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This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society.
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Now, Tabby, as you know, there are some books that you read once, but there are others you especially 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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That's what the Folio Society does. They are an independent employee owned publisher based in London. Since 1947, they've been turning the stories we know and love into books for life.
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Yes, every book is produced with specially commissioned beautiful artwork and a specially commissioned introduction that puts the story in its context.
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Whether you're into crime, sci, fi or history, Folio Society publishes the books we love. From Bronte to Dickens, from Margaret Atwood to Tom Holland. The books can feel like works of art in their own right. They're built around the text, the the stories that last in books that are made to last. If a story matters, keep it properly. Find it@folioSociety.com TheBookClub that's Foliosociety.com TheBookClub this podcast is brought to you by Carvana. Car shopping shouldn't feel like preparing for a marathon of paperwork. That's why Carvana makes buying and financing your car easy. From start to finish. Search thousands of vehicles with great prices, all online, all on your time. And when you're ready, your new car shows up right at your door. It doesn't get better than that. Buy your car the easy way on. Delivery fees may apply. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast. Smart move. Being financially savvy. Smart move. Another smart move. Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and aut bundling. Just another way to save. With a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. 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. Agnes 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. Agnes 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 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? 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 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 defense because Anne Hathaway, historically has always been quite condemned, and it paints their marriage in a far warmer light. 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 the 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?
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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 Ham. That's so moving. What a brilliant book.
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Yeah, you're all puffy and red faced.
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B
Red faced. I'm often puffing red faced, to be fair. So I had nothing to do with the book. True, true. It's one of the great things about doing this show is I get to read books that I wouldn't natur. I obviously knew of the books. I knew it's won the prize and 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, Anne 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 interior. So you're getting so much of this world through Agnes Sensibility. 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. Cause we'll talk about the film in the second half. But you love this book, don't you, Tabby?
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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 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 where she 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.
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B
Do you know what? You've absolutely put your finger on something that I was also thinking that she's brilliant at what is unsaid and what is left out.
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A
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 marvel, mind's owner 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, 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.
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B
So it's very physical, 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, hamnet, died in 1596, aged 11. Four years or so later, the father wrote a play called Hamlet. So you 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 Hamnet. 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 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 meanwhile his mother is off looking after her beehives. So then the narrative switches to his mother, Agnes, and she sudd 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 epicenter, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mothers, 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, 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.
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A
Yeah, of course.
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B
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.
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A
Yeah, exactly. The small but significant moments in the development of a life. Yeah, absolutely. But then we have this thing with the timeline because we move back in time, 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 mythologized. Her mother dies horribly in childbirth. And we learn about how she grows up with a stepmother that she despises.
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B
It's like a fairy tale, this, isn't it? Maybe we'll touch on this later on.
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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 Shakespear, 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, Susannah, 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 Agnes 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 labor in which she thinks she will die. And these twins are a robust baby boy called Hamnet.
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B
Yeah, the irony.
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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?
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B
Yeah. So we get back to the present and Hamnet has been looking for his mother to help Judith, who is ill. Agnes comes back to the house from her beehives. She's horrified to find Judith on the brink of death.
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A
Yeah, she's even got the kind of buboes on her neck and stuff.
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B
Exactly, yeah. Which you see in the film as well. But they're described in the book. And then, you know, because Agnes is a kind of witchy kind of person who does a lot of faffing around with herbs.
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A
Faffing around with herbs?
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B
Yeah, she's always grinding herbs. 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 gonna say it anyway, just cause 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 Hamlet has now got the plague.
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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.
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B
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.
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A
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?
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B
I did. My 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. Yeah, well, I actually do. You know what I'm saying?
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You can't believe it because you wrote
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this in your notes, giving it away.
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A
Yeah. I think because you were keen to be recognized as a author of the future.
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B
Yeah, it's a fight. So in 2007, Worcesterstones named their authors of the future. And I was one of them, and Maggie o' Farrell was one of them. And Gemini 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 want. And Maggie o' Farrell was there, and she was actually really nice. And so she stuck in my mind. Cause 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. So that's the. You know, I don't know who's the
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A
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 adequate, agile with language, because constantly in your mind, 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. 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.
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B
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 Hamnet 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?
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A
They SAP them of kind of modern emotion, don't they?
