In Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell's eloquent 2020 novel and the utterly poignant new film based on it, Shakespeare's wife Agnes is a herbalist skilled in concocting medicinal potions and with an almost supernatural ability to sense the future.
But he cannot save his young son from the plague, a death that prompts the boy's father to write one of the greatest plays in the history of literature, Hamlet.
And almost none of it is true in a verifiable way.
On paper and on screen, Hamnet is a work of inspiration and imagination, a lavish exploration of grief woven from the most basic facts.
You can't say that O'Farrell, who also wrote the screenplay for the film with its director Chloe Zhao, distorted the true story, because there is no known true story, despite historians digging into Shakespeare's past for centuries.
The scant facts regarding Shakespeare's family are in the vast minority compared to the questions that arise.
Records show that in 1582, William Shakespeare, then 18 years old, married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant with their first child, Susanna.
Three years later, their twins, Judith and Hamnet, were born, a name that at the time was a variation of Hamlet.
When he was only 11 years old, in 1596, Hamnet died.
He was buried on August 11th, and it is almost certain that Shakespeare, who was traveling with the theater troupe, was unable to return to Stratford in time for the funeral.
About four years later, he wrote Hamlet.
Take this as you wish.
No one knows whether Shakespeare was forced to marry the pregnant Anne or whether they were madly in love with each other.
No one knows how Hamnet died, but the plague was raging at the time and was most likely the cause of death.
Most importantly for the book and the film, no one knows much about Anne herself, including whether she could read and write.
The fictional version gives her a strong-willed personality (as portrayed on the big screen by Jessie Buckley in her Oscar-winning performance) and a passionate romance with Shakespeare (Paul Mescal).
Buckley is already qualified for this role. awarded a Golden Globe.
Hamnet it's actually about Agnes.
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Changing the narrative
In an author's note at the end of the novel, O'Farrell acknowledges how little is actually known about Hamnet and his parents.
She enriched the story with her own careful research into the late 16th century and placed it in historical context.
While researching the era, she tells the BBC, “I was a little taken aback by how unfairly history and academia have treated Shakespeare’s wife, the woman we were taught to call Anne Hathaway.
"We really only got one narrative about her, and most biographers just blindly accepted it, which was that she was an illiterate peasant woman who trapped him in marriage, that he hated her, and that he ran away to London to get away from her."
Even her name is uncertain.
Her father, a successful sheep farmer, left her a dowry in his will, naming her Agnes.
O'Farrell chose to give the character that name, assuming that "if anyone knew her name, it was her father."
"It really seemed symptomatic to me that, among everything else, we didn't even get her name right," he adds.
O'Farrell makes a strong point about the disparagement of Shakespeare's wife.
"This portrait of Maggie O'Farrell is a conscious rejection of centuries of ill-informed assumptions about Anne as either a patient but boring saint who kept the Stratford hearth or a promiscuous witch who lured Shakespeare into an unhappy marriage," says Joe Eldridge Carney, author of the study. Women Respond to Shakespeare: Contemporary Adaptations and Appropriations and an English professor at the College of New Jersey, for the BBC.
Determining her real name is complicated.
"She is Anne in almost all the writings, and Agnes in only one: in her father's will," David Scott Castane, a prominent Shakespeare expert and professor emeritus of English at Yale University, tells the BBC.
Nothing else is certain.
It is possible, he says, “that she was born Agnes, but that everyone called her Ann.”
"I like how the novel takes advantage of the opportunity to give her a completely new identity, unconnected to the marriage that we know too little about anyway and always view through the prism of Shakespeare," he adds.
Modern woman
To create the recognizable character of Agnes, O'Farrell came up with it by reverse engineering it from Shakespeare's plays.
"What I did was go back to the plays and start reading them differently, seeing if I could find it, because I always felt like I could see Hamnet in To Hamlet.
"But I wondered - I thought she was hiding in there somewhere."
One inspiration for Agnes's intuitiveness comes precisely from these rereadings.
"There's a lot of clairvoyance in the plays. Just think of Julius Caesar's oracle, for example," says O'Farrell.
And Agnes's knowledge of herbs and potions has an equivalent in the plays, especially in Ophelia's soliloquy in To Hamlet, when she seems to have gone mad and is handing out flowers and herbs to other characters, with lines like: "Rosemary, that's for your memory.. "
"I read that every household, at that time, had a medicinal garden," says O'Farrell.
