It is not only the tragically short life of William Shakespeare’s son that lies at the heart of Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel, Hamnet, but also that of his wife, Agnes Hathaway, of whom so little is known.
Agnes, charmingly played by Madeleine Mantock, is the focus of Lolita Chakrabarti’s light but slick adaptation in the handsomely refurbished Swan theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. A natural healer, clairvoyant and illiterate, we are taken from her first meeting with a teenage William (Tom Varey) – a Latin tutor and wastrel in his bullying father’s eyes – to their marriage and grief in the aftermath of Hamnet’s death.
