Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet and the problem of historical ethics

Good historical fiction shouldn’t be (too) relatable. Should it?

A few weeks ago, I finished reading Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, the loosely imagined retelling of the lives of William Shakespeare’s real-life son and Shakespeare’s extended family in Stratford at the turn of the 16^th century. The book came out in 2020 and promptly won the Women’s Prize; the Guardian called it “a work of profound understanding”. I came to it because I was on holiday and I finished reading the book I had taken with me too quickly (Nicolas Padamsee’s quite-good England Is Mine¹). I borrowed Hamnet, read it, and found it to be a work of mild misunderstanding.

Objectively, Hamnet isn’t a badly written book at all. Sure, O’Farrell has a habit of loading every sentence with poetic tri-colons, which can begin to grate a little unless you really buy into her hyper-descriptive style. “Her female fingers, slender, tapered, were required to enter that narrow, heated, slick canal, and hook out the soft hooves, the gluey nose, the plastered-back ears”, she writes to describe a woman delivering a newborn lamb. Or when a character looks down while eating: “She looks…at her own hands, her own fingers, at their roughened tips, at the whorls and loops of her fingerprints, at the knuckles and scars and veins of them, at the nails she cannot stop herself gnawing the minute they emerge.” That’s an awful lot of hand for one sentence. Plus, I tend to prefer books with at least an element of self-aware humour (think Zadie Smith; Jonathan Coe; David Annand’s amazing Peterdown). Hamnet is a hugely portentous novel with very serious, sensitive characters who seem to spend most of their waking hours feeling. 

But anyway. These are all questions of taste which would appeal to others, and O’Farrell is a very good stylist even if that style doesn’t appeal to me, personally. No; the thing that really put me off the book was that it fell into a trap I see in a huge amount of historical fiction, which is this: the protagonist shares the ethical outlook of readers in the 21^st century, while everyone else has a worldview typical of the time.

Here’s a short section in the book towards the end, when Agnes, William Shakespeare’s wife, rides to London with her brother Bartholomew to look for her husband. The two are directed to cross London Bridge to make their way to the Globe.

‘Perhaps,’ she mutters to him, as they pass what appears to be a heap of excremement, ‘we should have taken a boat.’

Bartholomew grunts. ‘Maybe, but then we might have—’ He breaks off, the words disappearing before he can speak them. ‘Don’t look,’ he says, glancing upwards, then back at her.

Agnes widens her eyes, keeping them on his face. ‘What is it?’ she whispers. ‘Is it him? Is he with someone?’

‘No,’ Bartholomew says, stealing another glance at whatever it is. ‘It’s… Never mind. Just don’t look.’

Agnes cannot help herself. She turns in her saddle and sees: drooping grey clouds pierced by long poles, shuddering in the breeze, topped by things that look, for a moment, like stones or turnips. She squints at them. They are blackened, ragged, oddly lumpish. They give off, to her, a thin, soundless wail, like trapped animals. Whatever can they be? Then she sees that the one nearest her seems to have a row of teeth set into it. They have mouths, she realises, and nostrils, and pitted sockets where eyes once were.

She lets out a cry, turns back to her brother, her hand over her mouth.

Bartholomew shrugs. ‘I told you not to look.’

But… why? Why is she so shocked?

As a reader, I struggle to believe there were many people in England in 1596 who would have been appalled to see the brutal evidence of capital punishment displayed in a public place… were there? This was a society where people would watch heretics burn for pleasure, who would set dogs on bears to rip each other apart, and then bet on it. People who were used to one in four of their kids dying before they made it to five. We, the readers, would be shocked by this level of brutality, absolutely – because we live during the most peaceful and violence-free century there has ever been in Europe (so far! lol). But, surely, most Tudors would have just shrugged?

In other words, in the passage above, I think that Maggie O’Farrell has written Maggie O’Farrell’s (imagined) response to seeing severed heads tarred and stuck on a pike on London Bridge. Not Agnes Shakespeare’s.

