In more innocent times, when pandemics were something that happened in history books, Maggie O’Farrell spun a fable about the route of a plague to England in the summer of 1596. It started with a monkey, three fleas and a cabin boy in the port of Alexandria and ended up making its way to Worcestershire in the wadding of a box of beads, where it killed Hamnet, the 11-year-old son of a Latin teacher turned playwright. A few years later William Shakespeare would premiere one of the world’s greatest tragedies, Hamlet.
Shakespeare is known to have been touring a play in Kent at the time of his son’s death. “It’s not even known if he made it back to the funeral. I hope he did,” says O’Farrell, who was so haunted by the story that she held off writing about it until her own son was safely past the age of 11 (like Shakespeare, she has a son and two daughters). In her bestselling novel, Hamnet, she allowed the grieving father to be with his family at the graveside: “I think him arriving in my novel was a wish-fulfilment for him.”
