Jeff O'Neill (3:02)

Hemnet by Maggie O', Farrell, that's the subject today. It's been out for 5ish years. It came out in 2020, March of 2020, as it, as it happens, and we all know it was happening then. And its subtitle a novel the Plague was both auspicious and misleading, which I think we're going to talk about in the course of the show today. But Hamnet, the book imagines the life of William Shakespeare and his family in sort of 1596 to 1599, this few year period. If you didn't know this, you know this now. And this is a true fact. And one of the great head scratchers in literary history that William Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet. And then that kid. I'm sorry, this is a spoiler for history, I guess. I don't think it's spoiled history.

Rebecca Schinsky (3:44)

It's on page one of the books.

Jeff O'Neill (3:46)

Yeah, I know, I'm kidding. But Hamlet dies presumably of the plague at age 11 in 1596. And then in 1599, Shakespeare writes Hamlet. Hamlet, the greatest play ever. I mean if there's, if there's going to be someone, if someone has to have that title, it's that we've talked about on zero to well read already and had a grand time doing it. You can go check that out in the backlist.

Jeff O'Neill (4:12)

But that's all we know. And if you know anything about Shakespeare, you probably know that he wrote Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet. And the next thing you know is we don't know that much about Shakespeare, which is one of the strangenesses of this. And Maggie o' Farrell picked this up and you know, the inciting incident for her was all the talk and there's also what little we know about Shakespeare hurts our understanding more than helps it because it just leads to more questions. One of the questions is why the hell was he living in London and making all this money? Because he bought the biggest house in Stratford eventually. And his family, Anne Hathaway, Agnes, which we'll talk about the difference or similarities there, stayed in Stratford. Eventually Shakespeare retires, moves back to Stratford on Avon. What's the nature of the relationship? We have no, we have. No, we really don't. Right. I mean, we really don't know anything at this point.

Rebecca Schinsky (4:57)

Marriages are a mystery in the best of times. This one is not documented in detail, but it opened up a rich space for, for Maggie o' Farrell's imagination.

Jeff O'Neill (5:07)

So, you know, the real Anne Hathaway is a few years older. She's 26. They got married when Shakespeare was 18. We don't know why. Right. And that's one thing Maggie of Earl picks up. But the thing she was really reacting against was that somehow the marriage is seen as necessarily acrimonious or estranged or something else like that. What if. What if it's not what it would look like if they were in a mature, complicated, loving.

Jeff O'Neill (5:33)

Relationship that had seen some stuff, Right. And at this particular moment, what happens? And that's basically. And then everything else is. She did some research. You know, Elizabethan England is very familiar on screen. We know what that looks like. We know what that looks like. We know what those streets look like in the houses and the costumes. But then she wants to paint a portrait of what if this relationship was something else? And it takes her into some extremely interesting places. Rebecca, I mean, beyond that, with the plot, what else do people need to know about the plot?

Rebecca Schinsky (6:01)

I think that's really it. It's a great exercise. What if I listened to some interviews with o' Farrell and she talked about coming across in her research Anne Hathaway's or Agnes, as she's known in the book, her father's will, and that she is named as Agnes in her father's will. And o' Farrell thought, well, surely her father better than anyone else would know what her actual name is. So let's call her Agnes. Let's try to imagine this person as a fully formed, like, you know, three dimensional character, as a real human woman where she's so often put to the side. And in stories about Shakespeare or even like last week I rewatched Shakespeare in Love and these assumptions, these like sort of pop culture assumptions that William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway had a rancorous marriage, that he was flagrantly cheating on her all the time, like, have made their way into other really popular works of media, like the Tom Stoppard play in the movie or like the movie that Tom Stoppard wrote for it. So o' Farrell is trying to center Agnes really, in a way, like, and. And I think the title in a couple of ways is misleading. That it's a hamnet named after a character who we know is from page one is going to die. That it's called a novel of the plague when the plague happens on a couple of pages. And also like the death happens near the end of the book, but is largely about o' Farrell trying to imagine what their life could have been like, as you were saying, if it wasn't. All of these rumors have made it out to be for centuries. And also, who was this person who was Anne Hathaway or who was Agnes and to give her, like, full treatment because she has gotten the shaft, like, almost all the way around. And o' Farrell does this for other women in history in her other books. Like, this is one of her particular concerns. But yeah, Hamlet. The Cliff Notes are. William Shakespeare had a son who died for unknown reasons. We think it's of the plague. His name was Hamnet, and four years later, Shakespeare writes Hamlet and it goes on to be, you know, the greatest play of all time. As a helpful note, Hamnet and Hamlet are the same thing in Elizabethan.

Jeff O'Neill (8:15)

I've got thoughts about this later. I don't know if you've looked ahead to our notes.

Rebecca Schinsky (8:18)

They're interchangeable. So if you, like, I until last week were like, why just change the one name or the one letter? He didn't change anything. They were used as the same thing. They're interchangeable in records. The same person might be referred to as Hamnet and Hamlet in different places. Shakespeare spelled his own name several different ways in record. Like, it's just not as static as what we think of as names and spelling today.

Jeff O'Neill (8:43)

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Rebecca Schinsky (9:08)

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Jeff O'Neill (9:42)

The hit series returns to Disney and Hulu. The danger the camp is under is greater than you can possibly imagine. For the key to our survival, three.

Rebecca Schinsky (9:52)

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Jeff O'Neill (9:59)

Percy Percy Jackson and the Olympians new Season 2 episode premiere December 10th on Disney plus and Hulu. Learn more at disneyplus.com what's on I think in terms of the historical project here, it's not really historical project. This is an imaginative project. It's a what one of those historical novels that some people do like a Ken Follett that does a bunch of research and is really looking for a structure to get this research and real details in there. I'm sure she's doing the work to make sure like the food and clothes is like accurate. But there's not. There's no secret journal she found or letters between them. There's, there's no stuff to make this into anything other than it is. And some people may find that more or less appealing. I have to imagine, I have to say that I find it extremely fascinating as an intellectual and artistic project, as a consumer and a reader and experiencer of it. To think of is what does this offer to think of it this way, what are the, what are these silences and gaps in the historical record allow us to imagine for ourselves given what we have and then also to think about the role of art and grief. Ofarroll Self has a child who has anaphylaxis is really extreme allergy. And if you know anyone like this, like it is serious business. Like you're on alert all the time.

Rebecca Schinsky (11:11)

Like there's a scary all the time.

Jeff O'Neill (11:12)

There's the same zip code. You're keeping the EpiPen. So the idea of a sudden child's death is I think at the forefront of her mind. At the time of the interview she gave at the publication of this, she was 47, which is my age right now I've got a 12 year old. Like this is something that is out there. And then in this world of Elizabeth England, pardon me, kids died more often younger but 11, if you could make it to like 2, 3 or 4, the mortality rates kind of look more modern. So it's not just, well, they were just Throwing them out as soon as they were born, whatever. So it's about that as well. And then a portrait of this woman, imagining the space for this woman where you don't really know anything. And so I think it tells us something about Ofarrell's own interest. What's the most interesting version of this for her, and then how she presents that to us. And I don't think it doesn't participate in the anti Stratfordians who Shakespeare really was. That's not the point of this. And if that's something you're looking for and you need, like, an answer or you need, like, this is not how it happened, if that's what you know, but what if you could imagine this as its own artistic space, like Hamlet, the play as its own artistic space.

Rebecca Schinsky (12:17)

And one of the, I think, most useful things and things that Maggie o' Farrell does on the page here is that Shakespeare is never referred to by name. Like, she's really trying to get around. And outside of the Shakespeare of it all, everyone else is named. All the other characters that we meet are named, but he is always referred to in terms of his relation to the other character. So he is the son, he is the husband, he is the father.

Rebecca Schinsky (12:42)

And he thinks of himself. We are inside every character's interiority. It's close, omniscient, third person. But he thinks of himself even in those own terms. In the rare cases that we spend time with him, most of the time that we're with characters on the page, we're not with Shakespeare. And Maggie o', Farrell, of course, knows that. We all know that's who that is, you know, from the jump. Everyone starting this book knows that the husband, the father, the son is William Shakespeare. But she's trying to take us outside of, like, all that cultural weight of everything we think we know about Shakespeare and all of the rumors and like all of the things that we imagine about him, all of the other representations, and it not really about Shakespeare at all. When Geraldine Brooks, the great novelist, reviewed Hamnet for the New York Times, she called it an exploration of marriage and grief written into the silent opacities of a life that is at once extremely famous and profoundly obscure. And she doesn't say whose life it is.

Jeff O'Neill (13:42)

Right. That's fascinating. Yeah. I think it just occurred to me that the characters in this book also don't know that William Shakespeare is capital W, capital S, William Shakespeare.

