 So welcome everyone, thank you for joining us at our Mechanics Institute program online. I'm Laura Shepard, Director of Events, and we're very pleased to welcome you to our program with award-winning Edinburgh-based author Maggie O'Farrell for her new book, Hamnet, a novel of the plague, and Maggie will be in conversation with Phillip O'Kelly, the dramaturg of Cal Shakespeare. She is one of our Bay Area's leading experts on Shakespearean drama. If you're new to the Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854 and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. We feature a general interest library, an international chess club, and our ongoing author and literary programs, and our Friday Night Cinema Lit Film series. So please visit our website, MILibrary.org. We're also very pleased to cosponsor this program with California Shakespeare Theater, and please visit their website, CalShakes.org, to see all of their programs and events that are online and classes and wonderful podcasts. They have so much going on and we're very pleased to cosponsor with them for the first time, and hopefully this will be the beginning of a great partnership. Hamnet, this gorgeous new novel, gives a reimagined account of the Bard's family on Henley Street in Stratford on Avon, England, circa 1580, during the days of the Black Death. The portrayal of William Shakespeare as a young and up-and-coming playwright, his wife Agnes, a free-spirited healer, and their vulnerable son Hamnet and Kin offer a deep dive into Shakespearean life, history, and human nature. This book recently won the Women's Prize in Fiction, and after our program, please remember you can put your questions in the chat and we will be participating with you in some Q&A. Also, Maggie O'Farrell's book, Hamnet, is available at your local bookstore and also at alexandrebook.com. Now, I'd like to introduce our guests. Maggie O'Farrell was born in Northern Ireland and grew up in Wales and Scotland and now lives in Edinburgh. She is the author of The Hand that First Held Mine, Winner of the Costa Navajo Award, Instructions for a Heat Wave, as well as This Must Be the Place, and her most recently acclaimed I Am, I Am, I Am, Seventeen Brushes with Death. And Philippa Kelly is resident dramaturg for the California Shakespeare Theatre. She has published 11 books and her latest and 98 articles and her latest edited in the book called Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation in Contemporary Dramaturgie, Case Studies from the Field. She is also proud to lead a year-round community theatre group entitled Berkeley Theatre Explorations, which is to make dramaturgy a foundational to community theatre appreciation and participation. She is also running, she is also offering Run the Cannon, a lively short this discourse on Shakespearean plays and also in depth with Philippa Kelly through Cal Shakespeare. So once again, please welcome author Maggie O'Farrell and Philippa Kelly. Thank you so much, Laura. It's just an honor to be here and such an honor to be here with Maggie O'Farrell, who's won so many prizes for her books. I can't believe at your young age how prolific you've been in terms of writing all these novels. She's won Betty Trask Award. She's won the Somerset Mormon Award. He's one of my favorite authors. She's won, as Laura mentioned, the Costa Novel Award. Gosh, you're amazing. What I want to begin by asking is what gave you the initial inspiration to begin this novel about Shakespeare and his family? Well, thank you very much, Philippa. It's lovely to sort of meet you. I mean, I could say it's a novel that I've wanted to write for a really long time. And I had several kind of forays into it. And every time I sort of feared away from it. And I think I've actually written three books instead of writing Hamlet, or distraction for writing Hamlet. But I actually first heard about Hamlet the Boy. I've known about him for a really long time because I had this absolutely brilliant English teacher at high school. And we studied the play Hamlet for my Scottish Highers. So I was 16, rising 17. And the play just really got under my skin, as I think it probably does with quite a lot of adolescence. And I think certainly a kind of particular type of adolescence, perhaps, perhaps a little bit gloomy and prone to melancholy, maybe wears quite a lot of black. And I was certainly one of those, a place I used to like to hang out most in. I grew up in this, well, I spent my teenage years in this very small Scottish seaside town. And there was this ancient medieval churchyard. And the roof had come off the church. So I used to hang around there quite a lot. There was a lot of ivy and sort of very picturesque ruins. So you can see why the play Hamlet would have got under my skin. But just my teacher mentioned in passing one day that Shakespeare had had a son who had died at the age of 11, and his name was Hamlet. And I don't know why this just really struck me. And I have a really strong memory of sitting in this very cold classroom and looking down at the cover of the play and just