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B
Yeah, because there's an assumption that because, you know, a third of all children or something died by the time they enter 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 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, that death's always lurking around the corner.
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A
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.
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B
And also there's an issue with her daughter. Aggie O. Farrow'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 me. I mean, to some extent, of course, that is the human condition, but in this case, it's obviously in an entirely different league.
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A
Yeah.
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B
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 round corners. Never for a moment forget they. They meaning your children or whatever may be gone, snatched from you in the blink of an eye, born away from you, like thistledown.
- [19:11]
A
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 really do that?
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B
Yeah, of course. Because, I mean, the most famous writer in. In history, right?
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A
Yeah, the pressure of that.
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B
Yeah.
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A
But then eventually 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. She learned falconry, she cultivated her own Elizabethan herb garden.
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B
So she was faffing around with herbs herself.
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A
Yeah, she was faffing around. And also she actually looks wonderfully witchy, my Gyo Farrell. So of all of this, I thoroughly
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B
approve if she's listening. Tabby means that as a compliment, just to be clear.
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A
Also, I'm looking for a new co host, so.
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B
Right, yeah.
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A
And 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.
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B
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 Maggie o' Farrell 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 Hulen's Farm, which is now called Anne Hathaway's Cottage. Although it's not a cottage, it's a farmhouse.
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A
It's quite fine, actually. I mean, yeah, they're definitely quite well off.
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B
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 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 glovemaker, had been an alderman, is 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 Germanic name that it comes from, but there's also a place named Hampnet. 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.
- [22:59]
A
Yeah. And we also know just from the facts of it, that by the time the twins were 7, 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 11 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, 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 was 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. No, 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. When the roads were better.
- [24:20]
B
Exactly. And this is a classic example, I think, Tabby, of historians and biographers just desperately piling implications and. 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.
- [24:44]
A
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, right?
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B
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 age 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.
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A
Ah, yes, the mystery of the second best bed.
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B
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?
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A
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, 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.
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B
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 bed. 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. And this is Maggie o' Farrell saying this is why she gets the second best bed.
- [27:04]
A
Well, more specifically, she says that to say otherwise would be bollocks. So.
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B
Really?
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A
Yeah.
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B
Wow, that's strong words from Maggie o'. Farrell.
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A
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 a significant amount, of course, and that's not something that you do if you regret your marriage.
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B
Yeah, of course.
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A
Anne died in 1623. She was 66. And she was buried next to Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church. So this is where Hamnet was also buried.
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B
Well, here's the thing. Maggie of Farrell was often struck, wasn't she? There was no monument to Hamnet or indeed to Judith, and so she took it upon herself, I think this is lovely, to plant two rowan trees in the churchyard in Stratford, one for Judith, one for Hamnet. 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.
- [27:56]
A
For Hamnet, she chooses a song from Hamlet, Ophelia's song. Here's Dead and Gone, lady, he is dead and gone. And that 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 are 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, color in the gaps in their marriage. So in James Joyce in Ulysses, he suggests that she's given the second bed because she was an adulteress. Many early 20th century writers portray her as cold, money hungry, a cradle snatcher. The famous movie Shakespeare, 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.
- [28:55]
B
Yeah, it's basically Shakespeare. And Shakespeare in Love has got this thing going on with Gwyneth Paltrow.
- [29:00]
A
Yeah. The inspiration for Viola. No.
- [29:02]
B
Yeah. And Anne Hathaway. Who cares about her? She's just some boring old person off in Stratford. Right?
- [29:07]
A
Yeah. That's a mark against that movie, definitely.
- [29:09]
B
I can't believe you're defending that film. Do you know what people now say,
- [29:11]
A
I love that film?
- [29:12]
B
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.
- [29:20]
A
Oh, yeah, No, I agree with that. That was Actually, Harvey Weinstein's work.
- [29:25]
B
It was Harvey Weinstein's work.
- [29:27]
A
He got her the Oscar. Do you know what?
- [29:28]
B
I find Saving Private Ryan a bit lachrymose, so.
- [29:31]
A
Seriously, I love Saving Private Ryan.
- [29:33]
B
The bit at the end with the flag over there.
- [29:34]
A
Yeah, it's great.
- [29:35]
B
All of that. No, no, that's terrible.