Rebecca Schinsky (13:52)

Because he's not yet.

Jeff O'Neill (13:53)

Because he's not. He's just Will or whatever. That he's not even referred to by name, pet name or whatever. And that is interesting. And Ofarrel treats Shakespeare not quite like the shark in Jaws, but a little bit like he'll come through. He's. He comes in quite late and lightly and then he leaves and comes back. Like we just sort of see him jump out of the water at a couple different places. And his presence there lends interest and gravity to the whole thing. I mean, that's one question I had for you is what is this book if William Shakespeare is a cobbler down the street? Right. And you know, the similar kinds of things happen. A. I don't think we're talking about it. I don't think it gets a book contract. And that's part of the realities of this. But we're going to talk about this again. But then the valence of art making and what art can and can't do. And one of the great questions in literary history, literary study, is how do you account for someone like Shakespeare historically and personally? And this is the most humanizing portrait I've seen. Because he has to be. He was just a guy. He just was. And here he's just a guy who. And we'll talk about the representation of his writing and what he's doing with the art. But like, this is the most just a guy Shakespeare you're ever gonna see. And somehow he's more Titanic because of it.

Rebecca Schinsky (15:09)

Right. He's 18, he's a Latin tutor, doesn't know what to do for these young boys. He falls in love with their older sister. They're knocking boots in the apple cel. One of the greatest scenes I've read in a long time. We can come back to that later. And she gets pregnant. And this was pretty common in Elizabethan England, I think. O' Farrell said in one of the interviews that like a third of couples, the woman was pregnant at the time of the wedding. They had this ritual called hand fasting that was kind of like being engaged.

Jeff O'Neill (15:42)

But it was a promise ring. But not quite somewhere between a promise ring and an engagement.

Rebecca Schinsky (15:46)

Yeah, but it wasn't verboten to be like. This was not thought of as like a shotgun wedding. It was not a taboo thing at. For the bride to be pregnant at the time of the wedding. So she gets pregnant, they decide to get married, and then he is still. He's just an 18 year old who all of a sudden has a child, has a wife who is older than him and more experienced. And she is the kind of like Stevie Nicks in Elizabethan England, you know, like witchy woman who's doing stuff with herbs and hanging out in the forest.

Jeff O'Neill (16:17)

And like picking stuff and boiling it.

Rebecca Schinsky (16:19)

Making poultices out, kicking his coverage. Like, dude has really outkicked his cover the time that they get married. And also has this horrible relationship with his father who is abusive. And I don't know how much of that is real or not. It doesn't really matter how much of.

Jeff O'Neill (16:35)

It is real or not. I don't, I couldn't see, I couldn't find. Maybe there's scant details.

Rebecca Schinsky (16:39)

Oh. Farrell imagines this at least like what it would be like for him to be bringing his new bride into his family home and knowing that, that, that anxiety that she's going to see me as just this little boy because of how my father treats me. And it's, it's so humanizing. And I think it's more effective than something that just like tries to imagine like a, a novel of young Shakespeare, you know, like, well, we got that.

Jeff O'Neill (17:05)

With Shakespeare in Love. Like that's the more fun, zany, the.

Rebecca Schinsky (17:08)

Foreshadowing of a young genius. Like, yeah, she's not interested in that at all. It's. It's very human. She's interested in the human parts of these people, not what they would go on to symbolize.

Jeff O'Neill (17:18)

Right. It was a hit pretty much right away. It won the Women's prize for fiction, which is given to the best full length novel written English by a woman of any nationality. And the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New York Times needed one of the top 10 books of 2020, which is Rebecca. And I have said this before. That's big deal. One of the ring of honor that you get into that and that becomes a historical record too. I think this is the most interesting 1. Number 22 on the new York Times readers favorite books of the 21st century so far. So the New York Times did their own, but then opened up to the readers and that's Tall Cotton Rebecca. And there's a little bit of recency bias, but it's really high up there. This is one of those, if you read it and you're available to like a literary fiction title, I think you like this book. Like for people that will read Little Friction. It's very recommendable, very, very easy to recommend.

Rebecca Schinsky (18:06)

But the subject matter and like how sad it is also makes it kind of surprising. Like one of my stray thoughts through the whole process and I said it to a who I know read the book at the time, but is the parent of twins. Like, I know you're not gonna come see Hamnet with me. She was like, absolutely not like that a book like this that is so sad could become that popular. And it was a huge book club hit. Like, this is heavy stuff. And I think o' Farrell makes it a little like she lightens the load by how lush the world is and how beautiful the writing is and also just how profoundly human these people are and it universal kind of experience that they're having. But that number 22 is high because that means that people had to sit down when they were completing that survey and think about like, this had to just come off the dome of what books do I love. And Hamnet was there.

Jeff O'Neill (19:03)

Number 30 on Goodreads, most popular books of that year. That's its own list we'll maybe get into at some point. And I summarized your notes here this way, which I think this did about a. Well, about as well as a book like this can possibly do, I think so.

Rebecca Schinsky (19:17)

I think that's right.

Jeff O'Neill (19:18)

It didn't win the Booker, so it's not an American title. So it's not eligible for the National Book Award of the Pulse or the ones that we. I guess it could have won the Booker. I didn't go back to look and see what it did there. But for all intents and purposes, this is the sort of 90th percentile, 99th percentile performance like a book like this. And I think it's warranted, I think. Is it the most difficult groundbreaking book of all time? No, it's not. I think there's a reason that it's. The readability is part of what goes into making a list like this, that New York Times readers favorite and some of these others. But that's not to say that it's easy necessarily, but from a reader's point of view, the import is there already. Shakespeare, Hamnet, Hamlet. That's just interesting, right?

Rebecca Schinsky (19:59)

Yeah.

Jeff O'Neill (19:59)

By its. On its face, that's a fascinating setup. But then she does it extremely well in a way that feels natural, inevitable and surprising at the same time. Is one feeling I had through the same time. Like, that's not what I was expecting when I read it for the first time. But then I was like, I don't think you could have done another way. You can't say. She says, you can't just write Will Shakespeare sits down to breakfast. Which I laughed out loud in the interview she gave because she's right. Like, you have to approach it obliquely. Otherwise, like, it's like gonna be looking at the sun or looking at Zeus's. True form, it's just gonna blind you to everything else around it. And she, she cares about the Shakespeare of it all, but she wants to allow some of the shine on the other characters and experiences there. Do you want to say something about. Oh good.

Rebecca Schinsky (20:37)

Well, I was gonna say along those lines, like about a book like this doing as well as a book like this can possibly do. Like this is the highest form of. About historical figures and especially like lesser acknowledged under acknowledged women in history because this is a whole sub genre. You know, there's like what about this famous scientist's wife? What about this famous, you know, war general's wife? And those are written to be like not quite potato chippy but closer to like the beach read closer to the typical lighter book club fare. They're kind of intended for like sit down with your book club and what would you have done if you were, you know, like Mrs. Whoever and O' Farrell elevates the form with like the level of writing, the level of craft here and the. The thoughtfulness of the detail really does make it I think best in class for what she's doing.

Jeff O'Neill (21:29)

Yeah, as you said, she. This is kind of o', Farrell's, you know, she's interested in these kinds of representations. She was a journalist first, which I think is always an interesting pre novelistic or artistic. Lots of research chops for a creative author. She herself contracted encephalitis when she was 8 and she was out of school for a while and you know, kind of left to her own devices pre device, you know, fell note books as kids do. She's Irish, born in 1972. So this is your first time reading it, right? It is. Talk about our first. So I mean you've talked a little bit already about your own experience, but from a, I don't know, from a reader's perspective. What was your reaction to what it was like to read this book?

Rebecca Schinsky (22:08)

Oh gosh, I loved it. I was not going anywhere near a novel of the plague in 2020. And I tend to stay away from fiction about famous people. It's something that I'm terribly interested in. If I care, I'd rather read a biography. So it needs to have special sauce for me to like want to read a novel that I know is about somebody who looms as large as Shakespeare does. I would have read this so much sooner if I had known how o' Farrell handles the Shakespeare of it all and that it is really like hot take in a just world. This book is called Agnes. Like in a just publishing Universe. The book is really. It's named for her. If I had really what the project was that she was doing. But I found the writing to just be like, it's wonderful and enchanting. And when I would read a couple of chapters and then get pulled away into my real life and have to sit back down and get back into the world, like, the transition between the book and the real world was pretty jarring in a way that I didn't want to leave this space that she's created, even knowing what's coming, even knowing how painful it's going to be. And also, I'm deeply in awe of everyone who has children and has survived reading this. Like, I don't know how you did this in 2020. Your son was this age.

