BY MAGGIE O’FARRELL Fiction
After You’d Gone
My Lover’s Lover
The Distance Between Us
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
The Hand That First Held Mine
Instructions for a Heatwave
This Must Be the Place
Hamnet Nonfiction
I Am, I Am, I Am
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2020 by Maggie O’Farrell
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Tinder Press, an imprint of Headline Publishing Group, a Hachette UK Company, London, in 2020.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: O’Farrell, Maggie, 1972– author.
Title: Hamnet / Maggie O’Farrell.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019030390 (print) | LCCN 2019030391 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780525657606 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525657613 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Fiction. | Shakespeare, Hamnet, 1585–1596—Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6065.F36 H35 2020 (print) | LCC PR6065.F36 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030390
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030391
Ebook ISBN 9780525657613
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover images: Boy with Flute by Christian Seybold (detail). bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Kunstsammlungen / Art Resource, NY; (feather) Juj Winn / Getty Images
Cover design by John Gall
ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
By Maggie O’Farrell
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Historical Note
Part I
Part II
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
A Note About the Author
To Will
HISTORICAL NOTE
In the 1580s, a couple living on Henley Street, Stratford, had three children: Susanna, then Hamnet and Judith, who were twins.
The boy, Hamnet, died in 1596, aged eleven.
Four years or so later, the father wrote a play called Hamlet.
I
He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone.
—Hamlet, Act IV, scene v
Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
—Steven Greenblatt, “The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet,” New York Review of Books (October 21, 2004)
A boy is coming down a flight of stairs.
The passage is narrow and twists back on itself. He takes each step slowly, sliding himself along the wall, his boots meeting each tread with a thud.
Near the bottom, he pauses for a moment, looking back the way he has come. Then, suddenly resolute, he leaps the final three stairs, as is his habit. He stumbles as he lands, falling to his knees on the flagstone floor.
It is a close, windless day in late summer, and the downstairs room is slashed by long strips of light. The sun glowers at him from outside, the windows latticed slabs of yellow, set into the plaster.
He gets up, rubbing his legs. He looks one way, up the stairs; he looks the other, unable to decide which way he should turn.
The room is empty, the fire ruminating in its grate, orange embers below soft, spiralling smoke. His injured kneecaps throb in time with his heartbeat. He stands with one hand resting on the latch of the door to the stairs, the scuffed leather tip of his boot raised, poised for motion, for flight. His hair, light-coloured, almost gold, rises up from his brow in tufts.
There is no one here.
He sighs, drawing in the warm, dusty air and moves through the room, out of the front door and on to the street. The noise of barrows, horses, vendors, people calling to each other, a man hurling a sack from an upper window doesn’t reach him. He wanders along the front of the house and into the neighbouring doorway.
The smell of his grandparents’ home is always the same: a mix of woodsmoke, polish, leather, wool. It is similar yet indefinably different from the adjoining two-roomed apartment, built by his grandfather in a narrow gap next to the larger house, where he lives with his mother and sisters. Sometimes he cannot understand why this might be. The two dwellings are, after all, separated by only a thin wattled wall but the air in each place is of a different ilk, a different scent, a different temperature.
This house whistles with draughts and eddies of air, with the tapping and hammering of his grandfather’s workshop, with the raps and calls of customers at the window, with the noise and welter of the courtyard out the back, with the sound of his uncles coming and going.
But not today. The boy stands in the passageway, listening for signs of occupation. He can see from here that the workshop, to his right, is empty, the stools at the benches vacant, the tools idle on the counters, a tray of abandoned gloves, like handprints, left out for all to see. The vending window is shut and bolted tight. There is no one in the dining hall, to his left. A stack of napkins is piled on the long table, an unlit candle, a heap of feathers. Nothing more.
He calls out, a cry of greeting, a questioning sound. Once, twice, he makes this noise. Then he cocks his head, listening for a response.
Nothing. Just the creaking of beams expanding gently in the sun, the sigh of air passing under doors, between rooms, the swish of linen drapes, the crack of the fire, the indefinable noise of a house at rest, empty.
His fingers tighten around the iron of the door handle. The heat of the day, even this late, causes sweat to express itself from the skin of his brow, down his back. The pain in his knees sharpens, twinges, then fades again.