Set in the late 16th century in a fictional British town near, and later right in Stratford, this novel initially concerns itself with the not uncommon problem of an unwed pregnant teenage girl in a blended family with strict adults and rebellious children. With stretched imaginations, the story is said by critical reviewers to parallel the life of a youth that Shakespeare supposedly based his Hamlet on, and they also claim that the pregnant girl is modelled after Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife. None of the allusions to Shakespearian themes were obvious to this reader. Later chapters relate the fraught relationships between in-laws of different generations and world outlooks and divergent levels of urbanized culture, from a glove-maker strict cruel patriarch to a young Latin-tutor son.
A circuitous route of the Black Plague bacteria via fleas from a monkey in Alexandria to London via a ship’s cats and rats, Damascus, Aleppo, Venice, Sicily, Barcelona, Porto, London, Stratford, and on to Warwickshire via a horse, is detailed. It infects and kills many people en route, including one of the main characters, a good illustration of the ignorance of infectious disease transmission of the era, long before Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, Ignaz Semmelweis, and John Snow. Likewise, the fragility of life in the era before any effective medicines and antibiotics is made clear by the common and unpredictable deaths of children such a Hamnet, and the widespread use of quackery and sorcery. With this in mind, and the fact that in that era at least one in five children died before age five, the extreme and prolonged grief and pathos to the point of psychotic delusions of Hamnet’s mother and other members of the family upon his death seems unrealistic. Readers are also accurately reminded about the primitive state of communication channels of the era with most of the population being illiterate, having no railroads, cars or telegraph, and no reliable postal services.
The present tense is used throughout the entire narrative but the chronology of events skips back and forth and can be confusing. There is a dearth of dates and ages of the children as different events are discussed non-sequentially with gaps of time left out entirely. If one leaves the story and then comes back to it as I did it becomes difficult to pick up the thread and distinguish the characters from each other. Unrealistic abilities of the young mother to smell distinctive odours of her own very early pregnancy and her husband’s melancholy border on magic realism. The bloody details of childbirth hardly make for entertaining reading, no matter how realistic.
Equally unrealistic is Hamnet at age eleven changing clothes with his dying twin sister to fool Death into taking him instead of her and his mother’s earlier frantic distressed musings as she goes into premature labour with the twins. As Hamnet’s father, playwright, theatre company owner, director, and actor reincarnates his dead son as Hamlet, what plot there is drowns in a sea of grief, sentimentalism, and nostalgia.
For me, there is an excess of the flowery meaningless descriptions that seems to please many professional reviewers of books who belong to the ‘creative writing’ set. There are twelve sentences on one page page starting with “She sees…”. Excessive long descriptions of scenes and people abound and metaphors often contradict others in the same sentence.
I found nothing very educational, enlightening, enjoyable, or memorable about this book. Others with a more literary bent may well disagree.
⭐️⭐️
Thanks, Alana
The Passionate Reader 