Maggie O'Farrell, HAMNET

[1:39]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zippy Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time To Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, My website is zibbyowens.com. Okay, now back to this amazing podcast. Welcome to another day of my June Book Blast. This is Historical Fiction Sunday. Listen to these amazing episodes of authors who have taken history and imagined what if it had happened this way or with these characters. Please enjoy. Maggie O'Farrell is the author of Hamnet. Born in Northern Ireland in 1972, Maggie O'Farrell grew up in Wales and Scotland and now lives in Edinburgh. Her most recent novel, Hamnet, won the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and was named one of the New York Times 10 best books of the year. She's also the author of The Hand That First Held Mine, which was the winner of the Costa Novel Award, Instructions for a Heatwave, This Must Be the Place, and I Am I Am I Am 17 Brushes with Death. Welcome, Maggie. Thank you so much for coming on moms don't have time to read books to discuss Hamnet, a novel of the plague. Thank you so much for having me, Zoby. It's a pleasure to be here. This is like the best written book I've read in so long. It is so good. I was just gripped from the first page. I've been hearing and hearing and hearing about how wonderful it was. And so I was like, no. It can't be that good. And it was amazing. So that's great. Congratulations.

[3:31]Maggie O'Farrell: Oh, well, thank you so much. I wish that I could ring you up every time I'm having a crisis of confidence with my writing. I wish I could just call you up and you could say that to me. You can just replay this. I'll send you the audio file at any time. You can just, you can make it your ringtone every time the phone rings, You know? I'm slightly overplaying it. That's certainly

[3:53]Zibby Owens: Yes. Yeah. Well, maybe just like an alarm ringtone, you know, once in a while or something. Anyway okay. So I read in the back how you came up with this whole idea. But why don't you tell listeners about what inspired you? How did you come up with this? And yeah, just tell me about the whole process of writing this book and everything. Well, it's a book that I wanted to write for a really long time. And I mean I actually originally first heard about the existence of Hamlet Shakespeare,

[4:20]Maggie O'Farrell: the boy, when I was at school and I was studying the play Hamlet for my Scottish tyres. So I was about 16 coming up to 17. And I had this really fantastic English teacher at high school who just mentioned in passing one day that Shakespeare had a son who was called Hamlet, died at the age of 11. And Shakespeare went on about four or five years later to write the play Hamlet. And I was just instantly struck by the similarity of these names and what did it mean? What did it mean for a man to call his play in his hero and the ghost, let's not forget, after his dead son? And I really remember, I have a strong memory of looking down at the school issue cover of the play on my desk and putting my finger over the L in the title and taking it off again thinking, well, it's the same name, you know. And when I went to university I studied literature and so I was reading a of books about Shakespeare. And I was always amazed how significant Hamnet, the sum, seemed to be to scholars and biographers of Shakespeare. You could read these big 400 page biographies of Shakespeare and Hamnet's lucky if he gets two mentions. His, you know, mention he was born, mention he's died. And there was a lot of sort of faffing about saying, you know, it's impossible to know whether or not Shakespeare was thinking of his son when he called the play Hamlet. To which I just wanted to say, well, are you serious? What are you talking about? You know, nobody, no writer in the world, they are the same name in Elizabethan times. They are interchangeable in Paris records. So what writer would casually just use the name of his dead son? He'd have to write it again and again in the manuscript, he'd have to hear it again and again in rehearsals. He'd have to speak it himself because there is a story that Shakespeare himself took the role of the ghost in Hamlet in the first production of The Globe. So you know, it doesn't even need to be said really that link is enormously significant. And so I just wanted to write this novel because I don't think enough people have heard about Hamlet. I don't think enough people know about him. His very short life has been so downplayed by history and he's been consigned to the margins, he's been consigned to the literary footnote at the bottom of the page. And I wanted to put him centre stage and give him a voice and a presence and say, you know, this child was important, he was grieved. Without him, we wouldn't have Hamlet. We probably wouldn't have Twelfth Night. Sorry, that's a very long answer.

[6:29]Zibby Owens: No, that's great. That's what this is No, no, I want the long answer. That's the whole point. But all the facts and things that you interwove with the story and things like which herbs they used when they were sick and all these little facts and things and the way that the streets looked and how it would be to get the physician and just like how you created the scene and even how you like took us inside the house and exactly what it looked like. It just how did you find all that information? Did you research it or was it part imagination, part research? Like you just created it so vividly.

