Comparative Drama

I miss you, I miss you, I would give anything to have you back, anything at all.

While Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet (2020) is offered to us as a work of fiction, a historical novel, it might equally be understood and perhaps even more deeply appreciated as a work of creative criticism. She crafts a tale imagining what many readers want to know more intimately: the courtship and marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, the births of their children, the death of their son Hamnet, and the creation soon afterward of the play Hamlet. But O'Farrell rises above a mere filling in the gaps left by the factual record. Her creative re-imaginings of Shakespeare's marriage, his wife's own form of artistry, and both parents' grieving the loss of their child are not just fictional creations but also critical interventions in the way that Shakespeare's life—his wife, marriage, and parenthood—and his art—Hamlet—have been perceived. Like all the best criticism, O'Farrell's creative writing is a form of creative reading that brings us back to a desire for an encounter, a feeling of encounter with the text that was primary.

Hamnet is less about Shakespeare than it is an encounter with Shakespeare, undertaken in a Shakespearean manner—that is, not littered with "thous" and "forsooths," but crafted in Shakespeare's distinctive art of indirection. O'Farrell's novel is also deeply informed by literary criticism; she cites Germaine Greer's Shakespeare's Wife and the studies of James Shapiro among her prized sources. She conducted an enormous amount [End Page 9] of research on falconry, herbology, epidemiology of the Black Plague, and of what one would see and hear and smell in the streets of London in 1600. But none of that is trumpeted in the book; we are not taken out of the story to admire how clever and studious she is. Like Shakespeare did when composing Hamlet, a play that would accelerate not only his career but playwriting itself in its innovations of interiority onstage, O'Farrell writes by way of radical excision, paring away anything that would prevent our complete absorption in her world.

That term, "radical excision," is Stephen Greenblatt's. When Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, Greenblatt argues, he found that he could "immeasurably deepen the effect" of his plays and create an "intense representation of inwardness" if he removed expected details, if he excised "a key explanatory element" or motive, whether of causal plot element or psychological rationale. This technique of radical excision was not used to make "a riddle to be solved" but instead to create a "strategic opacity" that "released an enormous energy" which had heretofore been "at least partially blocked or contained by familiar, reassuring explanations."¹ As a result, in Hamlet Shakespeare was not only able to represent Hamlet's inwardness but also his own, to conjure, as Greenblatt puts it, "the deepest expression of his being."² Greenblatt assumes that this "conceptual breakthrough" of radical excision was not merely technical; in other words, it was not just a new aesthetic strategy, but a personal revelation. Hamnet's death shook Shakespeare so profoundly that it inspired him to fashion a new inner structure of plays that could express his "root perception of existence," his "preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and settled."³ But, we might ask, how could Greenblatt really know this? Is his biography a work of creative criticism, an expression of his own literary critic's desire to discover and share in Shakespeare's root perception of existence? In that case, might we also consider Hamlet its own brand of creative criticism—a work that resees the legend of Amleth as a tale of grief? A tale and a telling that critiques the popular genre of revenge tragedy and its tired conventions by getting under them to see how much revengers are grieving, and slowing down the pace of the play to sit with the revengers and listen to why? Perhaps all innovation...