Jeff O'Neill (23:24)

I didn't read it in hardback, though, as you might imagine. I was extraordinarily interested in the project, but I really wasn't reading that much at all in the early days of COVID like, just trying to get through it and homeschooling and all the things not homeschooling. Virtual school. Everyone remember. So I don't have to recount our collective Civil War stories here. But eventually. And then the reviews were so good and I heard so much about it that when it eventually came out in paperback, I picked it up and I read it it in pretty much one afternoon, sitting kind of like I went to the bathroom and made lunch and stuff. But that was what I did. I wasn't interrupted for a long stretch of time. And you know what? I did almost exactly the same thing over the weekend when the Thanksgiving break. I had some time and I just sat down while we were watching movies and hanging out and being sick on vacation is what happens when you travel in the holidays anymore. And it is enveloping and it reads, I'm not. It's not a page turner. It's one of those reading experiences hard to describe, but you just feel yourself being swept away by the sensibility and the perspective. And it's not that, you know, I mean, there's a couple places we actually want to know what's going to happen. Like, how are things going to click into place? But the satisfaction and the stimulating quality of the world that she builds because it's very unshowing. I have a note here and I should save it for later, but I'll say it now. Now it does exactly what Hamlet the play doesn't.

Rebecca Schinsky (24:48)

Same long.

Jeff O'Neill (24:50)

The Hamlet the play is big. And it's. I mean, even the beginnings I want to do like English, English major nerd corner. Like the beginnings are exactly the opposite. Where you have this one, the hamnet opens with this 11 year old hamnet just sort of walking through his world looking for the people in his life. Kind of, you know, know, walking down the road and the milkman or you know, basically that equivalent because his sister is sick and he realizes someone needs. He needs to find help for somebody. And you gently walk into the world, right? You sort of. It opens up through his eyes and he's not explaining anything because it's close third person omniscient. So he's not like, I need to explain this to this reader who's here. Like it's not doing that. And ends with the first line of dialogue being who's there? Like 12 pages in. And of course the first line of Hamlet is who's there? But it's people with swords and a ghost in a castle. And then, you know, and we wait to see Shakespeare in this play until a third of the way through. Shakespeare plays the ghost. So he's one of the first three people on the stage.

Rebecca Schinsky (25:52)

Like that is on the historical record. He played the ghost in the first production of Hamlet.

Jeff O'Neill (25:57)

And then Hamlet is big and showy in verbose. And o' Farrell gives us a couple of moments of dialogue between Agnes and Will, which I thought were delightful. I think she was really trying to channel, like this is the kind of people that could become someone that would look like Beatrice and Benedict in some of the comedies. Like, it's not that stylized but they have a repartee. You can see why they like each other, which I like. And then, you know, Hamlet is extremely plot driven. Like it's a. Like we talked about, it's a switch Swiss watch of plot where this and this and this and they all connect into this like really intricate web. This isn't. This is a novel of feeling and interiority and Hamlet's extraordinarily exteriority in performance. No one here is performing for anyone. Oh, the only person performing is really o' Farrell for us. But it feels very private and very intimate and in a way kind of secret, I would say at the same time.

Rebecca Schinsky (26:48)

Yeah, there's that like lots of moments of Agnes like wandering in the forest or being out in nature. And it. In a lot of ways the book feels like walking into the forest. Like the path unfolding in front of you, the light just hitting what the light hits next. And that it. We're in such good hands. I felt that the whole time I was reading. Like I don't know exactly what she's going to do next. But I know that Ofarrel has this under control, and I'm trusting that the path will be laid out and that the light will hit what the light is supposed to hit. Like, that the players will be on their marks when you're looking for them. And that sense, as a reader, is just one of, like. That's one of the best things that you can have as a reading experience is to feel yourself in those good hands. But I think I just want to highlight a couple of the words you used, like intimate and sacred. And there is this really, like, sanctified feeling about the book, about, like you feel like you are entering into a space. And that's an uncommon reading experience and very special when it happens that the world is lush and it's evocative and the way that she writes it is enveloping and it feels a little bit magical. And Agnes is either just very intuitive or has, like, slightly supernatural abilities. It doesn't really matter. We don't need to adjudicate it. But just that, like, everything feels enchanted and that everything can feel enchanted in a book about something so awful and so. So earthy and human is really incredible.

Jeff O'Neill (28:28)

I did think, and you highlighted in the notes here, that the birth scene in the forest is. Is quite powerful and beautiful and terrifying in its own way. She's by herself and it's very visceral. And I was thinking about the proximity of the very elemental. Right. Like she's in the forest giving birth by herself without drugs or midwife even. We kind of haven't invented science, frankly, at this. At this point. So there's really nowhere to go. And then you think how quickly it is to three years later, she is going to the globe. I don't actually know if it's a globe at this point. I should have done my homework. Remember where the first Hamlets were performed? Anyway, we're on the stage in London seeing one of the Titanic works. Like, the space between, like, the primeval forest and high culture is so close here. And that's something that really struck me. And, like, some of that is the Shakespeare of it all, like bronze, you know, holding the bronze statues and the whole cult of Shakespeare. But at this particular time in history, we were. We talked about this with the Hamlet episode on a precipice of a different kind of understanding. And in a way, we see in the space of a few years, you know, this woman giving birth by herself in the forest to a work of art that people still read and consider in a lot of ways feels very modern. It feels like the interior sensibilities of Hamlet are still with us. And we're not just that. We're just not that far from the forest here. Rebecca. I guess we're not a better way of putting.

Rebecca Schinsky (29:46)

One of the things people say in modern culture kind of with a nostalgia is like, oh, we used to live so much closer to the earth. We used to be so much more in touch with nature. And that's true. But I think Ofarrel is drawing a really fascinating tension about it. Like, yes, it can be very beautiful to live more in touch with nature. There are very beautiful parts about what Agnes experiences and what she's able to do. And just this connection, like she's giving birth alone in the forest because she wants to. She has escaped. She has run away from the people trying to keep her at home to be there with the midwife. She wants to be that grounded. But then they also like the cost of that time.

Jeff O'Neill (30:24)

You don't understand fleas, right? You just don't.

Rebecca Schinsky (30:27)

You don't understand fleas. They're like tying dried toads to people's bellies to try to cure the plague. Like, nothing will cure a person of nostalgia for ye olden times. Like, you know, I can just go get some Tamiflu, right?

Jeff O'Neill (30:41)

And yeah, when the plague doctor shows up, I mean, that's really struck me too.

Rebecca Schinsky (30:45)

The plague scares the hell out of him.

Jeff O'Neill (30:47)

We haven't talked about this, but the, the nuts and bolts here is that Hamnet has a twin sister, Judith, and she gets it first and she's got like the pustules and everyone knows what it is. And Agnes assumes that she's going to die because that's just what the mortality rate was. But then she survives. But, you know, Hamnet is all cuddled up close to her and in the middle of COVID People have to be saying, so what do you do? They have no miasma, they have no germ theory of disease. Like, it's. It's wild to think about, except the plague doctor shows up. And if you've ever seen like those plague matters, this is like bird like mass with this long protuberance which is sort of masking, if you think about it weirdly. And like that beat keeps them at a distance. And it probably actually did keep some doctors from the flea jumping on them. But it has this like, they're again, they're on the. On the verge of on the sense the plague doctors are trying to do something. They have some Medical knowledge, but they're also using toads. So like, it's. It's really the line between the rational and the occult is super blurry. And it may not exist in a lot of cases when you're tying toads to people. You said something here that I thought was really good is how, like this plague season allows for some moving back and forth. Right. Where Shakespeare has to come back and forth. I wonder what else you thought about, like, the plaguiness of it all. Because you. Like you said you were put off by the plague subtitle. And it is and isn't a book about the plague.

Rebecca Schinsky (32:08)

Yeah, I found there to be less plague than I was expecting. Like that it overflowed.

Jeff O'Neill (32:13)

And what were you expecting? What would have been the amount of plague you were expecting?

Rebecca Schinsky (32:18)

What is the appropriate amount of plague? I think I was expecting something where like almost every interaction or every scene was defined by the presence of the plague or the fear of the plague or like the way that the novels of COVID feel where it's like all that anybody is talking about or the thing that everyone is thinking about or that's lingering right behind them. And so that it opens with Hamnet going in search of his mom and adoption and whoever can help Judith. And we know later on that Hamnet is going to be the one to die. And so we come back around every now and then, you know, o' Farrell brings us back around, like, what's happening with Judith and Hamnet, he's taking care of her. How is she feeling? Eventually, Agnes makes it home. Now she's involved, she's on the scene. Other members of the family are helping. And then Hamnet lays down with Judith kind of to try to take it from her this like, twin connection that they have where he thinks he can maybe go in her place and also accidentally ends up fooling Agnes. She looks and she thinks that Judith is the one who's died first. But in between those, like the main beats of plaguiness is a whole lot of just them living life of Agnes, you know, having her little basically apothecary that she runs of what's going on in the family. Of all the drama between she, Shakespeare's father and Agnes's stepmother. And like, what's all the things that are happening in the town and Shakespeare eventually coming back and forth from London during the plague season. So I thought it was. It's defined by the plague. Like the action of the story only happens because of the plague. And so in that way it's fair to call it a novel of the plague. But it was less like page by page. It was less plaguey than I was expecting. And I was delighted to find that.