[7:07]Maggie O'Farrell: Well, was a mixture actually. I mean, obviously a lot of it was library based research because there's no shortage of books about Shakespeare. You know, you could spend the rest of your life reading about him if you wanted to, and lots of people do. And also I went to Strathland Upon Avon, which I would urge anyone, if they're even slightly interested in Shakespeare or literature, obviously once it's allowed, just to go to Stratford Upon Avon because the Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust have bought all the houses that are related to Shakespeare. So you can what's extraordinary about this birthplace trust is that Shakespeare himself is a person who's quite mysterious. What we know about him is pretty scant. There are all these big gaps in his story despite the best efforts of the world's best biographers and scholars. There is still a lot about him we don't know. There are only six examples of his signature, which is extraordinary really, when you think about the wealth of work we have. But given all that, it's still possible if you go to Stratford, Malaben to buy a ticket and to walk into the house where he grew up. You can stand in the room where he was born. You can stand in his bedroom that he shared with his brothers. You can walk into the room where he ate his dinners every day. You know, it is a kind of hairs at the back of your neck moment because it seems so unlikely that this house, this building would have survived in an intervening five hundred years or whatever, four hundred-five hundred years. So obviously I spent a long time in Stratford in 2017. Went there in the autumn and walked around and around the houses and walked around his wife's house And I asked all the guides approximately 300 questions each. They were very, very patient with me. So I would say if you can, do go because it's a really, really incredible experience. But also particularly for the lives of the female characters in the book, because their lives, not only are they so obviously they're very undocumented that very few biographers will touch on the life of Shakespeare's wife and child and children, his three children, apart from criticising his wife, but we can talk about that later. So their lives are pretty shrouded. But also the women's lives are so, so distant from ours, to you Zibby, as women in the twenty first century. It's completely unknowable to us. Mary Shakespeare, William's mother, she gave birth to eight children, three of whom died very young. There were two girls before William was born, both of them died in infancy, and there was another girl, Anne, who died when she was seven. But then, you know, she had five children of pretty much regular, I mean eight births in one house. And so when William got married at the age of 18, he had a sister and then brothers going down, right, and then she also had, you know, Mary also had a toddler aged two when William was 18, which is I just find that unthinkable. I mean I've got a nearly 18 year old and the idea that I'd still be looking after the toddler as well makes me feel so exhausted. So you know, I think it's just also the idea that in that household, for the multiple generations living, just the sheer number of food you had to produce or laundry to do or keeping all these children well and alive and fed and educated. So I think in order to live their lives I did a bit more, I don't know, you'd say hands on research. So one of things I did, I found a recipe for Tudor bread and I made that just to try and get inside their skin in a way. And I also planted my own medicinal herb garden according to an Elizabethan layout, because I'd read that the women of the household would have had basic education on how to use herbs to cure minor ailments of everyone in the house. And the other thing I did for the character of Agnes, who's often better known as Anne Hathaway, William's wife, was I learnt to fly a kestrel. So I went down to the Scottish borders and to see a falconer and she let me fly her kestrel in the wood. I went on archaeological digs along the River Thames in London in the Tudor dumps and right outside the Globe Theatre. I was sifting through the mud and I found, particularly outside the Globe, lots and lots of brass pins, Tudor pins, that were used to fix their costumes, to fix their hair and to fix the ruffs and to pin everything on. So they were it felt absolutely amazing to have made that link through history and to pick these things out of the soil in front of the Globe Theatre. I still have them. I can't show you actually, I should have got them here, but they're in a different room. They are, they're very trupled and I keep them very carefully.

[11:14]Zibby Owens: Oh my gosh. That's amazing. Wow. I wonder what subject you're going to tackle next because like the in-depth, you can see it, you can feel it in like every page of this book, how much you know. And I don't know. It's just so transporting. Tell me a little more about Shakespeare's with his dad because I hadn't known I mean, I am not one of those people who has chosen to study Shakespeare for their entire lives and have not read his work since probably high school. So did he have this sort of abusive relationship? Was his father I mean, obviously, it must be true if you put it in your well, I mean, actually, I shouldn't say that. So is that true? Is that did that come from real life?

