Hamnet is Judith’s twin. He has an older sister, Susanna, a mother, Agnes who is a healer and a father who is referred to as ‘the father’ or ‘the brother’ or ‘the son’ in this novel. Is Maggie O’Farrell being coy? It is apparent that the father is, indeed, William Shakespeare. However, this is not his story; it’s not even Hamnet’s really; it’s Agnes’ story. Agnes who is wild and treated with suspicion by her Stratford neighbours because of her healing skills. It is her journey as a mother and wife that we relate to the most.
O’Farrell was intrigued by the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet at the age of eleven. There is no record of how he died, so she posits that he died of bubonic plague. There is a fascinating chapter that follows the deathly trail of a flea from a monkey in Alexandria via a ship carrying glass beads that are then delivered to a seamstress in Stratford. The beads are packed in cloth - a perfect bed for a flea - and Judith is thrilled to help the seamstress unpack the much anticipated beads from Venice.
There are moments where O’Farrell’s prose soars. For example, here, where Hamnet lies beside his ill twin:

He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side to him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut. That without her he is incomplete, lost. He will carry an open wound, down his side, for the rest of his life, where she had been ripped from him. How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain.

Or here, where Judith grieves the death of her twin:

Judith, though, hears him in the swish of a broom against the floor. She sees him in the winged dip of a bird over the wall. She finds him in the shake of a pony’s mane, in the smattering of hail against the pane, in the wind reaching its arm down the chimney, in the rustle of the rushes that make up her den’s roof.

Hamnet explores how a marriage can survive the loss of a child and how we all grieve in different ways. For Hamnet’s father, O’Farrell suggests that it was to write the tragedy Hamlet. This novel is a beautifully wrought historical novel, revealing life in the 1500s with unforgettable detail.