Maggie O'Farrell on "Hamnet"

Shakespeare had a son. When he was 11 years old, he died. It's safe to say that's all you know about him. Now let a novelist get hold of his story. Suddenly, there's so much more. From the Fulture Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I Michael Whitmore, the Fulture's director. Maggie O'Farrell writes beautiful, lyrical novels. Now there have been plenty of those written about Shakespeare, but with her newest effort, Maggie has tried something different. She's written a Shakespeare novel that never actually mentions the writer's name. That's because the center of attention is not the artist himself, but his family back home in Stratford, specifically his son who died during the plague outbreak in 1596 and the child's mother who tried frantically to save him. The novel is called Hamnet, and at the time we're recording this, it's on the short lists for the women's prize for fiction. That's the competition created after the 1991 Booker Prize short list had no novels by women on it. Maggie O'Farrell joined us recently from her home in Edinburgh, where she and her children are locked down during our own plague outbreak. There are spots in this interview where the audio quality isn't everything we'd like it to be. We hope you'll understand under the circumstances. We call this podcast, "Oh, My Son, My Son." Maggie O'Farrell is interviewed by Barbara Bogeyve. When did you first hear the story of Shakespeare's son, Hamnet? Well, it was a very long time ago. I was about 16, rising 17, and I was at school, and I was lucky enough to have an absolutely brilliant English teacher. He mentioned in passing, while we were studying the play, that Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet, who died about four years or so before Shakespeare wrote the play. Even though I was a very long way off, obviously, from being a parent and a very long way off from being a rising myself, but even then the parallel symmetry of these names really struck me. It was just something, and that was 30 years ago now, and it just always stayed with me. What does it mean to have written a play with the same name as your dead son? What is that telling us? For a man like Shakespeare, he's left such a scant paper trail. There are so very few clues about him, about his life, and about the person he was. We have this incredible richness of work to draw on, but not a great deal of biography. For a man who's quite mysterious and shadowy as a person, it seems to speak enormous volumes this act, and that's always intrigued me, the link between this lost boy and this stupendous, tragic play. Was there a reason that this inspiration returned to you now, or when you started to write the book? Well, in a sense, it's never really left to me, actually. The play, I think as it does actually, was quite a lot of that lesson, so it was probably a certain type of that lesson. The play Hamnet really got on my skin, and I remember I studied literature at university, and this was in the early 90s, and the kind of trend for academia then was very much, we were kind of encouraged to write Marxist, post Marxist, post feminist, Essex. It was all seen through the lens of theory, and I felt as though we were getting further and further away from the text, so I remember reading a lot of biographies of Shakespeare then, and they're fairly hefty works, maybe 400, 500 plus pages, and I was really amazed that Hamnet, the boy, maybe got, if he was lucky, got two mentions, you know, they mentioned he was born, and they mentioned his death, and his death was always wrapped up in statistics about child mortality in the 16th century. Almost as if, I don't know, the unspoken implication was that it wouldn't really have been that big a deal, because those probably should have been half-expecting, one of the children to die. I think that really got to me, that assumption, that it was such a presumptuous assertion to make that. And such hogwatch, I mean, when have parents not been struck to the ground? How could you not? How could you not? Yeah, I mean, he was 11, you know, and you only have to read the first act of the play to know that it's underpinned by this enormous weight of grief. That's true, although we don't really know the order in which the plays were written, and. No, it's true, and I think you have to. Obviously, you have to always be circumspect when you're trying to read biography into his work. Clearly, there are, you know, you have to differentiate between one and the other, and it's no just true, no one's entirely sure which order the plays were written in. No, I mean, that's true. We do know, though, that King John is written in 1596, which is the year that Hamnet Shakespeare died, and it has the heart-rending speech from Constance about the death of his son, and just leaps off the page. Yes, it really, really gets you. That speech doesn't, it's like a knife through the ribs. Yeah, but we don't know which came first, the death of Hamnet, or the play Hamlet, or whether Hamnet was sick and expected to die while Shakespeare was writing, you just don't know. But to get back to your book, it is true. Very little is known also about Shakespeare's wife, and you flesh out her portrayal, so it's such an interesting way. In your book, she's a healer and a seer, really. Well, I was, when I originally conceived of it, you know, I've been wanting to write this book for a really long time, and I would sort of do a bit more research, and then I would decide to write something else, and I'd put all my Shakespeare books back up on the shelf, and I said, "Humnet