Cast
Creative Team
Maggie O’Farrell
Writer
Erica Whyman
Director
Prema Mehta
Lighting Designer
Oğuz Kaplangi
Composer
Ayse Tashkiran
Movement Director
Kate Waters
Fight Director
Amy Ball CDG
Casting Director
Hamnet Full Staff Listing
MAGGIE O’FARRELL: What struck me most about her was that we know almost nothing. We know when she got married and when she died. One biographer described her as ‘the wife-shaped void’. For a biographer, the lack of facts would be frustrating but, as a novelist, it felt like an opportunity.
Originally, I conceived the book to be about fathers and sons, like Hamlet. Then I became sidetracked by the way Anne, or Agnes, has been treated. We’ve only ever been taught one narrative about her: that Shakespeare was lured into a hasty early marriage by this illiterate strumpet who had the nerve to get pregnant. That he ran away to London to escape from her. But I have read every single biography I could get my hands on and there’s no evidence for any of it. I also looked in Shakespeare’s plays: is there any hint to confirm this myth? There’s nothing—the plays are peopled by faithful, highly intelligent wives and lots of marriages that work well.
I started wondering whether we’d all been wrong about Anne Hathaway. What crystallized it for me was reading her father Richard’s will, where he named her as ‘my daughter Agnes’. Surely, if anyone knows her real name, it would be her father? Have we been calling her by the wrong name for almost 500 years?
LOLITA CHAKRABARTI: The one thing I knew about her was the detail about Shakespeare leaving her his ‘second-best’ bed in his will.
MO’F: Yes, this idea that William was insulting Agnes in his will by leaving her the second-best bed! What her detractors never mention is that, by Jacobean law, she was entitled to a third of his huge estate when he died. And of course, the second-best bed would have been their marriage bed, because the best bed in those times would have been reserved for visitors.
MO’F: Again, this comes from the plays. There is no shortage of female seers in Shakespeare’s plays. As a society, the Elizabethans were incredibly religious and sequestered (it was illegal not to go to church), but at the same time there were strong beliefs in the ‘other’, and in portents or second sight. Such antithetical faiths coexisted alongside each other.
I can trace my inspiration precisely to the scene in Hamlet where we watch the mad Ophelia. I’ve always wondered whether her distracted grief, and particularly her song (‘He is dead and gone, lady, he is dead and gone…’), is a version of Shakespeare watching his wife grieve over Hamnet’s death. That scene just feels so strong and seems to come from nowhere, like this huge wind blowing through the play. You have to be circumspect about reading too much biography in the plays, but I do think in Hamlet there are several instances where he becomes visible to us as a human, not just as a literary icon.
Where Ophelia hands out herbs to different characters, and every single plant is a well-known cure for a flaw that she perceives in them, is interesting to me. I read that every household in the 16th century would have had a kitchen/medicine garden, and it was the purview of the woman of the house to dole out those cures for common household ailments. I like to imagine Shakespeare writing that scene with Ophelia and not really knowing which herbal cures did what. How would he know? Maybe he had to ask Agnes—maybe she contributed to that scene.
All Agnes’ critics joke about how ironic it is that the greatest writer who ever lived was married to someone who couldn’t read. But what daughter of a sheep farmer would have learned to read in those days? What use would it have been to her? With the herbal medicines, and with Agnes’ skills in hawking, I wanted to emphasize that being illiterate doesn’t mean that you’re stupid. There are other forms of intelligence and education.
LC: My job is to find out what Maggie is saying, and whose story am I telling. When I really examined the book, I began to wonder if, for the stage, I needed to create a physical logic to the story. If I had stuck to the beautiful format that Maggie uses in her novel, we’d be watching a play that jumped around between different decades. In a film, or a novel, that works well but on stage it’s harder: theatre stages are huge machines of set and cast and you don’t want to stop the flow of the story for a scene change or a jump in logic.
It felt like the right way to go, but then I hit on a difficulty. Ordering things chronologically means that the title character, Hamnet, isn’t born until halfway through the play. It felt like a problem initially, but as I carried on, I became clear that his mother Agnes is the main character. The story is about creativity, how do we create people, what helps us to create art?
It then became a simple equation of working out how I show you who Agnes was, who Hamnet was and what he meant to her and her husband. The play spans 18 years. So that was also a challenge.
I often feel quite oppressed by the Shakespearean ‘industry’ and the regard he’s held in because it can remove you from the beauty and immediacy of his work. What’s fabulous about Maggie’s book is that it brings him and his family to us. It shows that these people were not that different to us. Yes, they lived 400 years ago. But I am still able to connect to these people, as a writer, as a mother, as a woman and so much more. It’s amazing to put flesh on the bones of somebody who’s been lionized—who is out of reach of all of us through time and through scale
– and to bring them back down to earth as a man, a woman, and a family.