Jeff O'Neill (34:02)

I mean, if Hamnet gets kicked by a horse and dies, you could write the same. I mean, the book would be slightly different, but I think a lot of the beats would still be the same. Right. The name would be Hamnet and Hamlet and the motherhood representations and the sort of everydayness and grief and relationship, like all those things are still there. At the same time, I thought the. It reminds me of few books where you find the end really accelerating, but not for plot reasons. It's not like a mystery, but like the last 10 or 12 pages here, here, where what's happened is that Agnes finds out that Shakespeare has written a play called Hamlet. And he hasn't said anything to her about it. And who knows if he thought he never heard of it. Her relationship to his work is very murky. What she does and doesn't know, no idea. But she's very surprised and strikes out on her own to go to London to see the play. And since we know what Hamlet is, right, there's a little dramatic irony. And that's where we know more than the character does about what she's about to see. And I thought the. One of the more breathtaking reading experience I've had that I can remember is when she realizes that Will has instructed the actor playing Hamlet to act like Hamnet, to use his mannerisms, his hairstyle, his way of speaking. Again, we have no. This probably didn't happen.

Rebecca Schinsky (35:20)

This is all of Ferrell's imagination.

Jeff O'Neill (35:21)

It's all of Ferrell's imagination. But what an imaginative move it is. Because Shakespeare is using art to conjure right in the way that he can, in the way that art is the closest thing we have to real magic. You know, Stephen King or someone else said, like, you know, where he can bring his son forth and give him stuff to do and live a big play and a big experience and be immortalized. And then in the process, she sees the rest of the crowd be mesmerized. And she is mesmerized. And she has a look with Shakespeare, who's playing the ghost. And he says, remember me, because that's a ghost last line. You can't make this stuff, folks. That actually is how it happens in the play. And I found that whole, like, last 15 made pages to be just truly, truly special stuff. Like, really. And worth the price of it. I mean, the rest of the book is worth reading. But even if it was a slog to get to those last 15 pages, it was absolutely worth the number of licks you needed to get to the center of that Tootsie Roll Pop. Even the Tootsie Roll Pop itself was quite enjoyable.

Rebecca Schinsky (36:20)

I wholeheartedly second that emotion. I felt like o' Farrell all the way through uses pacing really masterfully. That the pace of the writing and the words themselves, how crammed together or spacious the language is, changes depending on the urgency that's happening in the scene. And as I say it out loud, this seems like a thing that should be a given. If you're a writer and you want to create a sense of urgency, you need to work with language that feels more urgent, but it's harder to do than it sounds. And she does it. She does it so beautifully. Like, that's so well done. It's all so imaginative. There's a chapter dedicated to her imagining how this one flea that bites Judith comes to be there. And that is. It's so cinematic. Like, you can. I never see the movie in my head when I read, and I could see this of, like, the boy on the dock playing with the monkey and the flea that jumps from the monkey onto him, and then how it makes it onto the ship and which of the rats gets it, and how, like, how many generations of rats we're onto by the time it's on the shore. And how, like, the one flea makes it into the box that makes its way to the village, and here's how Judas comes to encounter it. All those little details.

Jeff O'Neill (37:31)

Yeah, it's like.

Rebecca Schinsky (37:32)

It's just incredible. This is just an incredible work of imagination. And it goes to the full breadth of human experience from, like. From them having sex in the apple seller, which is a truly hilarious piece of writing. Like, to the deepest anguish that a.

Jeff O'Neill (37:50)

Person learned a lot about apple storage in Elizabeth, New England.

Rebecca Schinsky (37:53)

Is that what you were learning from that?

Jeff O'Neill (37:55)

Well, she didn't tell us much else.

Rebecca Schinsky (37:57)

There are a lot of apples, too. I had a real like, okay, you're holding on to a lot of apples.

Jeff O'Neill (38:01)

The winter is long.

Rebecca Schinsky (38:02)

Yeah. They have to be stored stem down.

Jeff O'Neill (38:06)

I'm sure people have done it. I didn't find it, though. And I. In a faro. I didn't see an interview where she talked directly about it, about how much she is evoking elements of the play Hamlet. Because you say there's that. That flea, kind of a flea, jumps off a boat in Venice and your kid dies. Sort of chaos theory element. Even though it's quite Logical. There's a scene in Hamlet, in the graveyard scene, where Hamlet's talking about how an emperor might go through the guts of a worm, which is very like. Which all connected and circular, right? Like, I was like, was she thinking about that in that particular moment? Was she thinking about. About, you know, speaking of the great story, you know, Hamlet having. He's, of course, had the. The idea he. Death has happened. You know, his father has died, and so he's grieving, much like him. Excuse me, I'm getting all my names confused. Much like Agnes and Will are grieving, right. But then later, he has a different kind of encounter with death, which is much more abstract, right? He's holding up the skull of York and talking about it. And then Agnes is crossing Tower Bridge and there's like. Like bodies in the Thames. I assume they've all died of plague, where death is present in much more abstract. Like, that's her version of holding the skull. I'm not really sure. Like, Agnes's witchy, ethereal grief has strong Ophelia vibes. Like, is ofarrell thinking about Shakespeare wrestling with Hamlet's grief.

Jeff O'Neill (39:26)

With his grief by putting her into the play as Ophelia, who we said in Hamlet, like, the cliche, the Taylor Swift version is this. Hopefully dies of a broken lyric love, broken heart. When really she dies after her father has been killed unceremoniously. Like, this idea of, like, is he worried about his. His wife dying because she's so sad? And he puts it into the. You know, Shakespeare puts that into the play because of art. Like, I'd love to know. Or is that happenstance? And it's just so interesting and beautiful that you can put those pieces together. I'm not sure which one I want it to be, but it's there. I think there's something that I want to know.

Rebecca Schinsky (39:58)

Like, you can close. Read the hell out of this. You can go on the Easter egg hunt. But there is something. Something really special about the mystery of it here. And that o' Farrell is, I think, really dwelling in that mystery with the like. With the what if of what. What could their lives have been like? And trying to answer that in a different way than anyone else has answered before. And, like, a lot of people have tried to answer this question. Shakespeare has been imagined by all kinds of artists and in all forms of media for. For basically as long as anyone has known who he was. But she invites us into that mystery. And I found myself holding kind of a tension of. I will both always picture Shakespeare and Agnes now the way that I imagined them while reading this book. And I kind of feel like I don't ever need to imagine them again. That the work, his work can stand on its own. And it certainly has. And it does. And. And I appreciate the opportunity to imagine, like, a real woman in his life and what her experience would have been like. And now I kind of feel like that's. I can just release it, like, let the butterflies go.

Jeff O'Neill (41:10)

Yeah. It couldn't be any more grounded. Right. I mean, these are real people. And, you know, there's. There's a paradox. One of the paradoxes of Shakespeare, probably the central one for me at least, is one of. One of two things has to be true. True. Either Shakespeare was like a 1 of 1 out of 5 billion intellectual genius that, like, just special. Special. Special beyond special can never happen again. The other version is he was a kind of a guy who did very well. Right. Which one of those is more interesting? And I think it's. That it's. One of those two things is more interesting than that one. We know for sure one of them is true. Is it more interesting that it's, you know, anyone can be a Jedi or it's just the Skywalkers. Right. It's. I think that both possibilities. Schrodinger, Shakespeare, kind of have to exist side by side. Is super fascinating. Of course, you know, John Keats said this is one of the great. Shakespeare's own great qualities, because negative capability, which is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time and not go crazy. And I'd go one step farther than Keats. I know everyone's waiting for me to build on Keats and improve upon him is to say that, like, let's see, it's not that you just go crazy, but you find that pleasurable, and you kind of knock them together and see what kind of sparks fly out of it. I think that's as fun as it gets as a consumer of art and ideas. Okay, I think we've done through the bulk of our own reactions. Rebecca, it's time for Stray Thoughts, everyone's favorite part of the program where I think we gave a nice full throated appreciation, explanation. Explication. What are the bits and pieces of the IKEA bookcase that we didn't go into the construction that we did.

Rebecca Schinsky (42:45)

I mean, I've already said. I do think it's kind of shocking that book clubs really took this up. Like, what were the book club meetings like? And I am not asking that rhetorically. If your book club read this I would like to hear about it. Zero to well. Read bookriot.com. like, did everybody just get drunk and rant about how Shakespeare was a jerk for leaving home after, like, after the kid died? In the book, this is what happens. Like, he dies, Hamnet dies. Shakespeare can't bear to be at home. He goes away to London. She's like, how can you think of leaving? You can get a book club meeting out of that. But also, I can imagine that, like, everyone just sits around and cries because you're thinking about your own children or the kids in your life. Like, how did you do this? How did you do it for fun? I need to know. I also really wondered if Maggie o' Farrell is sad that she didn't title this novel the Marriage Portrait. That was the title of her book that came after this.

Jeff O'Neill (43:35)

I think this is a perfect name for marketing reasons. Alone. Alone. It's just perfect. You can do no better. Because Hamnet. What? Hamlet? You can tell the story in 30 seconds. It's such a curiosity gap. I mean, maybe from a. What's on the box? Maybe you might be right. But I don't think she's sad that she sold a couple million copies of Hamlet. No.

Rebecca Schinsky (43:55)

At this point, it's a great title and.

Jeff O'Neill (43:57)

Yeah.

Rebecca Schinsky (43:58)

Truly lush. And like, I'm. I just kept thinking also about how glad I am that she wrote this before she lived through Covid. I feel like. Like a novel about this that was informed by a writer's own experience of living through a plague. It would have been a different book. It might have been more plaguey. Who knows? But I'm glad that this is the version that we got. What are you. What were you pondering?

Jeff O'Neill (44:22)

I have a note on your note. I think we overestimate sometimes the amount of thought that goes into book club selections. I've consulted with people in my life who are looking for book club books, and there's a lot of. I heard it was good. It's my turn to pick. Everyone's reading.

Rebecca Schinsky (44:33)

Got it. And then you're the one who made everybody read the book.

Jeff O'Neill (44:37)

Not necessarily. Yeah, but like, you know, you're the one that picked out a little life and you've got some consequences to pay there. Its own kind of light reading sprint. So one straight thought I had. And I've seen this a little bit anticipation of the movie. I didn't see this bandied about when the book came out because people reading the book, I think, realize that it's more complicated, this idea of grief porn. Speaking of a little life, right?

Rebecca Schinsky (44:57)

What is I've seen these headlines too.

Jeff O'Neill (44:59)

What does this look like? And I think it's an interesting question, like, what is a what works of art or whatever that are constructed to extract the most sadness out of you as a reading experience? And that's a powerful emotion and it can be quite cathartic. And some people enjoy it like they enjoy horror movies, but there's a sense that at some point it becomes an artistic manipulative and gratuitous. Like it's just, you know, it's kind of like just eating fun dip rather than a really nice dessert, right? Just eat the fun dip like it's just sugar with a sugar. Spoon. Spoon.

Jeff O'Neill (45:34)

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Rebecca Schinsky (46:04)

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Jeff O'Neill (46:34)

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Rebecca Schinsky (46:34)

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Jeff O'Neill (46:44)

Got it on.

Rebecca Schinsky (46:44)

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Jeff O'Neill (47:03)

What's the difference and why is it? Well, I don't want to tell anyone what they think, but I was thinking about this, right? Because it's certainly sad, but a I think the real life of it almost evacuates all of that accusation, right? Because, like, people actually do die. It is. It treats it Soberly and seriously. But it doesn't dwell or twist the knife in its own way. And I think it's also about something else. Like, there is some. There is something beyond the fun dip of sad that's present in the book. Now, clearly it's an important, important mixture of what's going on here. But like it, the story of Hamnet's death is not the story of this book. It's something that happens, that then characters live with, react to, process.

Jeff O'Neill (47:47)

More or less. And there's a trajectory to it. And that's what I was thinking. I was thinking about directionality. Like, anything that might be accused of being manipulative this way has sort of one direction that's only toward itself. But this is a directionally inward and then outward, which I just. I don't see the grief porn accusation, but I can see a version of this. This is quite a bit.

Rebecca Schinsky (48:04)

I haven't seen the film yet, so we'll see. Because I have seen those headlines about the movie. It also just makes a clicky headline. My experience of reading it is not that it's grief porn at all. Like, I didn't find it to be gratuitous. The. The idea of, like, grief porn or trauma porn reads to me as, like, characters or. Or writers, like, wallowing in it kind of. Or like enjoying something about the really difficult, negative, painful stuff. Maybe that does lead to catharsis where, like, where grief porn is where you get like, the people crying into their tick tocks about the book, you know, and that's not what o' Farrell is doing. The book doesn't open with the death and then spend 300 pages on how these people felt after their kid died. He dies very late in the book. It's mostly. This is. This is a portrait of a woman. It's a portrait about motherhood and womanhood and a relationship and marriage and family and art. And some of that is informed and fueled by loss. But, like, the vast majority of what happens on the page is not. And like. And I've also raised my eyebrows at those headlines, like, well, this is one of the reasons that we try to. We're talking about the book separately from a conversation about the movie, so we can. We'll see what that experience is. But I did not find this to be gratuitous at all.

Jeff O'Neill (49:30)

I agree, but I think it's an interesting question. Like, when you verge into manipulation or some other kind of not really hackiness, but like simplicity or. Or sort of base, like the death of Hamlet's child.

Rebecca Schinsky (49:43)

As written by Nicholas Sparks, might cross this line for me.

Jeff O'Neill (49:46)

The Notebook or something like that. I mean, yeah, that's not. That's not a terrible way to think about it. Like, where. Where. What's the end point? Right? Because according to, like, Aristotelian logic, like, a comedy is something where people are better off at the end and treasure when they're worse off at the end. Hard to say that Agnes and Will are. Are better off at the end, but something has come out of it. Something of inestimable, inarguable, durable quality and value. Like, we get something out of Hamlet's death is a weird stray thought that I had. Like, would our lives be worse if Hamlet survives and we don't get Hamlet according to Pharaoh? It's kind of an odd thought.

Rebecca Schinsky (50:18)

That is a good one.

Jeff O'Neill (50:19)

Something more like, Romeo and Juliet could be much more credibly accused of being grief porn because, like, they die, die, curtain. Like, that's as sad as it gets, right? Die, die, curtain is maybe an easier grief.

Rebecca Schinsky (50:30)

It just doesn't feel manipulative. Like, I think that you hit the right word there, that there's. For something to be grief porn, it requires a manipulation on the author's part. And all fiction is manipulating us. All art is manipulating us. But, like, how overt that is and how aware we are that it's happening is part of it. And o' Farrell is good. She's in her bag here. This is very well done. This is exactly how I want an artist to manipulate me. Like, if all of my reading experience has made me feel like this, that would be fine with me for the rest of my days.

Jeff O'Neill (51:00)

Manipulate me, baby. Yeah. Let's go into notable quotes. Rebecca.

Rebecca Schinsky (51:03)

Curtain.

Jeff O'Neill (51:05)

Death. Curtain. Notable quotes. Rebecca, where would you. What would you like to highlight here?

Rebecca Schinsky (51:09)

This is as Agnes is realizing that Hamnet is dying. 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, the unheard cry. Like, I'm gonna cry reading it again.

Jeff O'Neill (51:28)

Yeah, very tough.

Rebecca Schinsky (51:30)

Also real Joan Didion Greek stuff here. We recently read the Year of Magical Thinking together and talked about that on the Book Riot podcast. And this next one rang my bells for Didion. I find, he says, his voice still muffled, that I'm constantly wondering where he is, where he has gone. It is like a wheel ceaselessly turning at the back of my mind. Whatever I am doing, wherever I am, I'm thinking, where is he? Where is he? He. He can't have just vanished. He must be somewhere. All I have to do is find him. I look for him everywhere, in every street, in every crowd, in every audience. That's what I am doing. When I look out at them all, I try to find him or a version of him.

Rebecca Schinsky (52:11)

And there's. There's. There were so many moments in reading this where I felt like I just needed to sit there and like. Like, you just need to take a breath with. With the thought. And right at the end, like, I found the most beautiful stuff in Ofarrell's writing to be the pieces about the real, like, deep human feelings and the grief. But she's making the shroud for him. And it says she is a sailor stitching a sail, preparing a boat that will carry her son into the next world. Like, that's incredible writing.