Library, back on shelf, now get it down again, and I have another shot." And so I decided that I would really give it a go, and I applied myself to very serious research, and what really struck me actually from the research that I did was what a, what hard time of it the woman who married William Shakespeare has been given. In over the years, she's been vilified and criticised and demonised, and it's astonishing. She really does get bad crafts. And really, she has done, you know, there is no evidence, she seems to have done very, very, very little to deserve this, really. If you say, "Stop to pass a by in a street," and said to them, "What can you tell me about the woman William Shakespeare married?" I'd probably like to say one of two things that she forced him into marriage by getting pregnant, and that he hated her. I mean, you know, the last time I checked getting pregnant is something that involves two people, and of course, you know, where is the evidence that he hated her? You know, people will always reach for the famous interleaving in his world, the second best bed, but, you know, with that, I like to counter that, and I say, "Well, you know, at the end of his career, when he was retiring from the stage, he went back to Stratford to live with her, which doesn't suggest to me a marriage that he regretted or a wife that he hated, you know." So I think I just was, I became quite fascinated by her, and I became, my interest got really hijacked by her in a way, and I thought, "Well, maybe they did love each other. Maybe it was a marriage of equality and parity." And, you know, I wanted to kind of ask readers to think again, to forget everything they think they know about her, and maybe open themselves up to a new interpretation. And one of the things I was really struck by was I read her father, Richard Hathaway's will, and he died a year before she in William Married, and he left her a very generous dowry, and he described her as my daughter Agnes, which it was a bit of a thunderbolt moment for me, because I thought, you know, obviously spelling in Elizabethan times was a lot less stable than it is now, but if anyone would know her real name, it would be her father. So we don't even know her name? Yeah, have we been calling her by the wrong name for 400 years? It seemed to kind of really typify attitudes towards her, so I wanted to give this name back to her, so in my book she's Agnes. So she is a healer, and as you describe her, she's kind of a wildling. She grew up in the forests with a counter-culture mother, and she's very much an individual, and she has a superpower, really. She has a way of reading people. She grasps them by the hand, and presses the flesh between the thumb and the forefinger, and the way you describe it, she can feel what they're feeling and what they're thinking, who they are in their essence. She can also see the future sometimes. How did you come to give her this superpower? Well, it was partly, I think, because I was wondering what William would have been like at the age of 18 when he married. He must have stuck out like some sort of thumb, you know, in this small, rural market, farming town. I just wondered whether, you know, because what interested me I think is that one of the questions, I'm Jermaine Greer has written a fantastic book about the woman we know is Anne Hathaway, it's called Shakespeare's Wife, and then she says the question is that everybody has asked, why did he marry her? Why did he marry this woman who's older than him? Why did he waste himself on her? And she says it should be the other way around. Why did she marry him? Why did she choose this penniless, wajeless, 18 year old? And I suppose that that question was at last of it. I thought, well, maybe she saw something in him, maybe she looked at him and realised he was extraordinary, that he was a genius, that he was nobody would be his, he was peerless in that sense. So I suppose that that's where this kind of grew from, that maybe she was the one person who could see into his soul and see what he was capable of. And that is funny, because Shakespeare does come off a bit, especially in the passages about it's youth in your book, it's a kind of, it's a really pathetic figure as you say, like this nervous weakness. Oh I don't know, I didn't, I didn't see him as pathetic, but I mean, he was young, he was 18, you know, which is, I mean, like, and little, you're right. Yeah, I mean, it's 18 is very different than from it is now, I think, but it's still, I mean, it's still young, it's still pretty, you're still pretty unformed at that age, I think. Well, maybe you could read a passage for us, and this is the passage where Anne does, or Agnes as she is in your book, does her, her, her, her pincer grip on, on his hand. When she had taken his hand that day, the first time she had met him, she had felt what, something of which she had never known the like, something she would never have expected to find in the hand of a clean-booted grandma schoolboy from town. It was far-reaching, this much you knew. It had layers and starter like a landscape. There were spaces and vacancies, dense patches, underground caves, rises and descents. There wasn't enough time for her to get a sense of it all. It was too big, too complex. It eluded her mostly. She knew there was more of it than she could grasp that it was bigger than both of them. A sense too, that something was tethering him, holding him back. There was a tie somewhere, a bond that needed to be loosened or broken before he could fully inhabit this landscape, before he could take command. Thank