Like Emma Donoghue’s most recent book, “The pull of the stars,” which is set in 1918 during the influenza epidemic, Maggie O’Farrell happened to be writing about a pandemic, the Black Death in Shakespeare’s England , at the same time one was happening. However, I do rather wonder if the subtitle of O’Farrell’s book might have been added because the 2020 situation developed as it was going to print. Yes, the plague is a central character in the book, one that carries off Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, leaving behind Hamnet’s twin sister, Judith, his older sister Susanna, and his devastated father and mother, Will and Agnes. But it could really have been almost anything that caused Hamnet’s death in those perilous times when death was a familiar in many households. The strength of the book is in the fictionalized depiction of Shakespeare’s marriage to his wife, here called “Agnes” rather than Anne. And indeed, that may well have been her name, just as Hamnet is an alternative spelling of Hamlet, the title of Shakespeare’s most famous play, written four years after the death of his beloved only son. It is a novel of a marriage, a reimagining of Agnes/Anne as a woman who dealt in herbs and potions, kept bees and gardens, and hawked with a kestrel on her wrist. A novel of the bonds between families – what strengthens and what breaks them – and the almost mystical bond between some twins. Beautifully imagined, obviously grounded in much research and thought, and highly recommended. There is a good reason Shakespeare left his “second-best bed” to his wife in his will. 305 pp.
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