Jeff O'Neill (52:43)

That's a really good stuff. I have something kind of on a similar tip. I think you had it above the notes that we jumped over where she. O' Farrell does a wonderful job of capturing the. The doubleness that can happen when you're going through a time of extreme feeling. You know, it could be good or bad, but, like, you feel yourself going through the thing. But then there's the other part of you that's also observing or multitasking or doing some other kind of processing here. Says seems split in two. Part of her gasps at the side of the bubos. The other part hears the gasps, observes it, notes it a gasp very well. Tears spring into the eyes of the first Agnes, and her heart gives a great thud in her chest, an animal hurling itself against its cage of bones. The other Agnes is ticking off the signs. Bubos, fever, deep sleep. The first Agnes is kissing her daughter on the forehead, on the cheeks, at the place where hair meets skin on her temple. The other is thinking. A poultice of crumb, red bread and roasted onion and boiled milk and mutton fat. A cordial of hips and powdered roux, Barrage and Woodbine. So one is like. Like feeling the feelings. The other one is like, we should do this. And here's what's next. And here's the sort of the. I don't know. It's not metacognition, but it's like meta emotioning, like two tracks of feeling happening in simultaneously, one layered on top of each other. And that, I think a lot of us can respond to that. If someone's in the hospital or you are sick or especially you've been injured or you've been in a car crash and time slowed down, you're like, oh, my God, I'm hitting that car. And like, oh, my God, I'm in a car crash. Like those things happen at the same time. And that Tunis is, you know, I don't know that it's universal, but anytime you can catch a glimpse of yourself in the writing of others, that's a special time.

Rebecca Schinsky (54:20)

Yeah.

Jeff O'Neill (54:22)

What else did you have? Anything else? I've got so much I'm trying to think.

Rebecca Schinsky (54:26)

I mean, we could quote this. Yeah, we could just quote this forever.

Jeff O'Neill (54:31)

I liked. I liked when beautiful. I liked when o' Farrell lets Hamnet. Excuse me, lets Agnes say the thing we're all thinking about Shakespeare going to London, right? He says. How can you think of leaving? She says, puzzled. What must she say to make him understand? Hamnet? She says, feeling the roundness of the word his name inside her mouth, the shape of air. Hamnet died. And it kind of hangs there. And she does eventually realize that he left because he has to deal with it in the way. Way he can. And Ofarrel portrays him as sort of going up into his bower of art and processing it through his monk like cell. And that part's really terrific too.

Rebecca Schinsky (55:11)

And he says that. That he'll come apart if he has to stay, that he can't bear it.

Jeff O'Neill (55:16)

Well, he left the first time because he didn't know what to do. He was at. He hadn't yet found his calling. And only through, you know, finding playwriting and art did he find, like he had purpose. Otherwise he was just kind of a shiftless guy that seemed perpetually unhappy, much like Hamlet in the Castle. Anyway, we could do this all day.

Rebecca Schinsky (55:32)

Just for like a taste of just some of the evocative writing. When Agnes is in the forest, the opening scene, she's tending to her bees because the bees have gotten out and they're like in the forest and they're.

Jeff O'Neill (55:42)

Not tending to the bees.

Rebecca Schinsky (55:45)

She lifts a bundle of smoldering rosemary and waves it gently over the comb, the smoke leaving a trail in the still August air. The bees lift in unison to swarm above her head a cloud with no edges, an airborne net that came, keeps casting out and casting itself. Just like you don't want to get the plague, but you kind of do want to live in this world that she's created.

Jeff O'Neill (56:11)

Yeah. I like also that Agnes identified in Shakespeare some spiritual intellectual recklessness. And when he comes back from London, she confronts him on and that confronts him, but sort of identifies and says, you are caught that place like a hook. You are caught by that place Like a hooked fish. What place? You mean London? This is Shakespeare saying. No, she says, the place in your head. I saw it once a long time ago. A whole country in there, a landscape. You have gone to that place and is now more real to you than anywhere else. Nothing can keep you from it. Not even the death of your own child. I see this, she says to him as she binds her wrists together with one of his hands, reaching down for the bag at his feet with the other. Don't think I don't. So I think that's in my notes, too. This is not one of those ideas where, like, Pharaoh's, like, actually, Shakespeare's wife wrote Hamlet. This is not that. No, but it is saying that this person was a peer to him. And if she didn't or couldn't do what he did on the stage, she saw him for who he was, more than we ever could. Whoever this person was real saw them better than we ever could.

Rebecca Schinsky (57:15)

That opening line to the sonnet about the marriage of two minds. Yes, and that o' Farrell presents this as a marriage of two. Two minds. That Agnes can hold her own, that she has her own knowledge, her own education, her own special talents in the world, her own way of seeing things. That she's on to him like she's not the little woman he left at home and now he's just running around in London. She gets to be. I've said it a couple of times here, but she gets to be fully formed. And so. So does he. Like both of their humanity is enriched and made more full by how. By especially how Agnes is presented.

Jeff O'Neill (57:51)

I feel like we've already kind of covered the. Is it for you? Or if it's not. But let's sort of hit the highlights anyway for you. If you do, like, a character study, I think that's the best way of understanding what's happening here. So interiority portraits of feeling move you. And if you're a Shakespeare nerd, like, if you like Shakespeare again, you will hit the maybe, not if. If you can let go of the truth or the facts or the specificity or even the probability, and allow yourself to wonder and dream and dwell in possibility more than causality, I think you'll have a really wonderful time here.

Rebecca Schinsky (58:20)

And on the flip side, you also don't really need to know anything about Shakespeare other than the stuff you have absorbed in the cultural water to. To appreciate this. You don't have to bring any real Shakespeare knowledge to it. It's maybe not for you if, like, the premise itself is a Trigger warning, right? If reading a book about a person losing their child is going to be a problem, like, this book is going to be a problem for you. This is just not the thing for you to pick up. Also, if you're a stickler for historical accuracy, because all of this, almost all of it is imagined. And I can just. I can imagine that that might be kind of torture for a certain kind of reader who wants things to be buttoned up and nailed down. And there is also physical abuse and family violence on the page. Shakespeare's father is abusive. The kids are terrified of him. It's like, it's right there. So if that's a thing that's difficult for you to read about, you should. You should know that it's a small scene, but it happens.

Jeff O'Neill (59:14)

The immortal questions are asked. Which of these are primary? Here's who we run through. What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Maybe a smaller slate of questions appropriate here, but how to deal with the certainty of death sure seems like the one. Sure seems like the one. Should we make a case? Or does it touch upon some of the others? Or is there a. Or is there another question that we haven't quite well articulated?

Rebecca Schinsky (59:43)

Well, I think what is the good life is embedded in this? As Agnes and the unnamed Shakespeare are negotiating the life they're going to have. Where are they going to live? Is he going to go to London? Like, she's the one who orchestrates the whole thing for him to go to London in the first place, because she sees that he is not enjoying his life. He needs to get out from under his father and, like, that influence and to be in a new environment. I think that that's what they're solving for. They have these kids, they love each other. It's passionate in the beginning, and that they are working through those questions, and then the certainty of death happens to them.

Jeff O'Neill (60:23)

I think you're right. What is the good life is the secondary one. Because they're. They're not rebels exactly, but they're willing to.

Rebecca Schinsky (60:30)

I mean, she's a bearded she.

Jeff O'Neill (60:31)

I mean, that's right. Like, she's not living in the. She's part of the community and she gets married. But, like, she's a stepdaughter and like, there's all this confusing stuff. And he's disobeying his father. So they're they're trying to figure out at the margin of acceptable life, they're.

Rebecca Schinsky (60:45)

Willing to be unconventional.

Jeff O'Neill (60:46)

Yeah, right, right. I think that. I think that's right. Are we sure this isn't how art.

Rebecca Schinsky (60:54)

I mean, this should be subtitled. Art is a mechanism for metabolizing pain.

Jeff O'Neill (61:00)

So I found myself thinking about that quite a bit after, like. Okay, so the straightforward. The more straightforward reading of this is that Shakespeare writes this plate to sort of, as you said, metabolism is a great word process. Deal with. Get the poison out of his system of. Of the grief. Right. Or try to. Try to incorporate it somehow.

Jeff O'Neill (61:23)

We don't know if it worked for him. Right. Our narrative of ends as soon as this play is over, essentially, or actually. Actually not when the play is over after we. We leave here. Because it kind of ends in the middle of the play.

Jeff O'Neill (61:37)

Is it metabolizing? Is it using it? You know, what he written of this same kind of stories, just slightly differently. Is this. He was already a playwright before this, right? He was. He didn't go off to London to write plays because of Hamlet.

Rebecca Schinsky (61:49)

He didn't become an artist because he was already Shakespeare.

Jeff O'Neill (61:51)

I mean, if we never got Hamlet, he's still Shakespeare and, you know, to 91% of, you know, what. What we're going to see from him. So I think it's clearly about art and writing, but I don't know that the question is as straightforward as, like, well, he used it to make one of the great works of art. And, you know, that's what. It's kind of like. That's what Shakespeare in Love does, right? Like, has this relationship and it lets him write this particular play, My Vile on the Far Shore. I think also her reaction to the art is fascinating. We get a moment of it. She's. She's no longer angry, right? Rebecca, when she sees it, but she is not healed. She doesn't seem thrilled. It's some other way of being. Right. It alters her state. And maybe that's all we can ask of art in a moment like this. Like.