you. I love that description of the spaces and vacancies, dense patches, underground caves, inside of Shakespeare. This is your Shakespeare in the book, and it's also very interesting that Anne is the one who can sense that he's being held back, and she's the one who has agency. She comes up with this idea for Shakespeare to set himself up in London, which is the very situation that in history is supposed to be a sign of their bad marriage that they were so delivered together by people. Yes, you turn that upside down. Yeah, well, I just wanted, I was just interested in the idea that maybe their marriage was a lot more of a partnership than people have given it credit for in a sense, which I think is why I wanted it to give her her own sort of brand of artistry in a way. Something that was fascinating to me, and I'm sure many others of Shakespeare's writing is the incredible range and reach of his metaphors. You know, he shows such a vast range of knowledge and a huge range of subject. And of course, there's a lot in hemlock to play about herbology. And also Hawking, there's a lot of references to Hawking and Falconry and his metaphors. And so I decided to give these areas of expertise to her because I felt that I just wanted to portray them more as partners, you know, as something much more symbiotics and people have characterized their marriage. I keep on thinking as you speak about the interview we did on the podcast a while ago about Anne Hathaway and how one of the things that became clear is that over the centuries, whatever the ongoing, you know, cultural controversy or preoccupation was, that would determine how people saw Shakespeare and his domestic life. So in the 19th century, there was Shakespeare the family man, but in the early 1700s, and then again, in the 20th century, he was Shakespeare the liberty cheating on his wife when he was in London. And then in the 20th century, he was cheating on her with men and women. It really calls all of this up for me how we take this void of Anne and throw ourselves and our anxieties into it. Yeah, that's very interesting. I know it's a strange one. I feel as though people have desired to so long to give him a kind of retrospective divorce. I'm not sure why, I don't know whether it's kind of misogyny or whether it just simply comes down to the idea that we prefer our artist to be footless and fancy free and open to many love affairs. And you know, I think that obviously there's a huge amount of debate about his sexuality and whether or not he was faithful with it. I mean, clearly he was a very sexual being. And you know, I imagine as a young man in London far away from his wife, maybe, you know, I'm sure there was temptation was shown in his way, especially in the sort of more freewheeling society of the playhouses. But you know, like so many other things with Shakespeare, we just don't know. Well, exactly. That's what I was going to say. We don't know. And just to ask a very practical question, were there certain works or biographies that you found very helpful to you, either of Anne or of William Shakespeare? Yes, gosh, so many actually. I mean, you know, there is, as you'll know, you know, an enormous wealth of reading material I should explain. I mean, you could very feasibly spend the rest of your life reading about Shakespeare. And lots of people do. But I think I, the ones I really loved actually were Neil McGregor's Shakespeare's Restless World. And I also really loved, of course, but I mentioned Shakespeare's wife by Jermaine Greer, Peter Atcroid's biography. James Shapiro's books about Shakespeare, I've really loved. I recently read his recent mind about Shakespeare in Dividing America, which I thought was wonderful. I also read a few sort of contemporary books. One of them was The Herbal or General History of Plants by John Gerard. And also there's a fabulous book about Falkenry. It's called The Book of Falkering Hawking by George Terberville, which is from 1575. I mean, obviously, you know, I read as many books as I could get my hands on, but those are the ones that really, I've still got my studying, they've all got thousands of post-it notes glued into them, saying things like London, traveling, windows, eating, you know, just these tiny list of details that I needed to borrow from elsewhere. Well, that's interesting because that's what you do need as a novelist, isn't it? You need details in order to write and to bring these things alive. And they're not necessarily the details that you thought you would need about saying. Not at all. Yeah, but say Shakespeare and they're kind of the incidental stuff like Falkenry. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think research is it's kind of a complicated issue because obviously you need to do a huge amount, you know, even to kind of to know an awful lot, but you need to kind of keep out maybe 95% of it from the book because otherwise, I mean, I think if you're writing fiction, I suppose in a sense, you know, the kind of historical novel that I like to read are ones that don't wear their research really heavily, you know, aren't weighted down by all the homework that the novelist has done, you know, and I think it, I find it really frustrating when I'm submerged in a scene and then suddenly somebody wants to tell me all about importing and I don't know, the sort of manufacturing processes of hemp or flax or something, you know, that I think, you know, why is this here? Why are I reading this? You know, I think, especially when you're writing a book about the past, you've got to be really careful not to show your