putting my finger over the L and taking it off again and putting it down again and thinking it's the same name. And what does this mean? And even when I was only a teenager, I knew at a very instinctive level that it was a very significant act. And I didn't know then, as I know now, that Shakespeare is a really mysterious person. We know so little about him. There's such an odd imbalance with him because we have this enormous wealth of his work, his plays and his poetry. But on the other hand, what we actually know about him, concrete facts about his biography, are incredibly scant. We only have six examples of his signature. There are so few concrete things that we can hang on to. But it just has always seemed to me that calling perhaps your greatest play probably your most memorable tragic hero after your dead son is not nothing. It's not insignificant. It's speaking huge volumes. It's telling us an enormous amount about him as an artist and as a man and as a father. But I've always been baffled by the idea that Hamlet, as a boy, has been so overlooked. He's been very underwritten about in history. I've always felt he's never been given his significance and his due. When I was a student, I studied literature at university and I read these big 500-page biographies of Shakespeare. Hamlet's lucky if he gets maybe two mentions. They mentioned he was born and they mentioned he died. His death is always wrapped up by biographers and scholars in statistics about child mortality and Elizabethan era. Almost as if the implication is that it wasn't a big deal because lots of children died and they would have been half expecting it. I've always been skewed through the heart by this terribly presumptuous thing to assume. I just want to say to these people, just read the opening scenes of Hamlet with this in mind and tell me that that man didn't grieve for this boy. Yes, because Hamlet was written about five years or finished about five years after Hamlet's death. Yeah, well that's what I mean. As you know, it's hard to date these things but the Globe Theatre dates it as 1601, which is five years after he died. Four or five years, yeah. Yes, and everybody, when you read this novel, which you have to read, it's just brilliant, but you'll find so much in it in the way that Maggie has put together her story of how Shakespeare related to his wife and family. Shakespeare's wife really has, I see her as almost like that, even though it's not first person, the narrative voice in so much of this novel. So it's really giving a window into his wife, his own psyche and the psyches of both children as well as the relationships with Shakespeare's family and to a lesser extent actually his wife's family, so that so many parts about it you think, oh my god, that just slots it into place. It's so provocative and evocative. And so Maggie, well you've had already enormous acclaim for this novel. When you think about it, is there any part of it that stands out to you as the part with which you began or did you begin at the beginning? Well, as I said, it is something that I've been thinking about writing for a while and I did have several kind of goes at it. You know, every time I finished a book I would get down my Hamnet sort of books and my Shakespeare biographies and things from my shelf and I would read them again, I do a bit more research and I had a kind of document on my computer where I would, I was writing things down and I, but actually when I came to it I finished my, I wrote a memoir and when I finished that I kind of sat myself down and looked myself in the eye and said, you know, either you have to write this book about Hamnet or you just got to forget about it, you know, you've got to do it or not do it, you know, no one ever, you know, I kind of gave myself a talking to and actually I looked at the document which, well I had about probably about 20,000 words and I realized I'd started it all in completely the wrong place, you know, I think the first decision you have to make when you write a novel is you think about the kind of chronological time of your book and you have to decide at which point along that line you can jump in, you know, where does your, where does your novel begin, where does the story start and I realized I'd started it completely the wrong place and I wanted to put him, I wanted to put him, the boy Hamnet absolutely centre stage right at the start so it begins when he is, he's 11 years old, it's just probably about a week or so before his death and his twin sister Judith Fallsill and he's looking for someone to help and I knew that I wanted to begin with him but it wasn't, it was a strength, you know, it is a strength because it's the first book I've written, I mean I, I wrote a book a while ago set in the 1930s but this is the first book I've ever written in deep time I suppose, you know, and it was, it was no, you know, there was so much vertigo I think involved in embarking on this novel because not only was I needing to go back to the 16th century which is a long, which is a long time and people's lives and are so different