Why did Maggie O'Farrell write about Shakespeare's son?

The life of young Hamnet and the effect that his premature death had on his parents is reimagined by Maggie O’Farrell in her 2020 historical fiction Hamnet, which has since been made into a major film starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. What inspired the writer to focus on such a moment?

Published: January 26, 2026 at 12:37 PM

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Very little is known about the only son of playwright William Shakespeare, except that he died at the age of 11. The life of young Hamnet and the effect that his premature death had on his father is reimagined by Maggie O’Farrell in an emotional departure from her previous works. Did the young boy’s death influence the bard’s later writing? And is the name of one of his most famous plays, Hamlet, a coincidence – was Shakespeare trying to tell us something?

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What inspired you to focus on Hamnet Shakespeare, and how much do we actually know about his life?

We know he was born, and we know he died but apart from that, pretty much nothing. I have always been struck by how little space Hamnet was given in biographies. There's usually a paragraph about how common child mortality was in the late-16th century, but the implication was that it wasn’t that upsetting to lose a child because it happened a lot. It seemed preposterous to me because it must have been devastating to lose your only son, at age 11.

Hamnet’s mother [Anne Hathaway] has also been unfairly maligned as an older woman who tricked a younger man into marriage. I think we need to look at her with fresh eyes which is why I gave her back her actual name. Her father named her Agnes, which raises a question: why all these years do we refer to her as Anne? I wanted to write a novel that gave voice to these people who've been silenced by history.

This is quite a departure from your previous novels. How different did you find writing this book?

When writing historically there's a lot of library-based research you can do, but the author has to inhabit the lives of these people.

For example, when writing the first chapter, I had this young boy falling on the floor. I stopped because I had no idea what the floor of a Tudor kitchen would be made of. I went to Stratford-upon-Avon and saw the flagstone Tudor floors for myself. I cultivated my own Elizabethan garden and learnt how to make traditional medicines.

In terms of the writing, it was like going back to the start of my writing career. All the metaphors and techniques you become used to don't work when you’re writing with the minds of 16th-century people.

Did knowing so little about Hamnet allow you more creative licence?

This is a fictional interpretation of what might have happened; the name Shakespeare never appears because I am taking the lives of real people who lived and breathed. No one really knows why the real Hamnet Shakespeare died.

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I've also always wondered why there's no mention in Shakespeare’s works of the plague. It seems extraordinary for it to have been such an ever-present terror, killing swathes of people, yet he never reached for it when constructing his plays. I sort of answer that for myself in the novel.

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