workings too much. But also, you know, I think the fantastic thing about research and, you know, going into these, you know, very scholarly and detailed and exhaustively researched books, you know, it's astonishing the words of those works of scholarship that people have done. But also, you know, you come across things that you didn't even know you needed to know and those can be very, very, very fertile grounds for a novelist certainly because you can find out all kinds of things that maybe spark you off in a new direction or send you off down an alley where you didn't know it was there. Well, that leads to my next question because the novel focuses on the death of Shakespeare's son, Hamnet and the devastating ripple effects it has on Shakespeare and Anne and their marriage and the whole family. But he dies of plague and and you have a whole epidemiology chapter that wonderfully traces how the plague came to Warwickshire, England in 1596 and then to Hamnet and the coincidences that needed to happen. And, you know, for me, reading this chapter in the midst of this pandemic, it's just so resonant, you know, the accidents just pile up, you know, and a symptomatic super spreader decides to go to a funeral across the country and suddenly people were dying in one state while the rest of the country is oblivious of any COVID-19 danger. But you wrote this book long before COVID-19 so what possessed you to include a plague contact tracing chapter? And is it what you're talking about that you've learned so much that you just can't stop yourself from putting me in the novel? Well, it's funny. I mean, you know, obviously when I, as you say when I wrote that chapter, it was a long, long time before any of us had even thought that this current pandemic was even possible. So obviously when I when I wrote it, it was a more kind of structural thing I wanted. I remember deliberately going off to research this because I wanted this to happen, you know, because the book, the first half of the book traces the final couple of weeks in Hamnet's life and of course it didn't know what the real Hamnet Shakespeare died of. There's no cause of death recorded. But, you know, the plague that, you know, what we now call the plague or the black death would have been, you know, a kind of constant fear for people in the 16th century. And yet Shakespeare never wrote a plague play. He didn't know. You know, I think what's interesting about it is going back to talking about the enormous range of subjects and knowledge that he reaches for in his metaphor. He never once mentions the pestilence or what we now call the black death. I mean, he mentions plague, but he's not actually talking about the black death, you know, plague on both your houses. He's talking about a plague, any plague because of course there were no shortages of killer illnesses in the 16th century. But he never mentions it, which is it's extraordinary really when you consider how prevalent and how high it must have registered in people's consciousness at the time. And I've always I've always wondered actually about this absence in his work. Yeah, and you write in your author's note in the book that this novel came out of kind of idle. Your idle speculation about why Shakespeare never wrote about it. We had a guest on recently who wrote about deaths in Shakespeare's plays and she brought that up too. What do you make? Well, obviously, you know, it is something that's always struck me. I suppose as a novelist, I wanted to join the dots between those speculation. And you know, we don't know, I haven't died, but he died in a plague year and he died in high summer. It's not impossible. I mean, you know, it's perfectly possible that he died of, you know, he cut his finger and died of septusumia. You know, we have no idea, but it was just too, I mean, as a kind of writer of fiction, it was just too tempting for me not to join those dots. Well, one of the terrible ironies of the novel is that Anne is a healer and everyone throughout the book is coming to her for cures of all kinds and her cures seem to work. But when her son is dying, she can't help him and that just adds to her guilt and her grief, which you write about just so seringly. And I'd like you to read a passage for us from this part of the book. That's on page 219. Inside Agnes's head, her thoughts are widening out, then narrowing down, widening, narrowing over and over again. She thinks, this cannot happen, it cannot. How will we live? What will we do? What will I tell people? How can we continue? What should I have done? Where is my husband? What will he say? How could I have saved him? Why didn't I save him? Why didn't I realise it was he who was in danger? And then the focus narrows and she thinks, he is dead. He is dead. He is dead. The three words contain no sense for her. She cannot bend her mind to their meaning. It is an impossible idea that her son, her child, her boy, the healthiest and most robust of her children should within days, second and die. She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts like fishing lines towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing and how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her is tabulating them and their whereabouts. Judith upstairs, she's on her next door, and hamlet. Her unconscious mind casts again and again, puzzled by the lack of bite, by the answer she keeps giving it. He is dead. He is gone. And hamlet, the mind will ask again, at school, at play, out at the river. And hamlet, where is he? Here she tries to tell herself, cold and lifeless on this ball right