Hamnet(100)

Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. ‘O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!’ murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.

She will say all this to her husband, later, after the play has ended, after the final silence has fallen, after the dead have sprung up to take their places in the line of players at the edge of the stage. After her husband and the boy, their hands joined, bow and bow, facing into the storm of applause. After the stage is left deserted, no longer a battlement, no longer a graveyard, no longer a castle. After he has come to find her, forcing his way through the crowds, his face still streaked with traces of paste. After he has taken her by the hand and held her against the buckles and leather of his armour. After they have stood together in the open circle of the playhouse, until it was as empty as the sky above it.

For now, she is right at the front of the crowd, at the edge of the stage; she is gripping its wooden lip in both hands. An arm’s length away, perhaps two, is Hamlet, her Hamlet, as he might have been, had he lived, and the ghost, who has her husband’s hands, her husband’s beard, who speaks in her husband’s voice.

She stretches out a hand, as if to acknowledge them, as if to feel the air between the three of them, as if wishing to pierce the boundary between audience and players, between real life and play.

The ghost turns his head towards her, as he prepares to exit the scene. He is looking straight at her, meeting her gaze, as he speaks his final words:

‘Remember me.’





Author’s Note





his is a work of fiction, inspired by the short life of a boy who died in Stratford, Warwickshire, in the summer of 1596. I have tried, where possible, to stick to the scant historical facts known about the real Hamnet and his family, but a few details – names, in particular – have been altered or elided over.

Most people will know his mother as ‘Anne’ but she was named by her father, Richard Hathaway, in his will, as ‘Agnes’ and I decided to follow his example. Some believe that Joan Hathaway was Agnes’s mother, while others argue she was her stepmother; there is little evidence to support or discredit either theory.

Hamnet’s sole surviving paternal aunt was called not Eliza but Joan (as was the eldest sister who predeceased her); I took the liberty of changing it because the doubling up of names, while common in parish records of the time, can be confusing for readers of a novel.

There were guides at Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust who told me that Hamnet, Judith and Susanna grew up in their grandparents’ house in Henley Street; others seemed certain that they would have lived in the little adjoining property. Either way, the two households would have been closely linked but I chose to opt for the latter.

Lastly, it is not known why Hamnet Shakespeare died: his burial is listed but not the cause of his death. The Black Death or ‘pestilence’, as it would have been known in the late sixteenth century, is not mentioned once by Shakespeare, in any of his plays or poetry. I have always wondered about this absence and its possible significance; this novel is the result of my idle speculation.