Good Night, Sweet Prince

I love Shakespeare. When I was a kid, I wanted so badly to be old enough to read his plays, and when I finally did, his work was as wonderful as I’d expected. There were shining lines and fantastic characters, and his plays were not the kind of literature I could pin down, which rewarded rereading and rewatching. Reading his writing was exciting but also left me wanting to catch my breath, trying to keep up.

That’s how I felt reading Maggie O’Farrell’s book Hamnet, a fictional rendering of the death of Shakespeare’s young son Hamnet, and the way that death affected each member of the family. It’s really the story of Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife, about whom so little is known.

I had so many conflicting feelings about this book. At first, I was looking for places where my understanding of Shakespeare’s life or the Renaissance was wrong or the author didn’t present the whole story. I also found some things about the story a little off-putting, such as the fact that Shakespeare is never actually named--he is always “the husband,” “the father,” “the Latin tutor,” and so on. The story jumped in time and from character to character, which wasn’t hard to follow, but pulled me out of a clear narrative flow. I wasn’t always sure where it was going.

But in the end, all of this was overshadowed by the beauty of the language, the characters she created, and the story she crafted. Scenes were distilled into vivid moments that left me a little dazed when I lifted my eyes from the page. And the end, when we see the play Hamlet through the lens of this story, was absolutely magnificent. O’Farrell is masterful at creating this literary world that lives on in the mind, and a family that is very complicated and also very like yours or mine.

When I started this book, I didn’t stop to consider the fact that from the very beginning, we know that Hamnet dies, and reading it right now was harder than I expected. It has been 16 years since my youngest sister died. She was killed in a car accident on October 23, on her way home from taking the ACT. She was just 17, and now she has almost been gone as many years as she was alive. 

Melinda was funny, vivacious, and beautiful. She loved kids and fashion, and she definitely did not love books. When she came to visit Joe and me when we were first married, she refused to walk down the block and watch Othello with us at Shakespeare in the Park. She hung out in our apartment and watched the Austin Powers movies instead, which is pretty much the perfect illustration of the differences between her and me.

Grieving someone you love is forever. I used to walk out of my school in the afternoons and imagine I’d see her there, laughing with the clumps of students on the front steps, although she had never attended that school. I still have clothes that were hers; she liked to clean out her closet into mine so Mom would buy her new stuff. I remember when she was very little, and she would curl up beside me on the couch while we watched movies, with that little face that I sometimes see reflected in my son’s.

The most powerful part of Hamnet for me was after his death, when each member of the family has to figure out how to grieve. I recognized myself in each of them, especially Shakespeare. But I also found comfort in it. Hamnet reminded me that the words we share about those we love can help them live on, and help us find healing.

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