Maggie O’Farrell

You know, you read these incredible works of scholarship, these huge biographies about Shakespeare, and Hamlet is lucky if he gets maybe one or two mentions.

And they say that he was born and then they say that he died.

And his death is all too often, for me anyway, wrapped up in statistics about Elizabethan child mortality.

Right.

Yes.

The implication is that because it was, you know, death, you were lucky.

You know, I think it was one and you had a one in five chance of reaching your fifth birthday in the 16th century in England.

There was no shortage of things that could fail you, unfortunately.

But the implication is that somehow it was less upsetting because you just had to get used to it.

And I just never I never believed that.

And there was one book in particular that had the sentence, it is impossible to know whether or not Shakespeare grieved when Hamlet died.

And I was so furious about that.

I threw it across the room because I just I just I don't believe that anywhere in time, anywhere in the world is anything less than catastrophic to lose a child.

I just don't believe it.

Well, yes, you just want to direct them and say, have you read any of the plays?

Have you listened to Constance in King John talk about her son and him dying?

I mean, obviously, I think we all know that's nonsense.

You don't have to be a parent to know that's nonsense.

So I think I just wanted to...

And I always felt that Hamlet, the boy, had been relegated to a footnote in his very famous father's story.