to mine, you know, so and everything is different, you can't take anything for granted even the very language which your character is speaking but also I had to, you know, hit the life of Shakespeare and that's no mean feat, you know, because it figures incredibly presumptuous to, you know, start inhabiting him as a character so that's one of the reasons why I never, ever use his name, he's never named in the book, then name Shakespeare doesn't appear anywhere and I don't refer to him as William and I don't refer to him as Will, you know, it's impossible and I found it impossible to write a sentence, a fictional sentence that is saying, you know, William Shakespeare walked up the path and knocked on the door and as soon as I typed that, I found myself pulled up out of the narrative and just thinking, I sound like I'm in Egypt so I thought, well, if I can't stay submerged in the narrative, I can't expect readers to so and also in a sense I wanted, you know, to ask readers to forget everything they think they know about him and try to see him as a man, you know, as a human being, not yet as, you know, the greatest playwright who ever lived, just kind of be a master's icon, just to remember him as a human with a beating heart and a pulse. You know, it's interesting, Maggie mentioned her memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am, Seventeen, Brushes with Death and I was really struck with that, that part, the voice of the memoir feels like Agnes' voice in Hamnet and so I was wondering, I was wondering, you know, how that had led you into inhabiting Shakespeare's wife. Well, I think in a sense, you know, I think all books are a reaction to their predecessor, anyway, you know, I found that sometimes I finish a book and, I mean, it's not as if, you know, one book is a springboard for the other, but often you, you know, I feel, I suppose what I feel is that every book that I write, I have an enormously steep learning curve within that experience, you know, within the two or three years it takes me to write it and in a sense with every book I want to try something different, you know, I remember when I started a novel, which is about an Irish family called Instructions for a Heat Wave, I remember wanting to try to get to grips with the idea of polyphony of, you know, writing a book that's narrated by five different people and in one scene you switch between four or five different characters' heads and so I wrote the book in order to learn how to do it, but then sometimes when you've, you know, you've set yourself as hurdle and then you manage to clear it, you want to put what you've learned into action and to try something different with it, you know, so I suppose, you know, I suppose there is all, I mean, I think with every writer's book you can see certain threads running through their book and I don't know if for some reason I, you know, I never ever expected to write a memoir, you know, I've always felt very wedded to fiction, you know, I feel like it runs through me like my skeleton, but you know, the memoir was a bit of a surprise, but I've always thought really that, you know, you don't necessarily choose the books you write, the books choose you and have to, sometimes you just have to go with it, there is always often there's a book, you know, sometimes you get these periods in your life where you're not quite sure what you're going to write next, but generally there's always an idea or a concern or a kind of a project that will just shout so loudly you can't ignore it and you have to just have to go with it and I think that's what happened with Hamlet, you know, it was something that I've always felt pulled towards, it's always been kind of tidal and I just, it just felt like the right time, I think, you know, there is that sense that planets are aligned, perhaps I'm the right age, my children are the right age, there's actually one of the things that always prevented me from, one of the things that often presented me, prevented me from writing Hamlet is that my, I didn't, I had an odd superstition that I couldn't write it until my own son was past the age of 11, I knew that I knew that parts of my own son would filter into, probably filter into Hamlet and actually quite a lot has I think and I couldn't do it until I knew that he was safely past that age, so for some reason the planets were aligned I think. Yeah, oh that's fascinating and then one thing I was wondering about, just I was thinking about Shakespeare's wife and well let's just say his wife and what do you think about the fact that Shakespeare's wife in real life was bequeathed only the second best bed by a man who left most of his property to Susanna and 360 pounds which is not nothing to to Judith who was his unfavorite daughter as what we understand about them, so basically Judith would have gotten 37,587 pounds today or just shy of $50,000 US, so just putting that in context what do you think about him and his loyalties and his feelings about his family? Well I think the will is a very interesting document and I think it's very, I think having read