in front of you, look here, see. With her back to the door, she faces the fireplace, which is filled only with ashes held in the fragile shape of the log they once were. That passage, you read it very in a very measured way, but in my mind, as I was reading, it was a very panicked mind, and just a hell of grief and the cycling thoughts. And you really give us a sense of that. And your style of writing changes here for quite a bit in the book, that there's less coherence or narrative flow. Your writing becomes a series of small sketches. What fueled your descriptions of a grief like this? Well, I think the whole impetus behind the book for me has always been going right way back until I was 16 and sitting in the very cold classroom in Scotland, hearing that Shakespeare had this son. I think the whole impetus for me was to give a kind of solemnity and to honour this death, which I think has been really overlooked and underplayed by history and by scholarship and by popular culture as well, actually. I just feel that nobody, before, has said, you know, this was really important, this shatter the family. You know, obviously, and for a very good reason, biographies focus on Shakespeare's life in London, it's career, you know, with good reason. But for me, I've always thought that the biggest tragedy, the biggest drama of his life, of Shakespeare's life, happened offstage in Stratford at home, and that was with the death of his son. And the book for me was always going to be a kind of memorial to this boy and wanting to say, you know, this was really important. He was very important. I don't think without his death, we would have the play Hamlet, and I don't think we would have the play 12 night. Culturally, he's crucial. And I think, emotionally, he was crucial. I think it must have been a huge turning point in Shakespeare's life, and in the whole family's life. And I wanted the death to come in the middle of the book, and for the second part afterwards, to be the style of it to reflect how the family must have felt. It must have been shattering. They must have all broken into pieces, and I wanted the way the book was written to reflect that. You do have a conversation between Shakespeare and his wife. It's really their first heart-to-heart conversation about their son's death. And so you have to put words into Shakespeare's mouth. Which is really the book, but I'm curious, how do you warm up to that? It is hard, obviously. I think writing about him is, there is an awful lot of vertigo involved, obviously, because it's him, isn't it? You know, the man on whose shoulders we all stand. And I think that's part of the reason why I don't ever name him in the book. He's just some guy. The word William, or even the very presumptuous will, doesn't appear. It wasn't something I'd necessarily planned, but I just found in the writing of the book, you can't, it's just almost physically impossible to write that name in a sort of fictional sentence. William Shakespeare came down to stairs and helped himself to breakfast instantly. I just felt like a total idiot. You know, and I thought, you know, you just can't do it. And I thought, you know, well, if I'm getting pulled out of the narrative here, I can't possibly expect readers not to feel the same. And also, you know, I think the idea is that I wanted, you know, partly as I was, you know, going back to what I was saying about Anne or Agnes, I suppose I wanted readers to try and forget all the things they think they know and just maybe open themselves up to a different version. Let's see him before he was, you know, the man, the icon, the this, you know, be a moth that we all know, just think of him as a man, you know, as a boy, a boy like teen. He's just this young Latin prudent in your work. He's in love with a girl much older than him. Yeah. And, you know, we need to try and forget, at this point, we need to try and forget who he is or who he becomes. We just want to see him as a young man in love, I suppose, or as a young bereaved father. Although you do have some lovely dialogue for him and a sister, Eliza, that plays off his love of language and word play that comes up throughout his plays, especially in the word nothing. That's what I'm thinking of that conversation. Well, he does have quite an interesting play on negatives, on onwards and no words throughout his plays. And, you know, with that, you know, I really wanted to avoid the kind of the temptation to say to my readers, this is where he gets this idea from and this is where he gets this idea, because I would find that kind of thing really painful. The easter egg thing. Yeah. Yeah, just awful. So, you know, I had to kind of really steer clear of that. But there's a few that, you know, obviously, I, you know, without, I mean, one of the first things I knew, you know, I would knew I would never, ever write in sort of, sort of called Elizabethan foe Shakespeare dialogue, because, you know, that would be agonising to write and to read. Thank you. And also, you can't, you can't imitate him. He is who he is. You can't, you know, try and pretend. So, I knew that I would write it in, in modern language, but I was knew that I wanted to be very careful about the way they spoke. No. So, it didn't, you didn't come across these terrible grating and that cringesms. So, I try not to use any vocabulary that wouldn't have been, have, so words that wouldn't have meant the same thing in 16th century. So, the last few draft I did with the OED right next to me, and I wrote things up. So, at one point, I had, I can't remember who it was. It might even have been