"And it was the responsibility of the woman of the house, the matriarch, to know how to make medicines and treat ailments."
"Men wouldn't know something like that."
For that speech, O'Farrell says, she could imagine Shakespeare relying on his wife's expertise.
When we see her as a truly equal partner, that might be something we want, the Anne or Agnes of the 21st century.
Agnes, as played by Jessie Buckley, is the kind of woman we wish Shakespeare had.
Which is to say, someone who is special in their own way.
She is so unusual that rumors circulate that she is, as Shakespeare's mother warns him in the film, "the child of a forest witch."
She is smart, stands behind her own views, and is aware enough to understand that her husband needs to pursue an art degree in London.
She is the kind of woman a genius could fall for, and from the very beginning we understand why she is attracted to Mescal's Shakespeare.
This concept of En/Agnes is not, however, necessarily just our wishful thinking.
"While it's easy to think that this is just O'Farrell's attempt to simply turn Anne into an early modern feminist - a figure more in tune with our own sensibilities - this portrait is actually quite consistent with what we know about the lives of many early modern women," says Carnell.
"We know that many women successfully ran what we would today call 'small businesses': they brewed beer, used herbs, made malt, traded, weaved, and did much more."
"The level of literacy they needed for these careers is already more difficult to assess," he adds.
We still don't know if Shakespeare's wife could read.
The fictional Agnes can read, but O'Farrell thinks she was probably illiterate in real life.
“It would be considered pointless to teach a sheep farmer’s daughter to read,” she says.
The Hamlet-Hamnet connection
The marriage imagined in the book and film becomes more distant when Shakespeare begins to leave his family behind in Stratford-upon-Avon for extended periods of time while working in the theater in London.
These absences are historically very well known.
But when it comes to Hamnet's death and subsequent mourning, there is only speculation.
O'Farrell, according to an influential 2004 essay by the great Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt. The death of Hamnet and the birth of Hamlet, sees a direct connection to the play, even more than a mere echo of Hamnet's name.
In the film, when Agnes travels to London to see the play herself - another fictional moment - we see, as she does, that the actor playing Hamlet has been given a costume and hair color that makes him look like Hamnet.
In a brilliant move of casting, Jacoby Jupp plays the boy Hamnet, and his brother Noah Jupp is the actor who plays Hamlet on stage.
The visual resemblance between the two is unmistakable.
In this interpretation, the play is not just a way for Shakespeare to channel grief.
Playing the role of the ghost of Hamlet's father, he gets the opportunity to say goodbye to his son on stage as he never could in real life.
"That must have had some kind of impact, but we don't know what."
"It is difficult to resist, perhaps impossible, not to connect one's son's death with Hamlet", says Kastan about the connection between Hamnet's death and the play.
"The death of Hamnet/Hamlet must have been an unbearable loss for Shakespeare and his family."
"This may have been at least part of the reason why, just a few years after the boy's death, Shakespeare returned to an old play (perhaps by Thomas Kyd) about a son named Hamlet and a ghost seeking 'vengeance' to write his own version." Hamlet, in which he himself will appear on stage.
"It has long been speculated that Shakespeare played a ghost in his own play, swapping roles with the living and the dead."
But there are numerous other influences on the play, both literary and cultural.
"The connections between lived events and Shakespeare's art are just speculation, however intriguing," says Castane.
The fact is that there is no evidence that Shakespeare thought or felt anything about his wife and family, not even a simple letter.
New research into a fragment of a letter from an unknown sender could shed new light on Shakespeare's marriage, but it may not.
Matthew Steggle, a professor of English at the University of Bristol, suggests that one letter addressed to Shakespeare's wife in London was intended for Anne.
This would mean that she lived there with her husband between 1600 and 1610 and would prove that she was literate.
Stegl says his research is only "opening the door" to this possibility, that it is "just a potential that seems hard to avoid rather than any certainty."
More than any scholarly research, however, this popular film is likely to alter public perception of Shakespeare's wife, solidifying her as Agnes.
That would be "very nice if it were true," says O'Farrell.
But "maybe it will just be a passing thing."
"Maybe, like this letter, something else will come to light and we'll all have to change our minds again."
She adds two words that define so much about Shakespeare and his son: “Who knows?”.
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