- [29:36]
A
This actually reflects your views on the Hamnet movie, so we're gonna have to get to that later. But in defense of Anne Hathaway, Germaine 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. Yeah.
- [29:51]
B
You think well of Jermaine Greer.
- [29:52]
A
I do. Well, I do now.
- [29:54]
B
Well, that's nice.
- [29:55]
A
I do. On this particular subject, you know, I
- [29:57]
B
don't think that badly of Germaine Greer personally, I actually find her very amusing. So there you go.
- [30:01]
A
God, we've been all over the place.
- [30:04]
B
We've got packed a lot into that half that I didn't expect. Jemi 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 Hamnet, the character, obviously talk about Shakespeare and address this question of whether or not Hamnet's death really did inform and inspire Shakespeare's greatest play, Hamlet. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing Company. No matter how you do game day, on the couch, in the crowd, or manning the snack table, Athletic Brewing fits right in with a full lineup of non alcoholic beer style. You can enjoy bold flavors all game long. No hangovers, no buzz, no subbing out for water in the second half. Stock the fridge for tip off with a variety of non alcoholic craft styles. Available at your local grocery store or online at athleticbrewing.com near Beer Fit for all times.
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Let's talk about it.
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A
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B
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We are looking for something.
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Something you've discovered. Give me something to believe and some of us will stop at nothing to get it ready. The countdown is complete.
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A
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B
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A
Hang on.
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B
Tron. Ares now streaming on Disney Plus. Rated PG 13.
- [32:06]
A
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?
- [32:26]
B
We're discovering it. You make it sound like it's an absolutely definitive verdict.
- [32:29]
A
This is the ultimate reveal. Right?
- [32:31]
B
Wow. Okay, so Hamnet and Hamlet. Hamnet died in 1596. And actually, when you look at what William Shakespeare's 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 comment. 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. Amidst some of Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, as yous Like It, Twelfth Night. I mean, they're actually the most celebrated.
- [32:57]
A
They're his best ones.
- [32:58]
B
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 dissed. Dissed in the first book.
- [33:34]
A
Sorry, Stephen.
- [33:35]
B
About the second.
- [33:36]
A
Admire much of your work.
- [33:38]
B
Stephen Greenblatt says Hamnet 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 Saxagromaticus and Bas. Basically, there's this story of Hamlet, 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, 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. I mean, it definitely would have occurred to Shakespeare himself when he was writing it.
- [34:33]
A
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. Yeah, okay, there's something in that. Or maybe he combined Amlet and Hamnet.
- [34:50]
B
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.
- [35:00]
A
I know. Apologies, Harry.
- [35:01]
B
Now I'm gonna make Harry very happy by talking about Sonnet 33. Even so, my son, one early morn did shine with all triumphant splendour on my brow. But out alack, 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.
- [35:20]
A
Thanks for that.
- [35:21]
B
Yeah, thanks, everybody. Everyone really appreciates me explaining that. There's a moment where I thought, Christ, I'd 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.
- [35:38]
A
Yeah, exactly. We're kicking you off this show getting Margaret o'.
- [35:41]
B
Farrell.
- [35:42]
A
I'm taking on the science guy.
- [35:43]
B
Oh, really? Yeah. Brilliant.
- [35:45]
A
Anyway, Hamnet is also reflected, though, in a much more famous Shakespearean work, which is his play, a Twelfth Night.
- [35:53]
B
Twelfth Night. Great play.
- [35:54]
A
Yeah, 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.
- [36:18]
B
Can I ask you a question, Tabby? Did you ever dress up as your brother?
- [36:21]
A
No, I didn't, but. God, he's gonna kill me for this. Go on. My brother. I did once dress up my brother as a girl. Yeah. And very striking.
- [36:30]
B
How old was he? 26.
- [36:31]
A
He was about. Yeah, he was about 19. Anyway. My poor beloved twin brother. Anyway, let's talk about another Male twin. Let's talk about Hamnet himself, as Maggie o' Farrell portrays him in the book.
- [36:43]
B
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
- [36:51]
A
praise, and rightly so. I think her performance is brilliant.
- [36:54]
B
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.
- [36:58]
A
No, I agree.
- [36:59]
B
Not how I think it's.
- [37:00]
A
It's a brilliant performance, but it's not for me, the Agnes of the book.