MO’F: Before you begin any book, there’s an overwhelming sense of vertigo when you face the blank page. Certainly, my biggest source of vertigo with Hamnet was writing about Shakespeare.
It’s a huge responsibility writing about real people, even if they have been dead for centuries. My characters are essentially fictional, but I wanted to honor and respect that they were real, and their bones are lying in Holy Trinity Church. That’s why, in the novel, you never see the surnames Hathaway or Shakespeare. It’s a marker for me, and perhaps for the reader, that these people are a version of how I imagine they might have been.
LC: Whereas I had more freedom—it was Maggie who had all that responsibility. Reading Maggie’s characters, I understood exactly who I was dealing with. I could take the vastness of the novel and add in new facts (that aren’t in the novel) to make the play live more three-dimensionally
LC: My go-to Shakespearean adviser is Professor Farah Karim-Cooper at Shakespeare’s Globe, who has written a book about hands in Shakespeare. She showed me this extraordinary spreadsheet she created, which contains every reference to a hand or a glove in all of Shakespeare’s plays. John Shakespeare, William’s father, was a glove maker. As writers, you take experiences from your own life and hide them in the play. It can’t be by chance that Shakespeare had a preoccupation with hands—it must have been linked to his dad’s craftsmanship. It felt like a lovely element to incorporate within the play.
MO’F: There are some writers who do a huge amount of research and then start writing, but I prefer to start, and then might meet a void where I need to do some research. I was a page and a half into writing Hamnet when I realized I had to go to Stratford. The book opens with a little boy coming down the stairs and falling onto the floor. As I was writing that I suddenly thought, what’s the floor made of? I couldn’t imagine. So I went to Stratford. I went round and round all the houses, drawing maps, and asking the guides thousands of questions.
It’s extraordinary that the houses still exist. We know so little about these people, but yet you can buy a ticket and walk into the Hathaway kitchen or into the room Shakespeare was born in. It seems like the most astonishing piece of luck that these houses still stand.
LC: You can feel the ghosts in Stratford. Everything suddenly makes more sense when you visit those places: simple things like where people washed, where they ate, who slept where. Those details answer quite a lot of relationship questions that you have when you’re setting up characters on stage. What are the power dynamics and how would they talk to each other? How used to each other would they be? Walking through Stratford and imagining the Shakespeare family here really changed the way I wrote.
MO’F: When I went to Stratford in 2017, it broke my heart that there wasn’t a grave for Hamnet. I felt that I had to do something. This child was so important—without him, we wouldn’t have Hamlet or Twelfth Night. So, during lockdown, with the help of Annie Ashworth (who runs the Literary Festival), we started negotiating with Holy Trinity Church and the diocese. They agreed that we could have a memorial for Hamnet and his twin sister Judith. In April last year, it finally happened. The vicar delivered a really moving dedication about the deaths of Hamnet and Judith. And now there are two twin rowan trees in the churchyard, both with a plaque displaying different quotes from Shakespeare’s plays.
MO’F: Twins are a recurring motif, particularly separated boy and girl twins, in Shakespeare’s plays. There’s a scene in Twelfth Night where the two twins reunite after both believing the other one is dead. It’s so moving reading that through the lens of Hamnet’s death. One of the most incredible things I discovered is that the opening night for Twelfth Night at the Globe Theatre was on what would have been the twins’ birthday.
LC: The way the world has worked up until now, perhaps still now, is that we credit men with the achievement, don’t we? Shakespeare wrote the plays, so we credit him with the genius. But what I love about Maggie’s story is that it shows nobody works alone. A writer is influenced by loves and losses, and the trials and joys of their own life all feed into the work.
You can’t assume everything is biographical. But there are startling thoughts in Hamlet that I now believe Shakespeare could not have arrived at without Agnes and their children, and the people around them in Stratford. I love this story as a salute to his artistry through all the people around him.
Genius is facilitated by the support, inspiration and energies of the people around that genius. That became very clear to me in this story. No one creates anything in isolation.
More About Us
Our Team
The thrilling work on our stages would not be possible without our visionary leadership, talented team of theater professionals, and dedicated Board of Directors.
Our Supporters
Chicago Shakespeare gratefully recognizes the gifts and partnerships provided by our hundreds of individual donors and institutions in our digital donor listing.
Our Education Programs
We are committed to providing access to high quality, culturally responsive arts education, and fostering a love for lifelong learning through innovative programming.