[11:54]Maggie O'Farrell: Well, to be very fair to John Shakespeare, who's William's father, I don't know if he was you know, in my novel I depict him as quite a violent and unpredictable man, a bit of a despot sort of tyrant in a sense. And to be fair, I don't know if that's true. That could be my invention. But there was a couple of things, you know, I think the I mean in contrast to William, who I was saying, you know, the paper trail for him is very scant. There are very few documents. The paper trail for John, William's father, is extraordinary. It's enormous. There are so many documents pertaining to John Shakespeare. And at the time, so basically what happened was he had been, John had been a very successful businessman in Stratford Upon Avon. He'd been the town's most successful blubber. And he had been a high alderman, was a very sort of honoured civic post. So he basically a bit like the town mayor at one point. And if you were a high alderman you've got special red robes to wear, you've got to sit in the front pew at the church. He was involved in a lot of legal matters. He was a bit like a judge or a mayor. But at the time when William was 18, just the time he married Harry, the family fortunes had taken a huge toll. So in those days you had to stick within your guild and within your trade and if you worked outside it, were running into huge legal problems. So he had started illegally trading in wool. Nobody quite knows why. He'd lost an awful lot of money, he'd run into a huge amount of debt. And there's all these documents where he was put, you know, he was stripped of his bailiff alderman title. And there was an account that I read saying he very rarely left the house at this point because he was so worried about running into his creditors and he owed money all over the town. And he was also fined, he also got into trouble with the law, not only for illegally trading, but also doing really peculiar things like, I mean it compulsory to attend church every single Sunday, So he was fined for not attending church, or he had to summoned to court for dumping what was described as 'audia' in the street right outside his house. Which, I mean, I don't even need to explain what 'audia' might be, but that's quite an odd thing to do, to dump that in the street outside your house. So I've just got the picture of this man who was quite erratic, whose behaviour was quite strange. And also, you know, drawing on the plays, there are a lot of sort of tyrannical, particularly ageing men whose ambition is their downfall, whose reach exceed their grasp. So I'm thinking of King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, whose temperaments are quite erratic, who swing from sort of rage and back again. So that's where I got it. But I should say it is possible that I owe the real John Shakespeare an apology. Maybe he was a lovely guy in the life of some of I doubt it. Party. I don't know. But in my book, he's a sad tyrant whose sort of ambition has been his downfall. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[16:40]Zibby Owens: Wow. Of course, at the heart of this whole story is the idea of how to get over the fear of losing a child and then what happens when that actually comes to pass. And I feel like I I feel like when I think about past generations, I'm like, oh, well, children used to pass away all the time. They couldn't have felt the way we feel about our children now. Right? There couldn't have been that they couldn't have loved them as intensely because how on earth could they have gone on when so often children passed away in every single family? And yet, that's completely not true. I've just like designed that in my head to rationalize it. But of course, it would be just as devastating then as it would be today. Tell me a little bit about how you got so into that feeling. I mean, as I was reading it, was thinking like, did Maggie have some sort of loss of her own? Is this your greatest fear? Where is all of this coming from? Well,

[17:36]Maggie O'Farrell: do think losing a child is probably every parent's most visceral fear, isn't it? I think it's the thing that we all absolutely dread. We almost can't even contemplate or think about it because it's so horrific. And I think it goes back to those biographies that I was saying that I read as a student. And even then, while I was a long way off from being a mum or a writer actually, I was really outraged by scholars who wrapped up Hamlet's death or sort of explained away Hamlet's death by talking about lots of statistics about child mortality in the sixteenth century, which of course was horrifyingly high. But I suppose I just refuse, like you actually, I refuse to believe that at any point in history, anywhere in the world, it's anything less than a catastrophe for a parent or for a family to lose a child. No matter how many times, poor Mary Shakespeare who had to bury three daughters, I don't believe that when she buried the third one it was any easier than it was burying the first one. I just think it must have ripped her in half, it must have done. I just refuse to believe there was anything less than devastating. So I think that was partly the engine behind my desire to write the book because I feel that, like I was saying, Hamlet's death is being downplayed and I wanted to say, I mean, you know, again going back to those scholars who say it's impossible to know whether or not Shakespeare how Shakespeare grieved his son, how could he not? And you really only have to read the opening scenes of the play Hamlet through that lens, through the lens of the loss of this boy to realise that the whole play is a huge expression of an immense amount of grief. And it's a message from a father in one realm to a son in another. Because of course, you know, the name Hamlet in the play is split into two. It's the son, it's the sort of young teenage son, grieving son, and it's the father who's dead, who's the ghost. And it doesn't take a psychiatrist to see what Shakespeare has done there. He's allowed the son to live and the son has grown up to be an adolescent and the father is dead and it's the son seeking the ghost of the father. I think that s what all parents want to do, you know, if your child is in pain or suffering or ill, you want to take it. You want to make some kind of odd superstitious bargain and say give me, give me that and spare them.

