Dana Stevens in Slate:
The curiosity that drove the Irish novelist Maggie O’Farrell to write her bestselling 2020 novel Hamnet sprang from the scarcity of documentation about the book’s title character, Hamnet Shakespeare. Born in 1585 to William and Anne Shakespeare, the twin brother to a girl named Judith, Hamnet died of unknown causes in 1596, the only one of the Shakespeares’ three children not to reach adulthood. But for the records of his christening and his burial in the Stratford-upon-Avon parish registers, Hamnet’s 11 years on earth remain a tantalizing blank, one of those countless human existences that are legible to us now only in the form of a bookended pair of dates.
And yet, because Hamnet happened to have a father who spent his life creating characters that four centuries on remain as legible and as vibrant as any have ever been, the six letters of this boy’s name are all that are needed to suggest an infinity of questions. What was the connection between the loss of the dramatist’s only son and the creation, about four years later, of his longest, most linguistically innovative, and—as generations of speculation about its ambiguities attest—philosophically richest play?
More here.
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