Maggie O’Farrell

He was grieved.

And without him, we would not have Hamlet and we probably wouldn't have Twelfth Night.

No, her footnotes were quite unkind, I think.

Yeah, again, scholars have always tended to only tell us one story about her, one narrative, which is that she was an older peasant woman who lured this boy genius into marriage.

And people have written things like that he hated her and he ran away to London to get away from her.

He regretted their marriage.

I mean, none of which there's any evidence for whatsoever here.

I couldn't really understand where all this hostility towards her came from and why people are so determined in a way to give him a retrospective divorce.

And actually, I found a lot of evidence that they did love each other instead.

So I wanted to, again, to write, to invite readers to forget everything they think they know about Anne Hathaway, which she's always called, I don't know why, even though her name was Shakespeare for most of her life.

And just to say, actually, maybe they did love each other.

Maybe theirs was a partnership.

I did find writing the scenes of Hamlet's death and the subsequent scene of his laying out for burial very hard to write.

It's true, I did.

And I didn't write them in the house where my children live.

I actually wrote them in a really old shed in the garden, which has since blown down in a gale.

and I had to do it in sort of 10 or 15-minute intervals.

So I would write it, and then I would have a walk around the garden to kind of decompress, and then I would go in again.

And the two scenes probably took me about a fortnight to write.

And they were really hard, but I wanted them to be hard, actually, partly because I felt his death had been so downplayed and overlooked and wrapped in statistics.