Still a higher turnout than the average game in Ligue 1

Even if this specific example doesn’t convince you, the same narrative framing – that the point-of-view characters have unusually modern, progressive views on life – pervades the rest of the book. O’Farrell’s Agnes is a sort of proto-feminist, refusing to be married off to a crap man, nor to be shamed for pursuing the male pastime of falconry. She’s also a healer type who is uniquely compassionate towards the elderly and lonely, tending to a dying old man despite his inability to pay her a fee, and deeply connected to nature in a hippy-ish way. She regularly communicates with the honey bees who live in her beehives, and she flees into the forest when it’s time for her to give birth to Hamnet and his twin sister, Judith (Agnes is also the lamb midwife and finger-gazer quoted above). And yet she also pooh-poohs the ridiculous quack cures other healers sell in the local town. In all, she reads as the sort of woman you might picture moving to St Ives after a divorce, combined with a sort of sleeves-up WE CAN DO IT! woman from that wartime poster, digging for Britain while communing with her inner goddess and quoting Margaret Atwood on Twitter. She’s utterly modern, and often holds the stupid peasant types – you know, the actual 16th-century people – around her in contempt.

It’s obvious why a writer would do this – it makes your main character instantly relatable – but (and I admit this is totally subjective) I really cannot stand it. Nobody in the 16^th century really lived or thought like this. Why would illiterate Agnes Hathaway have been the only one to know that tying a frog around someone’s neck wasn’t a cure for a cold, when literally every other individual she had ever met would have accepted it as fact?

None of this would matter as much if the novel hadn’t been lauded as brilliantly well researched (the Guardian again: “The depth of [O’Farrell’s] research is evident on every page. Anyone who has visited Shakespeare’s birthplace will recognise her descriptions of his former home, but O’Farrell plunges the reader into the vivid life of the house”). But what’s the point of describing the “vivid life” of early modern England if the main characters are somehow imbued with the worldviews and values of people alive in the 2020s?

This isn’t meant to be a Maggie O’Farrell hit piece. Obviously, O’Farrell is an accomplished, prize-winning novelist and many of the people I spoke to about Hamnet loved it (though my mum did call it “middlebrow”, which made me laugh in a way that only extremely understated shade-throwing can). But this struck me while reading O’Farrell’s book, because she is far from the only novelist working today who does it.

In 2012, Madeleine Miller won the Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles, a romantic retelling of the Iliad whereby the Achaean prince Patroclus (the lover of the hero Achilles, and the narrator of Miller’s book) was recast as a peaceful soul who chooses to become a sort of Bronze Age battlefield medic during the Trojan war, an MSF figure applying bandages and poultices to fallen hoplites, rather than fighting himself with spear and shield. Again: why?

Even on the novel’s own terms, there’s no way that someone raised in the honour-based warrior culture of the Iliad, where a man was measured on the strength of his sword thrust, would ever have chosen to forego the pursuit of martial glory in favour of work normally left to women and slaves.² Violence was part of everyday life; war (self-defence, if you’re being generous) was the only reason for states, and kings, to exist. An aristocratic warrior in the Greek Heroic Age simply wouldn’t renounce violence, any more than your mum would declare her intent to stop watching The Traitors and instead join the SAS in 2024.

It’s obviously an author’s prerogative to do anything they want with their characters; I’m not saying Maggie O’Farrell’s Agnes is invalid as a character. But making your characters think like modern people undermines your claims to authenticity; it turns your historical setting into little more than cosplay. And it doesn’t have to be this way.

Books which get this right do exist. Hilary Mantel’s work in Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light might be the best example, with her vulpine Thomas Cromwell, who despite being at heart a modern thinker is nonetheless a patriarch; who despite his sympathy for the white-hot ideology of Protestantism never strays into anachronistic atheism. He’s a believable product of his time, as are the people around him. Halfway through Wolf Hall, Cromwell recalls his childhood experience of watching a heretic Loller woman burn at the stake. See how Mantel describes the reactions of the Tudor crowd, including a woman standing behind Cromwell:

When the Loller was led out between the officers the people jeered and shouted. He saw that she was a grandmother, perhaps the oldest person he had ever seen. The officers were nearly carrying her. She had no cap or veil. Her hair seemed to be torn out of her head in patches. People behind him said, no doubt she did that herself, in desperation at her sin[…]The woman in the clean cap squeezed his shoulder: like a mother might do, if you had one. Look at her, she said, eighty years old, and steeped in wickedness. A man said, not much fat on her bones, it won’t take long unless the wind changes.