[19:44]Zibby Owens: And then you have like the whole added element of the book coming out in a pandemic when you are writing about the plague. And even the one mentioned where someone's wearing a mask and you're like, and they were like, does he really need to wear a mask? And yes, they believe it might help. And I was like, oh my gosh, that's like what's going on now. Yeah, well I certainly didn't see COVID,

[20:05]Maggie O'Farrell: if that's what you're asking. Yeah, I mean I think I just I was No, I'm not asking. I think it goes back to, obviously it's not known what the real Hamlet Shakespeare died of. His burial is recorded in the Paris records, but not the cause of death. But I think I just went back to the play and there's a speech in the play where the ghost is telling his son Hamlet how he died. He's describing the manner of his death and he's lying in an orchard and he describes his brother creeping up to him and pouring poison into his ear. But the description of the death, it's a really horrifying speech because he talks about the poison coursing through the gateways and alleys of his body and how painful it is. He says it's horrible, horrible, most horrible. And when I read that, I just thought it sounds like the Black Death. It sounds like the plague, the poison coursing through the body, agony of it, the suddenness of it. And I really hope, there's a part of me that really, really hopes that Shakespeare made that speech up, that it's entitled fiction, it's fictional. But I have a horrible feeling that it's Shakespeare describing Hamlet's death. And I find it almost because it just has you know, it's funny, I do think that in the play Hamlet, than in any of his other plays, he becomes visible to us A lot more there. I'm particularly thinking of, not only in of course the massive significance of the name of the hero, but there's a scene in which Hamlet himself has written a play and he's talking to the actors who are going to speak it and he instructs them on how to say it. He says you speak the words trippingly off the tongue and don't do this and don't do that. And when you read that scene you think oh my god, there he is, there's Shakespeare. That's Shakespeare talking to his players. And so I do wonder whether that speech of the ghost is also him and he's describing Hamlet's death. So it is painful when you read it through that understanding.

[21:53]Zibby Owens: Wow. Tell me about this part of Agnes's ability to touch between the finger, like this little I'm holding up my hand, nobody of course listening can hear that. But my thumb and my pointer finger, that little piece of flesh that Agnes can touch and kind of tell the future. Did you just make that up? I'm assuming.

[22:12]Maggie O'Farrell: I did make that up. And I was quite interested in the idea, you know, partly the character of Hamlet's mother. You know, I think I originally conceived the book has to be about fathers and sons as of course the play is about ghosts, you know, about the search for a ghost, the absence of presence and the presence of absence. But I became so enraged, actually is probably the only word, about how his mother has been treated by history. If Hamnet has been ignored and sidelined, the woman we know as Anne Hathaway has been vilified and criticised without any good reason actually. I became so shocked and so distracted in a sense about how historians and scholars and biographers and other novelists and writers of Oscar winning screenplays have treated her. We have constantly been fed one narrative about her, and that is that she was this older peasant woman who lured this boy genius into marriage, that he hated her, that he had to run away to London to get away from her, he regretted his marriage. And actually there isn't a single, single thread of evidence that I could find that supports that. And people will always talk about the second best bed behest in the will. But in a sense actually the will is a very dry document. And the second best bed is an interliniation. It's squeezed in between two other lines. And the will is a very dry, arid document. I mean the man was dying, let's not forget, probably of typhoid which is a particularly horrible death. But what has always spoke much louder to me is the fact, and this is a concrete evidenced fact, is that at the end of his career when he retired from the stage in London, he was an incredibly wealthy man. He was the equivalent of a multimillionaire. And he chose to go back to Stratford to live with her. And he sent all his money back to Stratford. He bought her an enormous mansion of a house. And none of those things to me suggest a man who hated his wife and regretted his marriage. So I was so furious about how she's been treated. And one of the documents I read was her father's wills, and in it he left her Agnes. And it was like a kind of lightning bolt moment for me because I thought, you know my God, on top of everything else have we been calling her by the Romaine for almost four hundred years. Know, it just seemed to exemplify how badly she's been treated, how misunderstood she's been. So I wanted to kind of ask, I wanted to reinvent her in a way and ask readers to forget everything they think they know about Shakespeare's wife and open themselves up to a new interpretation that perhaps it was a partnership, perhaps they did love each other. And you know, he certainly lived out his final years with her. But also I was interested in the idea of what he was like when they got married, he was 18, which was pretty young then, as it is now of course. And I was just trying to imagine what he would have been like at 18, how he would have been seen in rural Warwickshire Shire or in Stuttgart and Bunavy. We know now, of course, what he was capable of, how extraordinary he was, what his intellect and imagination was going to produce. But then I wonder whether he was seen as this kind of slightly feckless, trade less, unemployed, oddball maybe. And so I just thought maybe I like the idea maybe she saw something in him, you know, maybe that's why she married him. Because she was 26 when they got married. She was from a pretty respectable family. She had quite a good dowry. He, discussed, was from this family that had gone on the decline a bit. Their family was in a bit of trouble and their reputation had fallen. So I just like the idea that she chose him because she saw something in him. And so that's where the idea of her sort of insight into people came from. Wow, I love it. I love how you're making them into real people. I feel like historical figures,

