"Hamnet" is subtitled “A Novel of the Plague,” and I think that cuts straight to the issues at stake in the novel. Did people in the 16th century grieve like we do? That was the biggest question I had during the final act of “Hamnet,” when Agnes

Spoiler

is grieving her young son who has died of the plague

.

Another version of the same question: what was the human experience like in the Early Modern period, when human nature was arguably changing?

I don’t simply mean that human grief would have been different when everybody in your hometown seems to be dying from plague. I mean that the whole European experience of being a person would have been different in 1596, at that hinge point between the Medieval universe and the Modern universe, that hinge point where Shakespeare and Agnes lived and made a family. When Maggie O’Farrell characterizes Agnes so fully—imbuing her with self-knowledge and internal conflict, with emotional blind spots and self-doubts, with emotional and intellectual autonomy—is she giving us a truly 16th-century woman?

Maybe these questions aren't important to you. But these questions are important to me because this novel feels like it’s transporting you to Early Modernity, to the late 16th century. It’s so full of the sights and scents and sounds of the period, the little bits of reality that most of these characters would have overlooked but that give the novel its texture of realism. O’Farrell clearly did a lot of research when writing “Hamnet,” but I felt unsure if this world’s historical realism extended to the minds of the characters.

Put a different way, and to summarize notorious asshat Harold Bloom: were humans “human” before Shakespeare?

I ask because O’Farrell renders Agnes’s grief so powerfully. Is this the response of a 16th-century woman who has lost a child to the plague, who inhabits a world where pretty much every parent has lost a child to something or other? Or is this a 21st-century woman who experiences grief as a cosmic void, a terrible hole in the fabric of a society that basically ignores the reality of death?
That’s the question I was asking myself by the end of this gorgeous novel, anyway.

It’s hard as hell to write about the Early Modern period because people back then were transitioning between the types of characters who would have been recognizable to Boccaccio, Hildegard of Bingen, and Pope Leo III and the types of characters who would have been recognizable to…well, to us. Unlike the other characters in the novel (including the unnamed Shakespeare, whom O’Farrell wisely flattens into a side character with little more than daddy issues, a strong intellect, and some mild depression), Agnes felt extremely recognizable to me. She was full and round and deep. She

Spoiler

grieved for her son

like a free woman. And that broke my suspension of disbelief just a tad.

***

But maybe I’m wrong. And maybe being married to Shakespeare gave Agnes some "early adopter" access to modern ways of being, just as Shakespeare being married to Agnes gave him access to the social freedoms necessary to escape his overbearing father. Because if there’s one word I’d use to describe Agnes in “Hamnet,” it’s “free.”

Agnes’s freedom is her gift to her husband, because it empowers him to discover the universe—the modern universality of human experience—brewing in his brain. And Agnes knows what she has unleashed within her husband. Here’s an exchange between them, in a scene when Shakespeare has just returned to Stratford but seems distant:

Agnes: "I know. You are caught by that place, like a hooked fish."

Shakespeare: "What place? You mean London?"

Agnes: "No, 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 it 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. … Don't think I don't."

Shakespeare is cultivating the modern human experience in his brain but he doesn’t seem to recognize what it is. Agnes’s gift is that she does.

***

Anyway, this is a book about Shakespeare’s wife. Some of my favorite chapters include the voyage of the plague-infected flea journeying from the Levant across the Mediterranean into Western Europe and finally Britain. I was also extremely moved by the chapter when Agnes simultaneously a) realizes that she’s pregnant and b) smells the odor of depression emitting from her husband, a premonition of the tragedy that will befall them. I can't describe how good these chapters are.

There is some interesting stuff in "Hamnet" about the nature of language, about the invention of words and the limits of words.

Spoiler

After Hamnet has died, his twin sister Judith asks Agnes, “What is the word…for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin?”

:

Her mother, dipping a folded, doubled wick into heated tallow, pauses but doesn't turn around.

If you were a wife, Judith continues, and your husband dies, then you are a widow. And if its parents die, a child becomes an orphan. But what is the word for what I am?

I don't know, her mother says.

Judith watches the liquid slide off the ends of the wicks, into the bowl below.

Maybe there isn't one, she suggests.

Maybe not, says her mother.

The power of language and its limits are compounded by the fact that, although she is in many ways much wiser and more knowledgeable than her husband, Agnes is illiterate and uneducated. She is freer and stronger than him, and this makes the moments when she seems to rely on him more...romantic, vulnerable. In one scene, Agnes recalls a moment when she was pregnant with their first daughter:

When they were first married, he took her out one night into the street and it was passing strange, to be there, the place so quiet, so black, so empty.

Look up, he had said to her, standing behind her and putting his arms around her, his hands coming to rest on the curve of her stomach. She leant back her head so that it lay propped on his shoulder.

Balanced on the tops of the houses was a sky scattered with jewels, pierced with silver holes. He had whispered into her ear names and stories, his finger outstretched, pulling shapes and people and animals and families out of the stars.

Constellations, he had said. That was the word.

The baby that was Susanna turning over in her belly, as if listening.

The word “constellation” has never sounded so beautiful or so inadequate as it does on this page.