His son’s death may have inspired some of Shakespeare’s greatest lines, but he never recovered from the loss

Maggie O’Farrell is much possessed by death. Her first novel, After You’d Gone (2000), chronicled the inner life of a young woman who finds herself comatose following a near-fatal car accident. And a recent piece of non-fiction, I Am, I Am, I Am (2017), gave an account of O’Farrell’s own numerous brushes with mortality.

Her latest novel returns to this pre-occupation with the undiscovered country. In it she sets out to tell the imagined story of the life and death of Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, who perished at the age of 11, four years before his father wrote the play that would share his dead son’s name — in Elizabethan England, the spellings Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable.

O’Farrell opens her narrative with the young boy moving through the rooms of the houses of his parents and grand-parents in search of assistance for his twin sister, Judith, who is ill in bed with chills, a fever, ‘a swelling at the base of her throat’ and ‘another where her shoulders meet her neck’. There is no help to be found. His tender father (who is never named) is away working in London. His older sister, Susanna, is nowhere to be seen. His violent and tyrannical grandfather, John, is not in his workshop making gloves. And his mother, Agnes, is off gathering herbs for the creation of simples, potions and curses. Accordingly, Hamnet is left to face alone the prospect that his twin might have the plague. It is an episode of solitude that will haunt his mother, ‘will lie at her very core for the rest of her life’.

With this scene in place, O’Farrell takes us back to young Shakespeare’s days as a reluctant Latin tutor to the family of Agnes Hathaway, a mysterious woman — ‘too dark … too silent, too strange’ — with whom William falls in love.