- [37:03]
B
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 gonna take over the glove business. He's the great scholar, the great businessman, the only one of them with any sense. All of this, 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, who has this landscape in his head that he's always kind of disappearing to.
- [37:46]
A
And he loves his father. Like, he's always looking for him. He's imagining him.
- [37:50]
B
He totally idolizes.
- [37:52]
A
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's 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.
- [38:27]
B
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 round the corner. You know, your children can be taken away from you like Thistledown. This lovely image kind of blowing away in the breeze. Agnes has this concept of death herself, doesn't she?
- [38:52]
A
Yeah, this is very potent, I thought.
- [38:55]
B
Go on, Tabby, you talk us through it.
- [38:56]
A
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 Hamnet 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. It's time.
- [39:40]
B
Well, that's the sort of image, if you think about, I don't know, engravings and pictures and stuff. In Elizabethan England, they would have pictured death, you know, effectively, you know, with his kind of scythe or whatever. The image of the skeleton. Well, that brings us to Hamnet's death. We always know it's coming. You know, we've known it's coming from the moment we open the book. You know it's coming by the time when you buy the book, frankly. But it's part of her achievement as a writer, you know, the sensitivity, the nuance, the power of the emotions in her prose, that when that death scene comes, it's really, really difficult to read, isn't it? Because it's so physical and so agonizing
- [40:20]
A
until the very end. You think, oh, come on, he's gonna 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
- [40:31]
B
for a parent writing about the death of a child from the perspective of the mother. Yeah, hard to do.
- [40:36]
A
So Hamnet, in some strange way, it's not clear whether or not, you know, as with his mother, Agnes Witchery, it's not clear whether or not this is actually happening or it's in his own head. 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 Judas. 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. 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.
- [41:57]
B
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 Judas. And then the physicality of it. We talked about the physicality of the writing.
- [42:10]
A
Yeah, the hard, real physicality of what actually is happening to him.
- [42:14]
B
So his death. She smells it on him, the 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 scene. It's 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 learned to crawl, to eat, to walk, to speak, Hamnet takes his last breath. He draws it in, he lets it out. Then there is silence, Stillness. Nothing more. Very moving.
- [43:01]
A
Yeah, very, very moving. They actually did that slightly differently in the film. I thought they did kind of the buildup to that quite well. You cross between, you know, what's happening in the present. His plague wracked body. And then you see him kind of walking into death, but it almost looks like a theater. But I thought that moment when he actually dies, the agonizing 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.
- [43:29]
B
Do you know what? I actually think that's true generally of the film. I think that the book often prioritizes stillness and silence and kind of emptiness. And we said at the beginning what's not said and whatnot. An understatement. And the film is not an understated film. The film is very, dare I say, tabby, a little bit heavy handed at times.
- [43:51]
A
You know, I disagree, but I will give you my defense later. First of all, let's talk about Agnes in the book, because I just. I love her character. So let's start with her name. So obviously o' Farrell uses Agnes 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.
- [44:14]
B
When I think about Anne Hathaway, I think woman in a.
- [44:16]
A
Woman in a kind of white cat.
- [44:18]
B
I think National Trust, quite matronly.
- [44:20]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [44:20]
B
I think National Trust scones, I think about that. And I also think about Anne Hathaway and her teeth coming out in Les Miserables.
- [44:26]
A
But anyway, so Maggie o' Farrell brilliantly and beautifully gives Anne Hathaway Agnes, you know, an identity, a 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 favorite 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. She has her herb garden. She's always mixing up, up healing lotions and potions.
- [44:56]
B
Faffing around with herbs, as I said.
- [44:58]
A
That is so patronizing, though. She's not faffing around with herbs.
- [45:01]
B
What? I can't believe this.
- [45:02]
A
She keeps bees, which is lovely. And she even looks ethereal. She's tall, pale. She has long dark hair. She's very slim.
- [45:08]
B
This is me just being a pest about the film again. Do you not think Jessie Buckley is too earthy?
- [45:13]
A
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 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, Dominic is demonstrating it.
- [45:46]
B
I am demonstrating right now.
- [45:48]
A
Yeah. With his typical witchiness. You're so zany.
- [45:53]
B
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.
- [45:59]
A
You'd see worlds. Worlds and layers and depths.
- [46:02]
B
I don't think I would.