him saying that something was a shambled and, you know, meaning a kind of chaos. But actually, when I looked it up in the OED, I realised that that word in 16th century meant to dice and caught a carcass. So, that had to go. So, it is, but it's quite, you know, for someone like me, I find that kind of thing, I'm a bit of a kind of, um, etymological nerd, so I found it quite enjoyable. So, yeah, it was, it was a minefield, but quite an, you know, quite an interesting one for me. That's the kind of thing I enjoy. Well, I don't want to give away the ending, but let me ask you this, did you always know the ending you were heading towards, or was that something that you struggled with or came to as you were right? No, I always knew that the book would end where it does. One of the big questions for me, which I've always wondered about was how, how Hamlet's mother might have felt to know that her husband had written a play with the name of their dead son as it's title, and also as the name of its hero, and also the ghost, of course, who's also called Hamlet. And we should explain Hamlet and Hamlet is this right? They're virtually interchangeable. Yeah, so as I was saying, spelling in the 16th century was not stable, and so Hamlet and Hamlet are completely interchangeable in parish records. So Hamlet and Judith, the twins, were called after their godparents who were with the baker and his wife in Stratford. They were called Hamlet and Judith Sadler. And Hamlet Sadler's name appears very various documents with a double T, with an L, with an N, with two N's. There's absolutely no consistency at all. So it is the same name. So I always knew that the book would have to end with the play, not to give too much away, and with Hamlet's mother's interaction or experience of the play. I have to ask also whether writing this novel changed your thinking about Shakespeare, the man, or Hamlet, the play? I think it did end so far as it made me really dig down very deep into both the man and the play. I mean, obviously I'd studied the play at school and I studied again at university and I've read it since I've never seen it on stage, which is ridiculous. I know, this is ridiculous, isn't it? And actually now I'm slightly nervous to see it. I've seen the Olivier version of it, which is all very, you know, lots of tights and brooding. But I've never seen it. I know I haven't you gone. Are you afraid it would ruin it for you because you love the play? No, not cool. It's funny. I mean, it's not just how I've deliberately avoided it. It's never quite, I don't know. It's ridiculous, isn't it? Anyway, I can't believe what you asked me now. Rather writing this book that you wrote. I do remember that. I do remember that back now. Whether it changed your thinking about Shakespeare as a man or Hamlet a play. I think writing a book made me think about how much more is a human being and it made me speculate a lot more about the last years, you know, how did this club's boy, how did he make that leap? Nobody knows. But I think as a novelist writing about him, you start to fill in those gaps yourself. So, I mean, I decided to invent my own, actually, his wife, days, days of marriage at all. We're going behind the man. But who knows? Nobody knows. But I think that's all women everywhere. Well, thank you. Good. I hope so. But I think that's what's so fascinating. About him. You know, this is a man who, you know, we only have, is it six examples of his signature? You know, he is so shadowy. I think what? I'd love to read your novel of his last years. That's the next time. I think, and everything I know about him, that's the thing that first, that's the biggest question mark. There you go. Another novel. Thank you so much for this. This was wonderful talking with you. Oh, no, it's my absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. For having me on your brilliant podcast, I mean, I wish I'd known about it when I was writing my book. It's really frustrating. I've been listening to it and thinking, "Oh, that's all these things I could have known." Oh, that is so lovely to hear. That is the greatest compliment. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate you taking the time. It's my pleasure. Thanks so much, Barbara. I hope you stay well. You too. Maggie O'Farrell is the author of Eight Nobles. After you'd gone, my lover's lover, the distance between us, the vanishing act of Esme Lennox, the hand that first held mine, instructions for a heat wave, and this must be the place. Her latest, titled HamNet, shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction, was published in the US by Kenop in 2020. She was interviewed by Barbara Bogeve. Our podcast, Oh, My Son, My Son, was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Pastor. Ben Lauer is the web producer. We had technical help from Andrew Feliciano and Evan Markwart at VoiceTracks West in Studio City, California. We'd like to ask you a favor. Please rate and review this podcast in the Apple Podcast Store. I don't personally understand how the algorithm works, but I'm told that reviews are the best way to let people who've never heard of Shakespeare Unlimited find out about the work we're doing here. Thanks so much for your help with this. Shakespeare Unlimited comes to you from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Home to the world's largest Shakespeare collection, the Folger is dedicated to advancing knowledge and the arts. You can find more about the Folger at our website Folger.edu. Thanks for listening. For the Folger Shakespeare Library, I'm Folger Director Michael Whitmore.