it and having looked I mean obviously I haven't seen the original manuscript but I've seen photocopies of the original manuscript, it is a very uncharacteristic document, it's very, very devoid of any affection whatsoever, you would never think that the person who wrote probably the greatest lines and the greatest poetry about love and affection and marriage and fidelity and all different you know love in all its many guises you know it was written by the same person and actually I don't think he did write it I think, I mean I think he, I mean he was probably, somebody was transcribing it for him and the man was dying probably of typhoid you know if you read descriptions of how he died and there's another document saying that the stream at the back of their garden had some kind of terrible, I think they described it as a sweating sickness and it does seem like, I mean typhoid is a particularly nasty death but also you know the thing about the, I mean you know in in Jacobian law the wife of a man was entitled to a third of his estate so he would have known that his wife was entitled to, I mean you know at the end of his life Shakespeare was incredibly wealthy, he was equivalent of a multimillionaire you know as well as being obviously a very good playwright, a very good actor, he was a very, very savvy businessman you know he built up his company in London from the chamberman's man to the king's man and but also he'd sent all his money you know he, at the end of his career in London before he retired and came back to Stratford to live with his wife, he had sent all his money home to Stratford, he was still living in incredibly modest lodgings in in the city of London and in Stratford he bought his wife and daughters an absolute mansion of a place if any of you have ever been to Stratford the house no longer exists sadly but the plot of land is vast, it was one of the biggest houses in Stratford, he bought that year after Hamlet died with a huge amount of land and he also got cottages and fields and you know he was known I think probably in Stratford, I mean in what intrigues me is he was probably known as quite a successful landlord so he did have a vast fortune, absolutely vast fortune and a third of it would have gone automatically to his wife and he did, he does live at the second best bed in his will but I think well unless you see the document that behest is what's called an inter-lineation, it's squeezed in between two other lines and the thing about the sisters that yes so he does leave the vast fortune and the sort of what we now sort of call of power of attorney over the estate to Susanna and I think it's I think from what I can tell he had a good relationship with Susanna's husband who was a physician, John Hall, there's an awful lot of good doctors that appear in Shakespeare who work extremely, and Susanna did marry the physician in the town but I think what with Judith the situation is complicated because that Judith is Hamlet's surviving twin and she just previously to Shakespeare's death had married quite late in life a vintner called Thomas Quiney and just before Shakespeare died and somebody refers tribute Shakespeare's death to this, Thomas Quiney was held up in what was called a bawdy court which meant that a woman in Stratford had named him as the father of her unborn child and in in society in those days in the early 17th century if a man was named as an unborn child out of wedlock you could be held up for immorality and unfortunately this woman who was called Margaret died in childbirth so the son-in-law of Judith's husband was in serious trouble he was held up in court so there would have been an enormous scandal in Stratford and it would have been very embarrassing and it would have been I mean heartbreaking for poor Judith imagine if this is your you know your new marriage so it's not long after that the Shakespeare died and I think if you look at the will what Shakespeare is trying to do is protect his money from this pretty feckless vintner you know someone who owns a pub basically landlord from his son he doesn't want this feckless son-in-law to get his hands on the money and actually the amount of money he gives to Judith and he specifies it's for her it's not for the dodgy vintner I think he is taking care of her and he allows her to live in the cottage and he leaves her a very valuable silver bowl so I think the will is much more complicated than is often given credit for sorry that's very long answer oh no it's fascinating because there's so much speculation some people say you know that Shakespeare went to extraordinary lengths to deprive his wife of that automatic third of the estate and all sorts of things like that I've never seen any any any proof of that so yes I mean to those people I think I would say you know at the end of his career he could have lived anywhere he was an incredibly wealthy man but he chose to come back to Stratford to live at his retirement with his wife that doesn't to me speak of somebody who disliked his wife and also you know again I was talking about sending the money