Rebecca Schinsky (62:32)

Yeah, I think it does.

Jeff O'Neill (62:33)

It moves us from one place to the other. Maybe not be forward or up or better or through, but we're moved.

Rebecca Schinsky (62:39)

Like, yeah, it opens up and expands her understanding of him. Like, if you imagine the next chapter of the book, like, what would have happened if o' Farrell had taken us past the moment where Agnes sees the play? These two people now understand each other differently because she has seen that this is what he's been doing. Like, maybe he has been sleeping with other women while he's off in London. But he has also been creating this thing that to her looks like a way of metabolizing his pain. You know, one of the things o' Farrell said in an interview was that she imagined what it would have been like for Shakespeare to make the decision to name the play Hamlet and have to say his child's name and hear his child's name being called out over and over and over in rehearsals, and then to stand on stage and address someone playing a character who at least bears his child's name, if no other characteristics. But o' Farrell also gives the actor some of the characteristics of the kid. Like to see that from your spouse where you've been like. And like, kind of telling one story about what's going on. Like, she's got her interpretation. And after she sees this play, she cannot help but change and expand the interpretation. And art does that too. Like art, like seeing what another person has created gives us a window into who they are and how they're thinking about the world and also a new way of understanding ourselves as we go through that. And I think o' Farrell's interested in all of that.

Jeff O'Neill (64:08)

Yeah.

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Jeff O'Neill (64:39)

Yeah, it's almost like, is it a surprise he would write a play that touches upon his son's death in some ways? Or would it be more of a surprise if he didn't ever address it and it didn't affect him at all in his art making? Right. It's almost, if you put it that way, it's like, well, maybe not this, but of course it would have some effect on.

Rebecca Schinsky (64:54)

But that it's kind of oblique. Like it's. He has Hamnet's name. But o' Farrell also points out in a lot of the materials that Shakespeare never addresses addresses the plague. It hardly ever comes up in any of his work.

Jeff O'Neill (65:06)

He doesn't write contemporary stuff. Like, I mean, that's part of what he does is he doesn't write contemporary works. And so he's not writing to the current. And some of that's political and trying not to get censored or beheaded or stuff like that and say apolitical.

Rebecca Schinsky (65:17)

Definitely about art and writing.

Jeff O'Neill (65:19)

Yeah, it's definitely about art of reading. All right, clearly this. We should have an version with the Muppets, right? In our movie musical TV series, our Muppets.

Rebecca Schinsky (65:25)

This is a deranged one, like Agnes.

Jeff O'Neill (65:28)

Played by Jesse Buckley.

Rebecca Schinsky (65:31)

Everyone else is a Muppet.

Jeff O'Neill (65:32)

Everyone's a Muppet. Which Muppet is the most Shakespeare to you? Fozzie.

Rebecca Schinsky (65:40)

You cannot. We're not doing a Muppet. Child dying. I cannot handle it.

Jeff O'Neill (65:44)

Oh, no. They'd be real children dying with Muppets grieving them. That'd be fine.

Jeff O'Neill (65:50)

Yeah.

Rebecca Schinsky (65:50)

Deranged. There's not an equation of this that's not bonkers. And we're about to see what the.

Jeff O'Neill (65:56)

I didn't include. I have this in my straight thought notes, but I've skipped over it. I'll include it here. When I first read this and I heard there was a movie coming out, it was not obvious to me what kind of a movie was going to be. And I've seen a trailer. They've clearly added a bunch of dialogue and character interaction stuff because it. This says this itself. Just. This.

Jeff O'Neill (66:14)

Is not something a bunch of people are going to want to see in theater. I just don't think. I think we're going to get a lot more of Pedro Pascal and Jesse Buckley mucking around and having a good time.

Rebecca Schinsky (66:21)

Paul Mescal, not Pedro Pascal, God damn it.

Jeff O'Neill (66:24)

Every time. I don't know who anyone is. Which one's Hamlet? Hamlet, Hamnet.

Rebecca Schinsky (66:29)

It's a confusing moment. Paul Mescal's having. He's having a good time. I kind of disagree. I'm sure that they're adding dialogue. The book is light on dialogue. And to make a movie happen, you'll have to write more of that in. But the opening scene of Hamnet moving through the house and the town felt like it could be a long one shot to me. Like the bit, the chapter about how the plague makes its way, like the fleas jumping and, like making their way that we talked about that I could see coming across on screen. I could see her walking into the theater and him coming on the stage and her realizing what's happening. I don't know which ones of these are going to be in the movie, but like that. And maybe it's because I knew it was going to be a movie that I was trying to sort of Fill out that world as I was watching. But it read as pretty cinematic to me. Not in the way that that like sometimes you read a book and it feels like this was written with the intention of getting it adapted. And I did not have that feeling about Hamnet at all. It's not obvious, but I do think that she sees things. It's so detailed. Maybe that's what it is like the world is so lovingly detailed that it was easy for me to imagine.

Jeff O'Neill (67:35)

I think you're right. It is cinematic and visual. But in terms of narrative filmmaking, the bulk of this is interior feeling and thinking and that's difficult to put on the film.

Rebecca Schinsky (67:44)

Yeah, it's going to have to come.

Jeff O'Neill (67:45)

Out sometimes a lot of that interior will be expressed and they'll put, you know, different characters in combinations to do movie stuff with it.

Rebecca Schinsky (67:51)

I see your point. At least it's cinematic but not externalized in the way that like we're gonna have to imagine what these people sound like or when you read, you have to imagine what their conversations would be like. And we're going to be seeing that imagined onto on the screen.

Jeff O'Neill (68:06)

I'm gonna be preemptively mad about how much credit Chloe Zhao is going to get for him. I'm always pissed off about this. In adaptations where the author isn't the author of the source material is never given enough credit. Never ever, ever, ever, ever given enough credit.

Rebecca Schinsky (68:19)

Oh, Ferrell did co write the adaptation. So if it wins an Oscar like this is gonna go up for best adapted screenplay. It absolutely will. And at least she'll get to stand on stage and hold a trophy. If they win, it's gonna be this.

Jeff O'Neill (68:30)

In one battle if there's another for adapted screenplay. Unless they think, I mean, no, it's one battle will not get original screenplay. It'll be nominated, but it'll be a real one of the great head to head adapted screenplay play battles of all.

Rebecca Schinsky (68:40)

Frankenstein is out this year too. Like that's a whole other episode that we've got to do.

Jeff O'Neill (68:44)

Trivia adaptations, rumors, Mr. Tra, misattributed quotes, Etc. What have you got? We've talked about the ghost already, I guess.

Rebecca Schinsky (68:51)

Yeah. Just incredible that Shakespeare played the ghost in the first adaptation. I really loved learning that. I didn't know it until this week.

Jeff O'Neill (68:59)

We get two character names that are in Shakespeare's orbit in the book. Hamnet, Heming and Condal. They are the two people who after Shakespeare's death collected what was available of his plays together and published the first folio which is why any of us know Shakespeare. Okay, so little shouts to the bookmakers and secondary characters over there. Hot take. You already did yours. Or one of them.

Rebecca Schinsky (69:22)

Yeah. I mean, there's a version of this book that is called Agnes. Like, where we don't have the weight of Shakespeare, we don't have the weight of Hamlet. We don't have the weight of a publishing industry that likes books. Nature named about famous men. Like, I loved the Agnes of this book and the project that o' Farrell took on here. I think she was right, as you said, to name it Hamnet. It works for a million reasons. This is what. If you want to sell a book, you title it. But in my heart, this is a book about Agnes.

Jeff O'Neill (69:53)

Right. I've got a few here. I feel like the more you know about the play Hamlet, the less the hamnet equals Hamlet. Makes sense. Sense. I can. I can still hit with it. I don't mind it. But like, for example, there was an earlier version of the play called Amleth the Dane. Like it was already kind of named Hamlet. So it's still weird that he chose to do the play and his son, like, there's no getting around that. But even as I did some Easter egg and sort of cross pollinating. Close reading stuff earlier, it's not really about grief for your son. It's. It's. It's not there.

Rebecca Schinsky (70:24)

So it's not a straight line.

Jeff O'Neill (70:26)

Certainly it's not a straight line. And maybe that's better. But. But I think there's going to be people that come out of this think, wow, yeah, Hamlet was clearly inspired. It's like, no, it's. It's cool. It's cool that o' Farrell did this, but it's not like a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. It doesn't fit neatly in without a little forcing. I love the thought of imagining that Shakespeare wrote one of the most sprawling, diverse and encompassing characters as a substitute for his own son's brief life. Hamnet didn't get to do much, so Hamlet gets to do everything.

