Day 893, Quasi-Quarantine: "Hamnet" Imagines The Dynamics, Grief, And Pain That Inspired Shakespeare

"How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain."

Based on conjecture about the life of William Shakespeare's son Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell has spun a spellbinding tale of love, dreams, family, grief, and isolation. While there are a number of liberties taken and assumptions made, the book's payoff is well worth it.

"And Agnes finds she can bear anything except her child's pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusion, but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief."

Filled with procedural accounts of how the plague travels and letters wind about their journeys, "Hamnet" reduces Shakespeare to a minor character, not using his name and rendering his writing a vague abstraction. 

His wife, Agnes, is the star here, bringing to life an eccentric, unreachable woman who will go to any lengths to preserve the health of her three children. 

"She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be."

The twin dynamic between Hamnet and Juliet is heartbreaking, and the stunning story delivers a breathtaking conclusion as an examination of the pain that informs the very best art.

"What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children's hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown."