Naming, Shaming, Proclaiming: some notes on Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet
I should be given a medal for resisting the easy route of titling this piece ‘what’s in a name?’
Anne
I’ve long since accepted that every thought I have is influenced, if not entirely indebted, to Anne of Green Gables (1908). Fellow devotees of L. M. Montgomery’s novel will recall this scene when Anne is asked her name for the first time:
“Will you please call me Cordelia?” she said eagerly.
“Call you Cordelia? Is that your name?”
“No-o-o, it’s not exactly my name, but I would love to be called Cordelia. It’s such a perfectly elegant name.”
“I don’t know what on earth you mean. If Cordelia isn’t your name, what is?”
“Anne Shirley,” reluctantly faltered forth the owner of that name, “but, oh, please do call me Cordelia. It can’t matter much to you what you call me if I’m only going to be here a little while, can it? Anne is such an unromantic name.”
“Unromantic fiddlesticks!” said the unsympathetic Marilla. “Anne is a real good plain sensible name. You’ve no need to be ashamed of it.”
“Oh, I’m not ashamed of it,” explained Anne, “only I like Cordelia better. I’ve always imagined that my name was Cordelia—at least, I always have of late years. When I was young I used to imagine it was Geraldine, but I like Cordelia better now. But if you call me Anne please call me Anne spelled with an E.”
Out of all the plain English girls’ names, ‘Anne’ might be the plainest. It’s only one syllable, its three letters are some of the most common in English, it’s only a short vowel, so brief it practically begs for decoration, as in Anna, Anya, Annette, Annika, Annabelle. But none of these options are allowed to our Anne.
Marilla unwittingly hits the nail on the head: Anne is indeed a real good plain sensible name, but Anne herself is neither plain nor sensible. Dramatic, lovable, passionate and strange, Anne wants a name that becomes her, or at least hints at who she is. She begins the novel without a stable home, with no family or friends. So it’s no wonder she feels the need to plaster her identity on every available surface. Anne wants to be known and her name, she feels, is a missed opportunity for broadcasting herself.
Over the course of the novel, Anne puts down roots. She finds a home, family and friends in the little community of Avonlea. At the same time, we get to know her more and more, and her name—previously ordinary—expands to contain the multitudes of who she is. Someone named Cordelia would have to contend with the serious, romantic implications of that name, but ‘Anne’, being common, is also a blank canvas. We come to see that what otherwise seemed plain might also be understated elegance, queenly reserve, room for growth and change. By accepting her name, Anne also accepts her circumstances, and this—a recurring theme throughout the series—sees her choose, again and again, comfort over grandeur and home over fantasy.
It’s not just Montgomery who does this, of course, although she does place special emphasis on names: characters Ruby Gillis and Jane Andrews are exactly who you think they might be. ‘Anne’ is deceptively plain in other places too. Anne Elliot, from Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1817), is patient, forbearing, meditative and generous, but hardly anyone sees her apart from Captain Wentworth. Anne Bullen, possibly the most notorious woman in English history, has a name like a common fishwife. I think we write it Boleyn to lend it more dignity.
Agnes
Last night I finished Hamnet (2020), Maggie O’Farrell’s dreamy, reverential, open-hearted novel about Shakespeare’s family life. One choice she makes is to call Shakespeare’s wife Agnes, instead of what she is more commonly known as: Anne.
Agnes is the main character. O’Farrell imagines her as strange, beautiful and decidedly rural. She must be the kind of woman who could bewitch the mind that wrote Cleopatra and Rosalind and Lady Macbeth. The ordinary townspeople, including her mother-in-law, are slightly afraid of her. She sees through everything: strangers, secrets, time itself. Like other cunning folk, she is skilled with herbs and medicine. She possesses the second sight. She is not urbane, but neither is she rustic or pitiful.
We often think that Shakespeare escaped to London, and once a year he forced himself to visit Stratford, that backwater, where his dull children and older wife lived almost unconscious of his creative genius. But Shakespeare’s plays thrum with rural consciousness: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream especially, the forest is a place of wonder, chaos and astonishing power. By aligning Agnes with the traditions of English folklore, O’Farrell finds a possibility that this woman was not simple and merely domestic, but mysterious and alluring, and connected to his most imaginative writing.
When Agnes and William Shakespeare first meet, he mishears and thinks her name is Anne. She smiles and tells him he’s wrong, he’s delighted he managed to coax that out of her, they kiss, and then:
“It’s Agnes,” she says. And this name, too, he knows, although he has never met anyone with it. Agnes. Said differently from how it might be written on a page, with that near-hidden, secret g. The tongue curls towards it yet barely touches it. Ann-yis. Agn-yez. One must lean into the first syllable, then skip over the next.
