Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

21:24On 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 it another way. 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, you have to approach it obliquely. Otherwise, it's like looking at the sun or looking at Zeus's true form. It's just going to blind you to everything else around it.

21:53And 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 it? Oh, good.

22:02Jeff:Well, I was going to say along those lines, about a book like this doing as well as a book like this can possibly do, this is the highest form of the what if 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 uh 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 fair 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.

22:41Jeff:Whoever. And O 'Farrell elevates the form with like the level of writing, the level of craft here, and the thoughtfulness of the detail really does make it, I think, best in class for what she's doing. Yeah. As you said, 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 artistic career. Got some research chops. For a creative author. She herself contracted encephalitis when she was eight and she was out of school for a while and, you know, kind of left to her own devices, pre-device, you know, felonaut books as kids do.

23:19She's Irish born in 1972. So this is your first time reading it, right? Let's 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 action to what it was like to read this book.

23:34Jeff:Oh my 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 just not 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 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 like it's named for her.

24:14Jeff:If I had known 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 when your son was this age.

24:49I 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 remembers, 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 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.

25:21I 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. It's not a page turner. It's one of those reading experiences that's 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 of places we actually want to know what's going to happen.

25:55Like, 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 unshowy. And I have a note here, and I should save it for later, but I'll say it now. It does exactly what Hamlet the play doesn't.

26:13Jeff:Say more. The Hamlet the play is big, and it's, I mean, even the beginnings, I want to do like English major nerd corner. Like the beginnings are exactly the opposite. where you have this one boy, 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 walking down the road and the milkman, or basically that equivalent, because his sister is sick and he realizes he needs to find help for somebody. And you gently walk into the world, right? It opens up through his eyes, and he's not explaining anything because it's close third-person omniscient.

26:52So 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.

27:18Jeff:That is on the historical record. He played the ghost in the first production of Hamlet. and then Hamlet is big and showy and 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 it. 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 we've talked about, it's a Swiss watch of plot where this and this and this, and they all connect into this really intricate web.

27:56This isn't. This is a novel of feeling and interiority, and Hamlet's extraordinarily exteriority in performance. No one here is performing for anyone. The only person performing is really O 'Farrell for us, but it feels very private and very intimate. And in a way kind of sacred, I would say, at the same time.

28:13Jeff:Yeah, there's that, like, lots of moments of Agnes, like wandering in the forest or being out in nature. and 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 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 O 'Farrell 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 use 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.

29:40Jeff:But just that everything feels enchanted and that everything can feel enchanted in a book about something so awful and so earthy and human is really incredible. I did think, and you highlighted in the notes here that the birth scene in the forest 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 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.

30:21I don't actually know if it's a globe at this point. I should have done my homework and remember where the first Hamlets were performed. Anyway, we're on the stage in London, seeing one of the Titanic works. The space between 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.

30:53And 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 just not that far from the forest here, Rebecca, I guess that's a better way of putting it.

31:11Jeff: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 O 'Farrell 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.

31:43Jeff:She wants to be that grounded. But then they also like the cost of that time. You don't understand fleas. You just don't. 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. Yeah, when the plague doctor shows up, I mean, that's what really struck me too. The plague - Scares the hell out of them, yeah. We haven't talked about this, but 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.

32:22And Agnes assumes that she's going to die because that's just what the mortality rate was. But then she survives, but Hamnet is all cuddled up close to her. And in the middle of COVID, but people have to be saying, so what do you do? They have no miasma. They have no germ theory of disease. Like it's wild to think about, except the plague doctor shows up. And if you've ever seen like those plague masks, this is like bird-like masks 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.

32:53But it has this like, again, they're 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 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 plaguingness of it all. Because you said you were put off by the plague subtitle.

33:32And it is and isn't a book about the plague.

33:33Jeff:Yeah, I found there to be less plague than I was expecting. Like that it opens. And what were you expecting? What would have been the amount of plague you were expecting? 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 a doctor and whoever can help Judith.

34:10Jeff: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.

34:47Jeff:But in between those, like the main beats of plagueness 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 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.

35:21Jeff:But it was less, like page by page, it was less plaguey than I was expecting. And I was delighted to find that. 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 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.