Eventually, men stack wood around the old woman and set it alight:

The stake was on top of a pile of stones, and some gentlemen came, and priests, bishops perhaps, he did not know. They called out to the Loller to put off her heresies. He was close enough to see her lips moving but he could not hear what she said. What if she changes her mind now, will they let her go? Not they, the woman chuckled. Look, she is calling on Satan to help her. The gentlemen withdrew. The officers banked up wood and bales of straw around the Loller. The woman tapped him on the shoulder; let’s hope it’s damp, eh? This is a good view, last time I was at the back.

In the book, Cromwell believes he was about nine when this happened, though of course he doesn’t know quite how old he is or was (another great example of of-the-time mindset). But imagine it: holding a nine-year-old boy by the shoulders and encouraging him to watch the violent, state-sanctioned burning to death of an old woman because not only does the woman deserve it because she believes something you think is actively dangerous to her soul and those of people around her, but also because you think it will do the boy good. That’s the woman’s belief who is holding the child Cromwell.

People in past centuries believed in what they believed, and it wasn’t the same as what you or I believe. That’s precisely why they are interesting to read about.³

You can plot authors of historical fiction along a spectrum, if you like: Mary Renault is better at capturing her characters’ temporal belief system than Niklas Natt och Dag, who’s better than CJ Sansom, who’s better than Ellis Peters, who’s better than Ken Follett, and so on.

In fact, it’s not even always a good thing to be totally clued-in to the worldviews of your historical protagonists. The 1970s novel King Hereafter by Dorothy Dunnett is a masterly work of fiction that inhabits the mindset of an 11^th-century Norse-Gael chieftain called Thorfinn the Mighty, who is one possible candidate for the historical basis for (Shakespeare again!) the Thane of Cawdor himself, Macbeth. But Dunnett’s research is so in depth as to make her characters’ motivations impenetrable at times. Thorfinn and his beautiful Scots-Viking wife, Groa, a.k.a. Lady Macbeth are so of the time, and Dunnett’s research so in depth (she supposedly spent six years prepping the novel), that there’s no time or words spent bothering to explain the landscape of Norse-Gael Britain to the contemporary reader within the in-book stream of consciousness. “If Macbeth understood the politics of 11-th century Cumbria,” the novel seems to say, “then why shouldn’t you?” And so, while reading King Hereafter, it feels like we really are in the head of a Viking Earl of Orkney – and that is not a place that makes much sense to a modern reader.⁴

So. The challenge for any author of decent historical fiction is to tread that fine line, I suppose. To make the world accessible but not overly explained. To make it foreign and familiar at once. To make us gasp in horror at those tarred, mutilated heads on London Bridge, but not the characters.

1. Very well written and compelling but ultimately lacking payoff, if you want to know.

2. Incidentally Braveheart, probably the worst “serious” historical epic ever put on film, has the opposite problem: its depiction of the villain, the almost certainly (in real life) gay Edward II, as weak, effeminate and unduly influenced by his lover Piers Gaveston is so harsh as to seem outwardly homophobic in 2024. This is probably in line with how many of Edward’s detractors did see him at the time, but I think that’s just a coincidence; in reality, it tells you more about Mel Gibson’s famously, uhh, progressive outlook than it does the worldview of people living in the 1200s.

3. See also: the specious argument you occasionally see on Twitter that “If women were in charge of all the countries around the world, there would be no wars”. As though Catherine the Great wasn’t responsible for the conquest of Crimea and southern Ukraine or the partition of Poland; as though Elizabeth I didn’t issue letters of marque; as though Victoria stepped in to say to Parliament “Oh, sorry, actually, it’s wrong to colonise Australia and India, lads.” These people were products of their time, whether women or men, and they accepted that massive violence was normal and fine.

4. One of the most famous books to emphasise this is The Viking Way by Neil Price, originally a doctoral thesis and later published as a tour through the deeply, deeply weird mental landscape of the Vikings. Price was recently interviewed on everyone’s favourite centre-right history-for-dads podcast, The Rest is History. It’s worth a listen.