would have turned 44 this coming Sunday. Justin wasn’t uppermost in my mind as I was reading, but when I reached the end of the novel—where we see Anne/Agnes at the lip of the stage reaching out to the figures of Hamlet and the ghost of his father (played by Shakespeare)—something in me broke. I, who haven’t cried for Justin in over 20 years, was wracked by loud sobs that I couldn’t stop. Here’s the passage—the novel’s final paragraphs—that unleashed pent-up emotions I didn’t know were there:
For now, she is right at the front of the crowd, at the edge of the stage; she is gripping its wooden lip in both hands. An arm’s length away, perhaps two, is Hamlet, her Hamlet, as he might have been, had he lived, and the ghost, who has her husband’s hands, her husband’s beard, who speaks in her husband’s voice.She stretches out a hand, as if to acknowledge them, as if to feel the air between the three of them, as if wishing to pierce the boundary between audience and players, between real life and play.The ghost turns his head towards her, as he prepares to exit the scene. He is looking straight at her, meeting her gaze, as he speaks his final words:
“Remember me.”
Up until the moment when the young Hamlet appears on stage, Agnes has been furious with her husband. The rest of the audience may be gripped with the early presence of the ghost on the ramparts, but Agnes cannot understand why Shakespeare would have their son’s name emerge from “the mouths of people she has never known and will never know.” Why pretend, she asks, that their son’s name
means nothing to him, just a collection of letters? How could he thieve this name, then strip and flense it of all it embodies, discarding the very life it once contained? How could he take up his pen and write it on a page, breaking its connection with their son? It makes no sense. It pierces her heart, it eviscerates her, it threatens to sever her from herself, from him, from everything they had, everything they were.
And:
She had thought that coming here, watching this, might give her a glimpse into her husband’s heart. It might have offered her a way back to him. She thought the name on the playbill might have been a means for him to communicate something to her. A sign, of sorts, a signal, an outstretched hand, a summons. As she rode to London, she had thought that perhaps now she might understand his distance, his silence, since their son’s death. She has the sense now that there is nothing in her husband’s heart to understand. It is filled only with this: a wooden stage, declaiming players, memorized speeches, adoring crowds, costumed fools. She has been chasing a phantasm, a will-o’-the-wisp, all this time.
Then, however, the magic of the theatre takes over, which is all the more intense in her case because she recognizes, in the boy playing Hamlet, her own son. Shakespeare has coached the actor to be Hamnet had he grown into a man:
He has found this boy, instructed him, shown him how to speak, how to stand, how to lift his chin, like this, like that. He has rehearsed and primed and prepared him.
As fiction becomes more real than reality itself, Agnes realizes what her husband has done:
Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own.; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. “O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!” murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.
The novel affected me not only because, through it, I relived the death of our son. After all, I have encountered other such dramas in the intervening years that, while moving, have not struck this deep. No, I think what O’Farrell has done is show how, in a great work of art, we are able, momentarily, to penetrate the boundary that separates us from the dead. Agnes sees—imagines she sees— her child on the stage and experiences “an old, familiar urge, like water gushing into a dry streambed. She wants to lay hands on that boy; she wants to fold him in her arms, comfort and console him—and she has to, if it is the last thing she does.”
Of course, art, no matter how great, can’t bring the dead back to life. But think about it this way: those we have lost were never entirely material to begin with. They were the emotions they aroused in us, the anxieties they put us through, the love we felt for them. They are also integrally intertwined with the people we have become. What Hamlet does for Agnes is bring back all of that. She sees, in one of the most three-dimensional characters ever penned, everything but the actual flesh and blood of her beloved son. And that flesh and blood were never the most important part of him anyway.
I realized, in reading Hamnet, that the way I turn to literature to process my life—including the death of my son—is more than a shallow consolation or a wish fulfillment or a cerebral exercise. I already knew, of course—but here was an author confirming it—that literature puts us closer to life’s essence than any other use of language. Watching Agnes watching Hamlet, I saw myself reading the literature I turned to after Justin died: Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Mary Oliver’s “The Lost Children” and Percy Shelley’s Adonais and Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia. These works, I realized, connected me to parts of myself that Justin had touched—which is to say, ways in which Justin was still alive. The sorrow I felt while reading Hamnet, which took me back to my own mourning period, was intermixed with a deep joy and maybe even relief: these fictional re-creations to which I have devoted my life, I was assured, are not in vain.
Julia the other day asked me why I thought she is so drawn to certain fantasy works (especially Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown) that she returns to time and again. I said that the works we love have articulated deep soul longings and that we reread to get back in touch. Sometimes an old work still functions as a conduit and sometimes we discover we have grown past it and need to turn elsewhere. In any event, when she saw me crying and saw the book that was lying by my side (she’s the one who alerted me to it), she knew what had happened and she held me, just as she held me almost 23 years ago when we mourned our son together.
And in that action, I see another passage in Hamnet. Right before the end the author tells us that, after the play, Agnes will find her husband, “his face still streaked with traces of paste,” and they will stand together in “the open circle of the playhouse” until it is “as empty as the sky above it.” Perhaps they will think together, “Good night sweet prince: And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” Because art has opened hearts that were in danger of shriveling, their relationship too will grow, in spite of—or even because of—the stresses that have been put on it. The Globe Theater opens them up to a vision that is as wide as the sky.