36:06And who knows if he thought she'd never heard of it. Her relationship to his work is very murky. What she does and doesn't. No, 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 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 Hamlet, to use his mannerisms, his hairstyle, his way of speaking.

36:43Again, this probably didn't happen. This is all O 'Farrell's imagination. It's all O 'Farrell's imagination. But what an imaginative move it is because Shakespeare is using art to conjure in the way that he can, in the way that art is the closest thing we have to real magic, Stephen King or someone else, 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 that 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.

37:23You can't make this stuff, folks. That actually is how it happens in the play. And I found that whole like last 15 pages to be just truly, truly special stuff, like really remote 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.

37:45Jeff: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 like 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.

38:31Jeff: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 were 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. Yeah. Like, 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 cellar, which is a truly hilarious piece of writing, like, to the deepest anguish that a person learned a lot about apple storage in Elizabethan, England.

39:18Jeff:Is that what you were learning? She didn't tell us much else. There are a lot of apples, too. I had a real like, okay you're holding on to a lot of apples the winter is long yeah they have to be stored stimmed down i'm sure people have done it i didn't find it though and i in a fair i didn't see an interview where she talked directly about about how much she is evoking elements of the play hamlet um 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 is all connected and circular, right?

39:58I was like, was she thinking about that in that particular moment? Was she thinking about, you know, speaking of the great story, you know, Hamlet having, he's of course had the idea, 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 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.

40:37I'm not really sure, like Agnes's witchy, ethereal grief has strong Ophelia vibes? Like is O 'Farrell thinking about Shakespeare wrestling with Hamlet's grief? 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 Ophelia dies of a broken heart when really she dies after her father has been killed unceremoniously. Like this idea of like, is he worried about 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 that happenstance.

41:16And 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 so many interesting tendrils. And I'm not sure that I want to know.

41:23Jeff:I don't want to know. You could close read the hell out of this. You can go on the Easter egg hunt, but there is something really special about the mystery of it here. And that O 'Farrell is, I think, really dwelling in that mystery with the what if, of what could their lives have been like and trying to answer that in a different way than anyone else has answered before. And 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 basically as long as anyone has known who he was. But she invites us into that mystery.

41:58And I found myself holding kind of a tension of,

42:03Jeff: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. Like that the work, his work can stand on its own. And it certainly has and it does. 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. Yeah, it couldn't be any more grounded, right? I mean, these are real people. And, you know, there's a paradox, one of the paradoxes of Shakespeare, probably the central one for me, at least, is one of two things has to be true.

42:48Either Shakespeare was like a one out of five 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 one of 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 Skywalker? I think that both possibilities, Schrodinger, Shakespeare, kind of have to exist side by side is super fascinating. Of course, John Keats said this is one of Shakespeare's own great qualities of negative capability, which is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time and not go crazy.

43:33And I'd go one step farther than Keats. I know everyone's waiting for me to build on Keats and improve upon him. It's to say that 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 right there?

44:11Jeff: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 at 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.

44:42Jeff: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. I think this is a perfect name for marketing reasons alone. It's just perfect. You can do no better because hamlet 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 ham no at this point it's a great title and yeah 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.

45:38Jeff: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 were you pondering? 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 this book. And then you're the one who made everybody read the book about kids dying. No, not necessarily. Yeah. But like, you know, you're the one that picked out a little life.

46:05and you've got some consequences to pay there, its own kind of light reading experience. So one straight thought I had, and I've seen this a little bit in 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? I've seen these headlines too. What does this look like? And I think it's an interesting question. Like 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.

46:42And some people enjoy it like they enjoy horror movies. But there's a sense that at some point it becomes unartistic and 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. It's just sugar with a sugar spoon. 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 treats it soberly and seriously, but it doesn't dwell or twist the knife in its own way.

47:21And I think it's also about something else. Like there is something beyond the fun dip of sad that's present in the book. Now, clearly it's an important mixture of what's going on here. But 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 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 don't see the grief porn an accusation, but I can see a version of this is quite a bit.

47:59Jeff: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 idea of like grief porn or trauma porn reads to me as like characters 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. Grief porn is where you get the people crying into their TikToks about the book. 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.

