In the hometown of the best-known playwright in Western history, everything is Shakespearean to the point of exhaustion: pubs, inns, hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops bear the name of the bard insistently, outlining a kind of theme park where tourists begin to arrive on a still shy spring day. In the author's small homeland, the Royal Shakespeare Company, founded in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1879 to preserve the legacy of his works, has just released Hamnet, a stage adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's bestselling novel, which has sold 1.5 million copies since it was published during the 2020 pandemic.
The company's headquarters, located a few steps from the writer's birthplace, is the ideal place to resurrect characters such as Shakespare, his wife Anne Hathaway – renamed by O'Farrell as Agnes after encountering that name in her father's will – or his twins, Judith and Hamnet. The death of the latter at the age of 11, in the midst of an epidemic of bubonic plague, could inspire his famous work on the Prince of Denmark, written only five years after his death and impregnated with the existential questions that usually derive from it. "With Hamnet I tried to explore the connection between the death of her son and the writing of the work that bears her name (with one letter difference), and ask myself where art comes from and why we need it," says O'Farrell, who has just published The Married Portrait (edited, like Hamnet, by Asteroid Books). by email from his home in Edinburgh.
The writer Maggie O'Farrell presents her new book, 'The Portrait of a Married', during a visit to Madrid, last March. Atilano Garcia (SOPA Images/LightRocket/getty)
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It wasn't his only mission. O'Farrell also wanted to decipher the enigma that Shakespeare's wife still embodies. "A void in the form of a wife, which the bard's idolaters later filled with their own speculations," as Germaine Greer wrote in her essay dedicated to Hathaway in 2007. Subjected to all the misogynistic stereotypes, Anne/Agnes has been treated as an illiterate peasant who took advantage of Shakespeare, a healer, seer and possibly a witch, despite the fact that there is no proof of this, according to O'Farrell. If the greatest experts used their imagination to draw her features, she could too: the author decided to imagine an alternative biography for an ignored and vilified character, turning her into a kind of pre-feminist icon in mourning for her son. Released on the 400th anniversary of Hathaway's death, this theatrical adaptation is faithful to O'Farrell's gaze and places Shakespeare's wife at the center of the play, in the same way that visitors who enter the writer's house-museum, in the center of Stratford, ask more and more about Anne and less about William to the guides dressed as locals in Elizabethan attire who give them They help to tour the place.
The play runs until mid-June at the newly refurbished Swan Theatre for the first time since lockdown, before landing in London's West End in autumn. Co-produced by Sam Mendes' theater company, the adaptation is signed by Lolita Chakrabarti, responsible for the successful musical based on The Life of Pi that is now represented on Broadway, who dismantled the messy structure of O'Farrell's book and decided to rearrange the story chronologically. The result is a simpler and lighter work than the original, or "more predictable and sentimental," as The New York Times wrote after its premiere. "A non-linear narrative may work in the book, but it's problematic for a theater audience. The time jumps would involve many changes of scene and costumes, "justifies O'Farrell, who acknowledges that his participation was brief. "I was shown two drafts of the script and proposed my comments on both, mainly on historical details and sometimes on narrative twists." In the end, Chakrabarti fails to match the emotional depth of the novel in its adaptation, except for the final stretch, when the protagonist understands the absences and silences of her husband: Shakespeare was busy creating a masterpiece that was to immortalize his deceased son.
The greatest courage of this theatrical Hamnet is to have turned its heroine into a mestizo woman. That the protagonist couple is interracial not only reflects the reality of the time, in which the moors (or moors), as non-white people were designated in Elizabethan England, could be seen on the streets of any city. It also seems to make a nod to Shakespeare's own works, in which his presence abounds: Othello, Titus Andronicus or The Merchant of Venice, for example, spoke of love stories between characters of different races. On the other hand, the Dark Lady of his sonnets might not be Mary Fitton, the aristocrat expelled from Queen Elizabeth's court after becoming pregnant, but Black Luce, a black woman who owns a brothel with links to the London theatre scene, recalls Farah Karim-Cooper, a professor at King's College and member of the board of directors of the Globe Theatre in London. in a newly published essay on Shakespeare and blackness.
The next stage will be the film adaptation of the book, driven by Spielberg, directed by Chloé Zhao ('Nomadland') and starring Paul Mescal in the role of Shakespeare
A few years ago, O'Farrell wandered through the cemetery of Holy Trinity Church, the church next to the River Avon where the bodies of Shakespeare and his wife rest, looking for the grave of their children. It was not successful, because they do not exist. It was then that he decided to ask permission from the diocese of Coventry to plant two trees in honour of Judith and Hamnet. "Now the church has two busts of William and Agnes looking at those two rowans. It makes me happy when I see it," says the writer. Next to each tree, O'Farrell added a quote from Shakespeare's plays. The one dedicated to Hamnet takes up the song that Ophelia sang with insolence to Gertrude in the play that the child would have inspired: "Dead is already, lady, / dead and is not here. / A rough stone / to his plants I saw / and to the lawn of the meadow / his forehead to cover."
O'Farrell's book seems to respond to a common trend in these times: to vindicate the role played by key characters in the environment of a great genius – Marx's daughter, Picasso's women – contradicting the theses in vogue during the last decades, which urged to belittle the biography of the artist and to privilege the study of his works almost in the abstract. "It always seemed to me that the death of the author was a strange theory," the writer replies. The next stage will be the film adaptation of the book, driven by Steven Spielberg's production company and directed by Chloé Zhao after winning the Oscar for Nomadland. Its protagonists, as it has just been known, will be Paul Mescal in the role of Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley in that of his wife. Hamnet remains for a while.
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