Rebecca Schinsky (70:55)

It's beautiful.

Jeff O'Neill (70:56)

All right, here's my real hot take. What's the deal with this Elizabethan spelling? Hamnet equals Hamlet. Those are completely different letters, like, but.

Rebecca Schinsky (71:04)

They haven't always been apparent.

Jeff O'Neill (71:05)

You cannot substitute for an infernal. And Agnes equals. And what are we. What are we doing here? At some point we have to say, this is. I guess they put toads on their belly. This is the spelling equivalent of putting toads on your belly. How bad would they have been at Passwords. That was my other thought.

Rebecca Schinsky (71:20)

Scrabble. Scrabble's important.

Jeff O'Neill (71:22)

We're awesome. Everything could be anything.

Rebecca Schinsky (71:26)

You can't agree on the wordle if you can't decide between Shakespeare, as you.

Jeff O'Neill (71:30)

Said, spelled his own name like seven different ways. And so that's why the anti Stratfordians think it's Francis Bacon or a time traveling cyborg. Because you've done us normies a favor and spelled your damn name the same way at least a few times so we don't have to do this crackpot stuff over.

Rebecca Schinsky (71:44)

Yeah, I loved seeing that scene in Shakespeare in Love when I watched it this week of him practicing his signature and even altering. Altering the spellings and like I'm going to be famous. So which. How am I going to do it when they want my autograph.

Jeff O'Neill (71:56)

Right. Read alikes. We got quite a few for this week. Nothing directly on the point, but you can take in a few different directions.

Rebecca Schinsky (72:02)

Yeah, there's a lot of places you can go from Hamnet. I think if you're interested in literature that sits with grief. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders is about as good as we've got in terms of fiction. And then for nonfiction, the Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Really wonderful. If you want to see more of Maggie O. Farrell's range. My favorite of her catalog, and I have no read them all, but my favorite is Instructions for a Heat Wave. Much more contemporary set with a family in Ireland during a legendary heat wave in the late 60s or early 70s. And they break down the way that people do when it's really hot outside and they're trapped together and everybody's secrets and stuff comes out. It's really fun. And it's just a totally different club in Maggie O. Farrell's bag to get to see her work with.

Jeff O'Neill (72:47)

Yeah, I took a couple different directions on the taking a figure in proximity to a famous work of art or artist. I think Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earling maybe was like patient zero in this move where the story is of the woman who was the object of Vermeer's painting Growth of Pearl Earring and then creates a story for her back and forth. It's sort of an O. Henry esque ending. It's quite beautiful. Was a huge talk about a huge book club, but book that one was really popular Also if you want more history of like women writers in the Elizabethan period and later and later in the Renaissance. Shakespeare's Sisters by Raymy Targoff was a big book a while ago. It's not actually about Shakespeare's sisters. It's. It's using the Shakespeare name and it's a provocative one, but portraits of four wheel real women who were writers or writing diaries or plays. That it wasn't just all dudes all the time. There were important and interesting contributions by women. And not as early, I don't think as 1596, but not. Not much later at the other time. And then, you know, to see what else can be done with a. Let's take a work of art and turn on its head and see what falls out. James by personal. Everett is a great. I love this, but it's like, what can you do, right? With a.

Jeff O'Neill (74:02)

Bank shot off the rail, back at a work of art and see what comes out. And I think both of these works.

Rebecca Schinsky (74:08)

That's a great one.

Jeff O'Neill (74:09)

Offer something in their own right. Of course they are reflected off the greatness of the work. They're, you know, they're mirroring, but they still shine at the same time. Three to five takeaways.

Rebecca Schinsky (74:20)

All right. Yeah, you gotta sum this up. I think you can very fairly tell people like this might not be what actually happened, but it feels true that Shakespeare would have transmuted grief from losing his son into a play about grief and madness and revenge. Even the revenge of Hamlet. It is an interesting component, the anger that underwrites it. Also, if you've been scared off by a novel of the plague or something that might tap into Covid feelings, this is not that book. Like they're not in a lockdown, they're not living in isolation. It's not an all consuming fear. And most of the action on the page is unrelated to the plague, so you can safely go there.

Jeff O'Neill (74:59)

Both Shakespeare and Hamlet in the play create a play in reaction to a loved one's death. Hamlet creates the mouse crack.

Rebecca Schinsky (75:08)

That's right.

Jeff O'Neill (75:09)

And I thought that was. That'll be a fun cocktail party. Note that there's plays within plays for both of them. I also, I think it's most helpful to think of this as a fable. Right. Rather than a Could it have happened? Not could have happened. I think that's a boring. That's a boring. I'm not interested in that. But like a fable, a what if alternate part of something. We don't know that it didn't happen, but like don't. I don't think it's helpful to try to like as a pruder, film it like this couldn't have happened or this definitely did. I'm so uninterested in that. And if that someone's doing that around the cocktail party after seeing Hamnet saying, well, it couldn't have happened this way, you know, you've got a real square on your hands, and you can tell.

Rebecca Schinsky (75:49)

Them that's a person you can't discuss art with.

Jeff O'Neill (75:51)

Yeah, that's right. All right, final beat. Zero to well read score. Each one gets a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Our five categories are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd read cred, and O damn factor. I think this will be one of our lower scoring ones on the whole. Not that we don't enjoy it, but historical importance. I mean, 22 on the New York Times readers. It's not a one. Is it a three?

Rebecca Schinsky (76:13)

I think it's a three. Yeah. And we'll see, like, we will see how enduring this is over time.

Jeff O'Neill (76:20)

That was one of these, I was gonna say, is that I think all of these could be notched up a point or two if this becomes the best picture winner, which seems like Has a real chance to do, like.

Rebecca Schinsky (76:30)

Yeah, yeah.

Jeff O'Neill (76:32)

Readability.

Rebecca Schinsky (76:34)

I think, like, it's high. I think it's high.

Jeff O'Neill (76:38)

No lower than an 8.

Rebecca Schinsky (76:39)

No lower than an 8. Like, the only knock on readability is the emotional subject matter, not the writing itself. So, yeah, I think an 8.

Jeff O'Neill (76:47)

Current relevance of central questions. I mean, we're all immortal now, so this is all passe.

Rebecca Schinsky (76:52)

I mean, this is a 10 forever. Like, the central question of what do we do with grief? How do we handle it?

Jeff O'Neill (76:58)

Right.

Rebecca Schinsky (76:58)

What happens in our families? Yeah.

Jeff O'Neill (77:00)

Book nerd read cred is an interesting one. Rebecca, what's your sense of this right now? If someone says to you, I've read Hamnet, you're like, oh, I mean, I.

Rebecca Schinsky (77:08)

Don'T think it's that unusual because it made number 22 on the book clubs, and all the book clubs have read it. It's also, like, it's not difficult. It's about to be very, like, even more well known than it is because of the Oscars. So I think that the read cred number is, like, pretty low. It's also not one of those books that if a book nerd says to you they haven't read it. You're like, how could you not. How could you not have read Hamnet? You know, it's not quite. It hasn't achieved that yet, but it could. I can imagine that happening.

Jeff O'Neill (77:36)

So five. So it's.

Rebecca Schinsky (77:38)

Yeah, right in the middle.

Jeff O'Neill (77:39)

A little this, little that. Oh, damn factor. Difficult one for me to. I mean the ending, like I said before, the ending is elite. That last 10 pages is elite, Rebecca.

Rebecca Schinsky (77:49)

And so that there, there are sentences here that. Yeah, let's give it an 8.

Jeff O'Neill (77:55)

8. Something like that. All right, 8. So we did 5. No. 3. 3, 8, 10. 5, 8. Not bad. Better than I thought initially. Yeah. Interesting. I think that wraps it up for us. You can find show notes@book riot.com listen shoot us an email at 02 well read bookriot.com 0to well read is a proud member of the Airwave podcast network. If you've got a moment to rate and review the show on Spotify Apple podcasts, maybe there's other places that you can give us five stars. Go to all the places you can to give us five stars there. And if you find yourself, if you did see the movie and you listen to this, I think Rebecca's gonna see it. I don't think I'm going. I'm really torn about seeing it. I'm more sad in the theater. I cannot take my darling that could not something that's gonna be a good situation for any of us. It would be a real weird thing to take my kids to I think at the same time but I would very very much interested in in listener reactions to the movie once they come out. Whether or not you've read the book from both even if you have or haven't I think reaction be very fascinating from everyone. Rebecca, real treat as always. Hamnet by Meg.

Rebecca Schinsky (79:03)

Thanks y'.

Jeff O'Neill (79:03)

All.

Jeff O'Neill (79:14)

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Rebecca Schinsky (79:22)

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Jeff O'Neill (79:25)

It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.

Rebecca Schinsky (79:29)

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