48:43Jeff:He dies very late in the book. It's mostly, 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 um i agree but it's i think it's an interesting question like when you verge into manipulation or some other kind of not really hacking this but like simplicity or or sort of base like the death of hamlet's child as written by nicholas sparks might cross this line for me the notebook or something like i mean yeah that's not that's not a terrible way to think about it.

49:46What's the end point, right? Because according to Aristotelian logic, 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 better off at the end, but something has come out of it, something of inestimable, inarguable, durable quality and value. We get something out of Hamlet's death is a weird, stray thought that I had. Would our lives be worse if Hamlet survives and we don't get Hamlet according to Farrell? It's kind of an odd thought. But something more like Romeo and Juliet could be much more credibly accused of being grief porn because like they die, die curtain.

50:19Like that's as sad as it gets, right? Die, die curtain is maybe an easier grief porn accusation.

50:25Jeff:It just doesn't feel manipulative. Like I think that you hit the right word there that there's in for something to be grief porn, it requires that like 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 experiences made me feel like this, that would be fine with me for the rest of my days. Manipulate me, baby. Yeah.

50:57Let's go to notable quotes, Rebecca. Death, death curtain. Notable quotes, Rebecca. What would you like to highlight here?

51:03Jeff: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 going to cry reading it again. Yeah, very tough. Also, real Joan Didion grief 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 is gone.

51:42Jeff: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 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 the mall. I try to find him or a version of him. And 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 the thought. And right at the end, like I found the most beautiful stuff in O 'Farrell's writing to be the pieces about the real like deep human feelings and the grief.

52:25Jeff: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. That's 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 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 agnes seems split in two part of her gasps at the side of the bubo's the other part hears the gasp 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, buboes, fever, deep sleep.

53:22The 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 rue, barrage and woodbine. So one is like feeling the feelings. The other one is like, we should do this. And here's what's next. And here's the, these are 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 I think a lot of us can respond to that.

53:58If someone's in the hospital or you are sick, or especially if you've been injured or you've been in a car crash and time slowed down, and you're like, oh my God, I'm hitting that car. And you're like, oh my God, I'm in a car crash. Those things happen at the same time. And that two-ness is, 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. Yeah. What else did you have? Anything else? I've got so much. I'm trying to think what I want to.

54:21Jeff:I mean, we could quote this. Yeah. We could just quote this forever. I liked when O 'Farrell 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 hair. 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 he can and O 'Farrell 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 and he says that that he'll come apart if he has to stay that he can't bear it well and 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 finding playwriting and art did he find he had purpose.

55:21Otherwise, he was just kind of a shiftless guy that seemed perpetually unhappy, much like Hamlet in the cast. Anyway, we could do this all day.

55:27Jeff:Just for a taste of just some of the evocative writing from when Agnes is in the forest. The opening scene, she's tending to her bees because the bees have gotten out and they're in the forest and they're not. It's a great sequence, the tending to the bees. 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 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.

56:06Yeah, I like also that Agnes identified in Shakespeare some spiritual, intellectual retlessness. And when he comes back from London, she confronts him on it. And that confronts him, but sort of identifies and says, 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 wrist together with one of his hands, reaching down for the bag at his feet with the other, don't think I don't.

56:47So I think that's... In my notes, too. This is not one of those ideas where like, Cheryl'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.

57:10Jeff:That opening line to the sonnet about the marriage of two minds. Yes. And that O 'Farrell presents this as a marriage of 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 does he. Like both of their humanity is enriched and made more full by how, by especially how Agnes is presented.

57:45I 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. And so interiority, portraits of feeling move you. And if you're a Shakespeare nerd, like if you like Shakespeare, again, we'll hit that. Maybe not. 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.

58:15Jeff: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 appreciate this. You don't have to bring any real Shakespeare knowledge to it. It's maybe not for you. The premise itself is a trigger warning, right? If reading a book about a person losing their child is going to be a problem, 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.

58:54Jeff: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 the immortal questions aren't asked which of these are primary here's we run through what is the good life what do i own 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.

59:31Should we make a case or does it touch upon some of the others? Or is there another question that we haven't quite articulated?

59:37Jeff: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? 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.

1:00:14Jeff:And then the certainty of death happens to them. I think you're right. I think what is the good life is the secondary one, because they're, they're not rebels exactly, but they're willing to trouble the edge. I mean, she's a weirdo. Agnes is a stone-cold weirdo. 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 trying to figure out at the margin of acceptable life something that works for them. They're willing to be unconventional. Yeah, right, right.