She is slipping out of the space between his body and the shelves. She opens the door and the light beyond is dazzling white […]
I know we’re entering perilous territory when it comes to Shakespeare and spelling. He never signed his name the same way twice, and none of the six surviving copies of his signature are spelt ‘Shakespeare’. Anne and Agnes may have been interchangeable: Stephen Greenblatt thinks that Hamnet and Hamlet certainly were. (Incidentally, when O’Farrell quotes him, she spells his name Steven.) Eager-eyed pedants will say that Shakespeare couldn’t have had such thoughts about Agnes: pronunciation, spelling and language were all different for him. But O’Farrell’s Shakespeare is only approaching the historical idea of the man himself. It isn’t him but more like a shade: fainter, ghostlier, with elements of the real.
Some observations about names in Hamnet:
Characters in the novel assume Hamlet is the same as Hamnet.
Shakespeare had a sister named Anne who died when she was seven and he fourteen.
At one point in the novel, Agnes sleeps in Anne’s old bed.
The book’s dedication reads ‘For Will’.
O’Farrell’s husband, mentioned in her author’s note, is called Will Sutcliffe.
What are we to make of this? Hamnet is a book inspired by a real child. Hamlet is a play probably inspired by that same child. Anne Hathaway was the name of Shakespeare’s wife, notorious for two things: the second-best bed and being eight years older. Agnes Hathaway is O’Farrell’s startling and generous reimagining of this woman. These are purposeful, important pairs. Spelling matters, at least to us, and O’Farrell’s sly elisions indicate the sliding relation it bears to historical truth.
Somewhere amongst Shakespeare’s Hamlet and O’Farrell’s Hamnet is a real boy who died in Warwickshire in 1596. But just as we can’t pin down the real person behind all this writing, so too is his name at once uncertain and significant.
Shakspere
The main obstacle in writing about a writer is that they’ve already said quite a bit about themselves. If it’s a good writer, like Shakespeare, the competition they offer is pretty stiff. O’Farrell faces the pressure of writing about the most brilliant writer in the English language head-on. Hamnet is neither bardolatrous nor flippant, neither arrogant nor self-effacing. Shakespeare isn’t in the shadows—that would be cowardly—but he isn’t front and centre either.
In the novel, Shakespeare is never referred to by his name. See this from O’Farrell’s interview with Kate Kellaway:
I notice she never uses Shakespeare’s name in the book. “I couldn’t. When you’re sitting at your computer, immersed in the world you’ve created, and have to write: ‘William Shakespeare had his breakfast…’ it’s impossible not to think: I’m an eejit. Even calling him William seems colossally presumptuous,” and she gives in to a gale of laughter.
Instead, he is called ‘the glover’s son’, ‘the Latin tutor’, Agnes’s husband, the children’s father. I like this trick of relating him to someone else, of recentring the world not around Shakespeare but around the individuals we normally see as his appendages. This is also how O’Farrell navigates the enormous pressure of characterising someone so huge. It’s hard to humanise the greatest English-language playwright, but easy when he is a husband and a father.
Not speaking a name only builds up tension around it. If the people in Stratford don’t speak Shakespeare’s name, then it only lends weight to the one place it does appear: on the playbills. In the novel, Shakespeare is only ‘Shakespeare’ when he is author of a play. The collision between these two parts of his identity, father of Hamnet and author of Hamlet, generates the energy that fuels the final stretch of the novel. Of course, these identities are reconciled by using his name, but O’Farrell’s refusal to do this seems to me triumphant.
There’s a trend in Shakespeare authorship theories to use ‘Shakspere’ or some other unconventional spelling to denote the man from Stratford, and to reserve ‘Shakespeare’ for the secret identity of the playwright. I understand this instinct, because ‘Shakespeare’ seems a hallowed name that only belongs to the playwright. It’s a cloak worn by whomever really wrote the plays. Authorship theories spin out from here: they say the Earl of Oxford etc. adopted ‘Shakespeare’ as a pseudonym, tacked it onto the playbills, but lived out his regular life as the Earl, not Shakespeare. So the plays are wedded to the name ‘Shakespeare’, but not the man who shared that name.
This is true even if you know the plays were written by the man from Stratford. There’s the family man, businessman, mentor and actor, and then there is the playwright. Shakspere the father and husband from Stratford blends, linguistically and eventually, into Shakespeare the playwright. Our identities aren’t fixed even though our names usually are. By uncovering a ‘Hamnet’ from ‘Hamlet’ and an ‘Agnes’ from ‘Anne’, O’Farrell understands how facets of a person can be lost in an idea—and finds the ‘Shakspere’ in ‘Shakespeare’ too.