January 2022 Book, Hamnet

 

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday at Guilford Free Library at 6:30. If this book appeals to you, contact the library for a copy and join in on our discussion in the New Year, January 19, 2022. 

“Hamnet”  by Maggie O'Farrell, is an exploration of marriage and grief written into the silent opacities of a life that is at once extremely famous and profoundly obscure."[ The editors of The Book Review chose this as one of the 10 best books of 2020. ]

Countless scholars have combed through Elizabethan England’s parish and court records looking for traces of William Shakespeare. But what we know for sure, if set down unvarnished by learned and often fascinating speculation, would barely make a slender monograph. As William Styron once wrote, the historical novelist works best when fed on short rations. The rations at Maggie O’Farrell’s disposal are scant but tasty, just the kind of morsels to nourish an empathetic imagination.

We know, for instance, that at the age of 18, Shakespeare married a woman named Anne or Agnes Hathaway, who was 26 and three months pregnant. (That condition wasn’t unusual for the time: Studies of marriage and baptism records reveal that as many as one-third of brides went to the altar pregnant.) Hathaway was the orphaned daughter of a farmer near Stratford-upon-Avon who had bequeathed her a dowry. This status gave her more latitude than many women of her time, who relied on paternal permission in choosing a mate.

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