1:00:42I think that's right. Are we sure this is the Howard and Ryan?

1:00:48Jeff:I mean, this should be subtitled art is a mechanism for metabolizing pain. 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, metabolizing is a great word, process, deal with, get the poison out of his system of the grief, right? Or try to incorporate it somehow. we don't know if it worked for him right our narrative ends as soon as this play is over essentially or actually actually it's not when the play is over after we we leave here because it's kind of ends in the middle of the play 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 uh he didn't become an artist because he was already shake 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 love does right like has this relationship and it lets him write this particular play my viola on the far shore.

1:02:08I think also her reaction to the art is fascinating. We get a moment of it. 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. It moves us from one place to the other, maybe not be forward or up or better or through, but we're moved from one place to the other.

1:02:34Jeff: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.

1:03:30Jeff:But O 'Farrell also gives the the actor, some of the characteristics of the kid, like, to see that from your spouse, where you've been 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. Yeah. Study and play.

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1:04:53Jeff:I'll never work again if anyone found out. My lips are sealed. Marvel Television's Wonder Man. All eight episodes now streaming only on Disney+. 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 a feeling human. But that it's kind of oblique. He has Hamnet's name, but O 'Farrell also points out in a lot of the materials that Shakespeare never addresses the plague.

1:05:28Jeff:and it hardly ever comes up in any of his work. 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. Some of that's political and trying not to get censored or beheaded or stuff like that and stay apolitical. It's definitely about art and writing. Yeah, it's definitely about art and reading. All right, clearly this, we should have a version with the Muppets, right? In our movie and musical TV series, our Muppets. This is deranged. This is a deranged one. Agnes is played by Jesse Buckley. And everyone else is a Muppet.

1:05:57Everyone's a Muppet. No.

1:05:59Jeff:I can't do it. Which Muppet is the most Shakespeare to you? Fozzie? You cannot. We're not doing a Muppet child dying. I cannot handle it. Oh, no. They'd be real children dying with Muppets grieving them. That'd be fine. Yeah. Deranged. There's not an equation of this that's not bonkers. And we're about to see what the adaptation does. I have this in my straight thought notes, but I 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 it was going to be. Oh, really? And I've seen a trailer. They've clearly added a bunch of dialogue and character interaction stuff because this itself, just this, is not something a bunch of people are going to want to see in theater.

1:06:41I 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. Paul Meskel, not Pedro Pascal. God damn it. Every time. I don't know who anyone is. Which one's Hamlet? Hamlet? Hamlet?

1:06:55Jeff:It's a confusing moment. Paul Meskel's having... He's having a good time. I kind of disagree. Like, I'm sure that they're adding dialogue. Like, the book is light on dialogue. And to make a movie happen, you'll have to write more of that in. But, like, 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.

1:07:31Jeff: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 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. I think you're right.

1:08:01It 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 a film.

1:08:09Jeff:Yeah, it's going to have to come out somehow. A lot of that interior will be expressed and they'll put different characters and combinations to do movie stuff with it. I see your point, at least. It's cinematic, but not externalized in the way that like, we're going to 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 screen. I'm going to be preemptively mad about how much credit Chloe Zhao is going to get for Hamnet. I'm always pissed off about this in adaptations where the author isn't.

1:08:39The author of the source material has never given enough credit. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever given enough credit.

1:08:44Jeff:Oh, Farrell did co-write the adaptation. So if it wins an Oscar, like this is going to 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 going to be this and one battle unless there's another for adapted screenplay. It is. Unless they think, I mean, no, it's one battle. It will not get original screenplay. It'll be nominated, but it'll be a real, one of the great head-to-head adapted screenplay battles of all time. And Frankenstein is out this year too. Like that's a whole other episode that we've got to do. Trivia adaptations, rumors, misattributed quotes, et cetera.

1:09:13What have you got? We've talked about the ghost already, I guess.

1:09:16Jeff: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. We get two character names that are in Shakespeare's orbit in the book, Hemning 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. So little shouts to the bookmakers and secondary characters over there. Hot take. You already did yours, or one of them. 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 named about famous men.