- [46:03]
A
I think that's wonderful. I love that little detail about it.
- [46:06]
B
Yeah, I think that's a cool detail.
- [46:07]
A
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.
- [46:18]
B
Johnson. Profound literary point, point.
- [46:20]
A
Sort of echo.
- [46:21]
B
I'm 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.
- [46:29]
A
You're right. Actually, she has the eye of a novelist. You're right.
- [46:31]
B
Maggie o' Farrell says specifically, she is a gatherer during this time of information, of confidences, of 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.
- [46:43]
A
Yeah, it's definitely the case. And it's interesting because when we get. Get her backstory, her life with her mother before she dies, you're in Agnes's head, but Agnes 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. 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 characters from Chaucer or something. Like the wife of Barth.
- [47:32]
B
The yokels.
- [47:33]
A
Yeah. Contrasted with these kind of more fairy like, elf like characters. And she has a wonderful quiet to her. And I think this is what allows her to watch, as you say.
- [47:44]
B
Yes, exactly. So I think there's.
- [47:46]
A
That.
- [47:46]
B
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 the motherhood ends up defining you to some degree.
- [47:58]
A
Definitely. And it kind of. Those sequences, 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 and broader and adventurous. Whereas Agnes's world is, like, small and tight and confined. And I think that's really, really nice. And. And obviously, motherhood is a huge, huge theme in this book. I mean, it's kind of its 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.
- [49:15]
B
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. Yeah, I guess I don't want to make it sound bleak because it's not a.
- [49:32]
A
It's not. It's a warm and colorful book.
- [49:35]
B
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.
- [49:44]
A
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, right? 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.
- [50:02]
B
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 talk 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 his child is 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 befall them. But that person is now lost to her forever. She's someone adrift in her life. She's unmoored, at a loss. 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.
- [50:52]
A
I think that's one of the great passages just in literature completely.
- [50:57]
B
It captures the disorientation, the sense that you've lost something that was yours, that you're not who you were. Then nothing will be the same again. Once you've lost a child.
- [51:05]
A
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 care worn and she can't be bothered to live. It's interesting because her grief is so. 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. 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 Hamnet dies, her puzzlement and her confusion at that is just heartbreaking, actually.
- [52:15]
B
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 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. Cause 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. 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.
- [53:06]
A
Let's move on.
- [53:07]
B
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.
- [53:18]
A
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 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 and realizing that it's Hamnet that's dead, is God, it just. It rips you apart.
- [54:00]
B
Yeah. He makes this noise.
- [54:02]
A
Yeah. And Paul Mescal does this very well in the movie. I have to say, yeah, although it's
- [54:06]
B
diminished in the film. God, I'm just being so harsh on the film, which is people who like the film will 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.
- [54:28]
A
Well, it's. Cause 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. Agnes will never forget it. At the end of her life, when her husband has been dead for years, she'll still be able to summon its exact pitch. And Tammy.
- [54:56]
B
So talking of the husband, I mean, we have called him William Shakespeare at times. He is 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 ruff.
- [55:09]
A
And you think of the playwright, you know, the most famous writer of all time.
- [55:13]
B
I mean, 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, or he's, you know, he's
- [55:25]
A
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. Agnes is the point. In their family.
- [56:00]
B
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 gray. He. He doesn't eat. You accused me of being puffy at the beginning.
- [56:20]
A
I did, and that's why. That's why I giggled.
- [56:22]
B
Shakespeare comparison, that's 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 center stage. And basically not exactly saying that he's a subsidiary character or her puppets or anything like that. No, but he's not the. I mean, as you said, he's not the point. She's the point, really.
- [56:49]
A
His character's 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, Agnes says, you know, there's more hidden away inside him than anyone she's ever met. And that's why she marries. Despite his kind of disliked family, his age, his poor work ethic and all that.
- [57:25]
B
There are layers and layers within him that maybe only she can see.
- [57:28]
A
Exactly.
- [57:29]
B
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, her magic power. And she says his mind is crammed with the 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 the sea. I think all that's anticipating Hamlet, where he goes on the sea journey and all that kind of thing.
- [57:56]
A
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 or Twelfth Night or whatever. Then also the way that she uses ghost. There are constant allusions in Hamnet to Hamnet 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 Agnes, after he dies, is constantly looking for his ghost. And she hears a knocking and thinks it must Be him, you know, some specter, 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. Yeah, yeah.