[25:41]Zibby Owens: you you're like, oh, of course I know a little bit about them. But no, this is like their interior life and like the older woman and the younger man and the like, you know, the Latin scholar in the barn. I mean, this is like this is gonna be a great scene in a movie, which I'm sure this is gonna be a movie. Has it I haven't even researched.

[25:58]Maggie O'Farrell: Yes. Is it has this been optioned and everything? Yes. I mean, it it's it's been optioned, but I can't actually say at the moment because it's all a bit in the balance and it's there's lots of paperwork going on. So unfortunately, I'm sorry, I can't I'm not allowed to But do hopefully.

[26:13]Zibby Owens: I know we're almost out of time already, but I just had to mention that the one line that well, not the one line. Have, like, every other page is, like, dog eared. And now, of course, I've read nothing out loud to you. But the one part that really got to me perhaps because I have boy girl twins of my own was when the girl twin asks, of course, now I forget asks Magnus. She's like, I know that when it's an orphan, when you lose a when you lose your parents, you're called an orphan. But what is it called when you lose your twin? And that just like I was like, oh, that got me anyway. And she was like, there's, you know, there's no word for that. So anyway, just the emotion that's in this book, the family bonds, how she dealt, how she didn't get out of how it took like finding out about the play for her to have one of those days when she didn't get out of bed. And even though she had been able to keep the family afloat before then, Ugh. The way that grief works in this unpredictable, not linear way. It's it was I mean, it's just beautiful the way you did it. It was just really impressive. Really amazing.

[27:14]Maggie O'Farrell: Oh, well, you, Simon. You're welcome. What are you working on now? What are we going to see next from you? Well, am I've just actually yes, no, two days ago, finished the end of a first draft of a new book. So I'm feeling a bit weird now. I feel a bit sort of untethered. So thank you. But I can't, it's funny. I can't really say, I don't really like to say until I've actually really, really finished it. But what I can say is it is another historical book. And I'm sorry that leaves it wide open, I realise.

[27:43]Zibby Owens: Yes, that doesn't narrow it down too much. Thank you. But okay.

[27:47]Maggie O'Farrell: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors? I think what I wish I had known actually when I was starting out is that you don't have to begin at the beginning. I find beginnings of novels really hard. It's often the bit that I find I have to redraft and rework more than any other. But actually you don't need to come up with your zinger of a first line. You can worry about that later. Just dive in anywhere in the book. Can start at the end, you can start in the middle, you can start way in. Just get words down on paper. Don't worry too much. You can always go back and fix it later. Excellent.

[28:18]Zibby Owens: Love it. Well, thank you so much. Sorry, this internet connection wasn't perfect, but thanks for discussing Hamnet. All the work you put into it. All of it. It's just it will stay with me. It's beautiful. Well done. Oh, it was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Zoe, and have a good day. You too. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to part of my June Book Blast. I hope you enjoy it. Come back tomorrow for more. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram ZibbyOwens and momsdonthavetimetoreadbooks.

[28:54]Zibby Owens: and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.