1:10:00Jeff: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. Right. I've got a few here. I feel like the more you know about the play Hamlet, the less the Hamlet equals Hamlet makes sense. 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.

1:10:39But 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 not there.

1:10:50Jeff:It's not a straight line. It's not a straight line. And maybe that's better. 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 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. It's beautiful. All right, here's my real hot take.

1:11:22What's the deal with this Elizabethan spelling? Hamnet equals Hamlet? Those are completely different letters? But they haven't always been, apparently. You cannot substitute for an infernell. And Agnes equals Anne? What are we doing here? At some point, we have to say, 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.

1:11:46Jeff:Scrabble. Scrabble's impossible. Or awesome. Everything could be anything. You can't agree on the wordle if you can't decide between. Shakespeare, as you said, spelled his own name like seven different ways. And so that's why the anti-Straithfordians 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 and over again. I loved seeing that scene in Shakespeare in Love when I watched it this week of him practicing his signature and even altering the spellings.

1:12:17Jeff:Like, I'm going to be famous. So how am I going to do it when they want my autograph? Right. Read-alikes. We got quite a few for this week. Nothing directly on the point, but you can take it a few different directions. 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 and 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 not read them all, but my favorite is Instructions for a Heat Wave.

1:12:49Jeff: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. 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 Earring maybe was like patient zero in this move where the story is of the woman who was the object of Ramirez painting Girl with a Pearl Earring and then creates a story for her back and forth.

1:13:34It's a good book. It's sort of an O. Henry-esque ending. It's quite beautiful. It was a huge, talk about a huge book club book. That one was really popular. Also, if you want more history of like women writers in the Elizabethan period and later in the Renaissance, Shakespeare's Sisters by Rami Targoff was a big book a while ago. It's not actually about Shakespeare's sisters. It's using the Shakespeare name and it's a provocative one. But portraits of four 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.

1:14:07Not as early, I don't think, as 1596, but 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 this on its head and see what falls out. James by Persil Everett is a completely different tone. I love this pick from you. But it's like, what can you do, right, with a bank shot off the rail back at a work of art and see what comes out? And I think both of these works -

1:14:32Jeff:It's a great one. Offer something in their own right. Of course, they are reflected off the greatness of the work they're mirroring, but they still shine at the same time. Three to five takeaways. All right. Yeah, you gotta sum this up. I think you can very fairly tell people 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. 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.

1:15:13Jeff: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. both shakespeare and hamlet in the play create a play in reaction to a loved one's death hamlet creates the mouse that's right and uh i thought that was that'd be a fun cocktail party note that there's plays within place for both of them um 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 uh 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 uh the cocktail party after seeing hamlet say well it couldn't have happened this way you know you've got a real square on your hands and you can tell them that's a person you can't discuss art with yeah that's right all right final beat zero to well-read score each one gets a score from one to ten with ten being the highest our five categories are historical importance readability current relevance of central questions book nerd read cred and oh 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 i think it's a three yeah okay and we'll see like we will see how enduring this is over time 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 a best picture winner which is seems like it has a real chance to do like a non-zero race yeah yeah readability i think like it's high i think high the lower than an eight no lower than an eight like the only knock on readability is the emotional subject matter not the writing itself so yeah i think an Right.

1:17:12Current relevance of central questions. I mean, we're all immortal now, so this is all passe.

1:17:16Jeff:I mean, this is a 10 forever. Like the central question of what do we do with grief? How do we handle it? Right. What happens in our families? Yeah. 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 don't think it's that unusual because it made number 22 on the New York Times. 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?

1:17:55Jeff: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. So five. Yeah, five, yeah, right in the middle. 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 and so that there are sentences here that yeah let's give it an 8 8 something like that 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 at bookriot.com slash listen shoot us an email at zero to well read at book riot.com.

1:18:43Zero to 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 podcast, 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 going to see it. I don't think I'm going, I'm really torn about seeing it. I'm more, I'm more sad in the theater. I cannot take my darling. That could not something that's going to 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.

1:19:14But I would be very much interested 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 would be very fascinating from everyone. Rebecca, a real treat, as always, Hamnet by Meg Raferle.

1:19:28Jeff:Thanks, y 'all.

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