- [58:45]
B
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 Anesthetic Beth. Yeah, the witch dream. Exactly. So. So all of this, I guess, brings us to the point where the two strands meet. The grief, the family story, Anas's loss on the one hand, and William Shakespeare's Titanic reputation, his literary 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, flint 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.
- [59:48]
A
Yeah. She rides 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 feels. 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 the actor playing Hamlet walks onto the stage and she realizes the truth.
- [60:35]
B
Do you know what? This is such a moving scene.
- [60:37]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [60:38]
B
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.
- [60:47]
A
I know.
- [60:47]
B
I watched the film. I didn't find it moving at all. And so I was disappointed. The actor comes on and these lines. She's looked for her son everywhere. Ceaselessly 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. 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 him, her and for everybody.
- [61:43]
A
That's what he's done. He's. He's brought him back to life. And this frees both Agnes 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. God, I felt like I was tearing up there.
- [62:11]
B
Yeah. No, it's so moving. It's actually really moving. I knew it would be moving to talk about it.
- [62:16]
A
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 the classic sad music. Is it? Max Richter.
- [62:29]
B
Max Richter, they used it in a Rival.
- [62:31]
A
They used it in exactly 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?
- [62:37]
B
It's the equivalent of playing Coldplay at the end of the film.
- [62:41]
A
It's not. I think this scene is so beautiful and sad. And 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 so. 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,
- [63:14]
B
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. Died. But she doesn't explicitly say that to him. Whereas in the, the film she says, you weren't here when Hamnet 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. His son has died. He's. He's riven with grief. Grief. He's depressed. He stands looking into the Thames a night 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.
- [64:15]
A
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 Hamnet. And I thought that kind of. Overall, it was very moving. And I came out with a profound sense of cathartic.
- [64:32]
B
And you've said that in such a profound way that who can doubt it? So listen, I mean, it's basically a question of taste because I think there's loads of people absolutely adore this film.
- [64:41]
A
Is your heart shriveled? Are you cold and cynical or do you have a bit of soul?
- [64:46]
B
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.
- [64:51]
A
You were. And that redeems you.
- [64:53]
B
So because we are such profound people, we always like to give books a mark out of 10. And what are we marking?
- [65:00]
A
Well, school teachers.
- [65:01]
B
And what are we marking this one in?
- [65:03]
A
I think we should rate this in ghostly apparitions. So ghostly apparitions out of 10.
- [65:08]
B
Okay. Are we gonna give a mark to the film as well?
- [65:10]
A
Yeah, go on then.
- [65:11]
B
That'll be exciting.
- [65:11]
A
Let's Mix it up.
- [65:12]
B
So I'm gonna give. I'm gonna give the book. I'm actually gonna give the book 9.
- [65:18]
A
Nice. Good for you.
- [65:19]
B
I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it. I mean, I'm mad that I've given it more than I've given, like, Frankenstein or whatever, which is this great kind of canonical mon of a book.
- [65:28]
A
You go, girl.
- [65:28]
B
I'm gonna give this nine, and I'm gonna give the film a shocking six.
- [65:33]
A
Wow. Brutal.
- [65:36]
B
Yeah, go on. What about you?
- [65:38]
A
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. And the characters are superbly wrought. And it left its mark on me for months after I read it.
- [66:02]
B
Yeah, you were desperate to do it on this show.
- [66:04]
A
I was.
- [66:04]
B
And you talked about it loads.
- [66:05]
A
Yeah. So 10 from me. And then for the movie, I'm gonna give an 8.5.
- [66:11]
B
You'd have the 0.5s.
- [66:12]
A
I do. I do.
- [66:14]
B
Eight and a half. Okay, so brilliant. What are we doing next week?
- [66:18]
A
So next week we have a very different book. We have 1984 by George Orwell.
- [66:23]
B
God, I'm looking forward to. All right, so please get ahead with your reading. Send us your thoughts if you wish to read them. 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 listeners. Aren't we, Tabby?
- [66:39]
A
Yeah. And some suggestions for future books, because we're all ears.
- [66:42]
B
I'd love suggestions. I'd love nothing more. All right, on that bombshell, thank you very much, Tabby. Bye, everybody.
- [66:46]
A
Bye.