Hamnet

By most accounts, Shakespeare’s wife was named Anne. You call her Agnes. Has she been inaccurately named throughout history? How did you imagine their relationship?

When I started researching for the book, I was so enraged, actually, by how she’s been treated in the intervening four hundred years. We’ve been taught this narrative about her that she was this older woman who lured this boy genius into marriage because she was three months pregnant when they got married. You know, if you look at the records, so were a quarter of the brides going to altar in Warwickshire at that time. And we’ve been told by all sorts of people—screenwriters, biographers, academics, scholars—that he hated her, that he had to run away to London to get away from her, that he regretted his marriage. There’s nothing—I couldn’t find anything to back this up. Yes, there is the famous bequest in his will: the second-best bed. But I think there’s so much evidence he loved her that outweighs that.

At the end of his career, he was the equivalent of a multimillionaire. He was a very successful businessman as well as being a pretty good playwright. But he chose, when he retired, to go back to Stratford to live with her. And that to me doesn’t speak of somebody who regrets his marriage. He sent every penny he earned in London back to Stratford. He lived in modest lodgings in London, even at the end of his career. And he bought his wife and his daughters an enormous mansion of a house just after Hamnet died. That seems to me emblematic of somebody whose heart is still back in Stratford.

One of the things I read, which really struck me, was the will of her father, Richard Hathaway. He died a year before she got married. In his will, he leaves her a very generous dowry. And he refers to her as “my daughter Agnes.” That was a lightning-bolt moment for me because I thought, On top of everything else, we’ve been calling her by the wrong name for almost half a century? Possibly, we’ve become completely out of touch with who she was.

What was the most fun part of your research?

Obviously a lot of the research was library-based, but for the character Agnes, I did more physical research. I planted and cultivated my own Elizabethan medicinal garden from seed. A book will tell you they used comfrey leaves to ease swollen joints, but until you get the comfrey seeds and you plant them and you germinate them and you water them and you try to protect them from blackbirds, you don’t know what the labor involved in that job is.

The most fun thing I did was learn to fly kestrels. There are a lot of hawking metaphors in Shakespeare’s plays, but I decided to give this expertise to her, to Agnes. I’d written a scene where she’s flying a kestrel, and I described the kestrel landing with a thud on her glove. Then I went and learned to fly one, and kestrels are about the size of a kitten. They’re really light. And they arrive—one minute they’re not there, and the next minute they’re right here. You don’t even notice. They fly so silently, and they land with such grace. So I had to go back and completely rewrite that scene.

I’ve always felt that people have criticized Agnes and called her stupid because she was illiterate. It’s not definite she was illiterate, but she probably was. She was the daughter of a sheep farmer. What woman with that social status would have been taught to read? But I find it so frustrating, because obviously, if you’re illiterate, it doesn’t mean you’re stupid. So I wanted to give the character her own sense of intelligence and her own brand of artistry because there’s so much in Shakespeare’s works about biology, plants, and the natural world. And I thought, Well, maybe he got this from somewhere. Maybe their marriage was an interchange. Maybe he got this expertise from her.

Did you have any hesitation about writing a novel about Shakespeare’s family? Why did you decide not to use his name—William, Shakespeare, or any variation—in the book?

Obviously, writing about Shakespeare gave me terrible vertigo because it seems ridiculous in one way. He comes with so much weight and heft—with so many references. We all have our own relationship with Shakespeare inside our head, and he goes beyond an icon, doesn’t he? He’s defined the way we think about ourselves. He defines our very language, the way we speak to one another.

In a sense, I was asking readers to forget everything they think they know about him and open themselves up to a new version. Obviously there’s a good reason why biographers, screenwriters, and other novelists have concentrated on his career in London. But at the same time, it’s always seemed to me that his domestic life has been very much ignored and very much silenced. And it’s always seemed that the biggest drama of his life happened offstage, in Stratford, and that was the death of his only son.

Also, there was a technical hitch for me because I found that I couldn’t write a sentence, for example, “William Shakespeare walked up the path and knocked on the door.” The minute you find yourself writing that, you just think, Oh, come on. If I’m pulled out of the story, I can’t expect readers to stay submerged in it. I was thinking, Well, what do I call him? I can’t call him William. Certainly can’t call him Will. Who do I think I am?

There’s so much hope in Hamnet. And remarkably, it’s a book set in a time of a plague. And we’re living through a plague now. You didn’t plan this, but what do you make of it now?

With most books that you’ve finished, your relationship with them is over in a sense. You put the final full stop and you shut down your computer and that’s it: Your involvement’s over. But with this book, I do feel different. There’s a section in the middle of the book where I trace the path of contagion of the Black Death all the way from a monkey in Alexandria to Warwickshire, via boats and goods and Elizabethan trade groups.

And it is strange thinking about that now, because when I wrote it, it seemed so distant. And I remember sitting in my study thinking, I wonder what it feels like to know that there is a terrible disease sweeping toward you across continents. It is peculiar—in a sense, I feel we all are closer in a way to Elizabethans and to earlier populations going through those absolutely terrifying new pandemics that must have cut down so many people. We’re closer to history in a way, having lived through the last six months.

Your memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am, explored closish encounters with death. And your fictional characters often seem to be on the brink of something. What draws you to the experience of pushing up against an edge?

I’ve always been very interested in the near-death experience. I think we all have them—some of us more than others, and obviously some are more serious than others—but it is a universal element in our lives. We’ve all at some point been in danger or we’ve come close to losing our life, even if it’s just almost stepping off the curb at the wrong moment. In those moments, we think about what we stand to lose, what it would be like if we didn’t come back. Those moments take up residence inside us, and they change who we are. And even if we tried to suppress it, anyone who’s been through any kind of serious illness knows that it’s a bit like traveling through fire. You come out the other side and you’re slightly reconfigured. You’re a different person. And you’ll think about yourself and you’ll think about your relationship with others in a different way. It gives you a different perspective on life.

In a sense, I think, the population, we’re all going to have to do that. We’re going to have to make ourselves anew; we’re going to have to rethink our priorities about our life and the way we live on the planet.

Have you been reading while sheltering in place in Edinburgh? Anything we should add to our stack?

There were times when I needed to read books that really faced up to what we were going through. And there were other times when I just needed to get away from everything and submerge myself in another reality.

One of the books I read was Philip Roth’s Nemesis. It’s one of his lesser-known books. I read it years ago, and I was looking for something on my shelf and I thought, Where’s that book? The one about the polio epidemic in Newark in the ’40s. It is a brutal book, but it’s a brilliant book. It’s all about what happens to this neighborhood when polio starts taking children. And it’s about a PE teacher who teaches these children. Oh, it’s brilliant. It’s really brilliant about society grappling with contagion.

I also read and loved Angie Cruz’s Dominicana. That was a beautiful book. Heartbreaking, but brilliant.

And I read a trilogy—which I’ve been meaning to read for ages—by Jane Gardam, a British writer, called the Old Filth trilogy. It’s about three people, a husband and a wife and a sort of enemy slash friend, who survive all the way through the twentieth century and their lives intersect and interact. Each book is from a different character’s perspective. You realize that the wife and the friend-enemy have a whole history that you don’t know about in the first book. They’re absolutely brilliant books. And it’s so exciting to read the first one in a trilogy and realize you’ve got two more to go.

What are you most looking forward to doing once it’s safe to do so in Edinburgh?

I look forward to giving my mum a hug. I haven’t hugged my mom for seven months. And that seems brutal. I see her and I wave through the window when we go visit. And I sent her flowers last week because her dog’s not very well. But I need to go and give her a proper hug. That’s what I need to do.