back none of that implies somebody who loathes his wife you know and if you look through his play I mean I know you have to be very circumspect about interpreting the biography and the plays you know you can't always automatically assume that they are related but there are so many examples of deep marital love and particularly very very faithful wives often in the face of inexplicable male behavior from their husbands yeah just I don't know I've never ever believed that he hated his wife and I know that you know the narrative that we've been taught for almost half a century is that she was an older woman you know I've seen biographers who say she was old she was stupid she trapped him into marriage you know he hated her he had to run to London to get away from her and I've never found any evidence of that ever at all you know I got really sort of enraged actually on her behalf thinking you know why has she been so badly treated why are we taught this narrative why are we told to hate her why are we why are biographers and scholars and you know screenwriters and other novelists so determined to give him a retrospective divorce but actually there's no evidence particularly either way I mean yes you can talk about the second best bed but then you can counter it by saying but he went back to live with her in his retirement you know and I do think there's you know and one of the thing that one of my lightning bolt moments with her as a character was reading again another will her father's will so her father Richard Hathaway was a very successful sheep farmer and he died a year before she and William married and in his will he leaves her a very generous dowry really for the daughter of farmer and then he did he refers to her as my daughter Agnes and as soon as I thought that I thought you know my god have we been calling her by the wrong name you know for almost 500 years on top of everything else she's been so vilified and you know the receiving end of so much hatred um I thought we've been you know this is the wrong name so I gave this name back to her I thought I wanted if anyone knows her name it should be her father so I thought I wanted readers again to forget everything they think they know about the the narrative of the ignorant strumpet peasant and open themselves up to a new interpretation perhaps their marriage was a partnership they did love each other and maybe she perhaps she was a litter I mean she probably was you know what daughter of a sheep farmer would have been taught to read but maybe she had her own sense of artistry and intelligence yeah and one of the wonderful things about the lack of firm information about Shakespeare's life is that you've leapt in and given him a life if you see what I mean because every every biographer is giving him a life from from the story they're telling and I I just love what you did can we actually go to a little bit of a reading so that our listeners can get a sense of the the timbre of the novel well I could start if we've just been talking about Agnes maybe I'll read a little bit about them first meeting so at this point in my so there's lots all sorts of debate as maybe people know about how how the son of a glover you know who only had a school education became to be such a famous playwright and scholars often think of refer to this as the lost years no one really knows how he came from a rural market town to become a play but one of the theories is that he was a tutor and he taught latin so that was the one I decided to go with so in this section he is the Latin tutor on a morning in early spring a latin tutor is standing at the window of huland's farm absolutely tugging on a hoop through his left ear he is watching the trees the boys are behind him they are conjugating verbs temporarily unheard by the tutor who is intent on the startling contrast between the sharply blue spring sky and the new leaf green of the forest the colors seem to fight vying for supremacy vibrancy the green versus the blue one against the other the children's latin verbs wash over him through him like wind through the trees he is just about to turn and face his pupils when he sees from the trees a figure emerge for a moment the tutor believes it to be a young man he is wearing a cap a leather jerkin gauntlets he moves out of the trees with a brand of masculine entitlement covering the ground with booted strides there is some kind of bird on his outstretched fist chestnut brown with a creamy breast its wings spotted with black its its hunched subdued its body swaying with the movement of its companions its familiar the tutor is imagining this person this hawk taming youth to be some kind of factotum to the farm a relative to the family a visiting cousin perhaps then he registers the long plat hanging over the shoulder reaching past the waist the jerkin lays tight around a form that curves suspiciously inwards at the middle he sees the skirts which had been bunched up now hastily being dragged down around the stockings he sees a pale oval face under the cap an arched brow the tutor moves closer to the glass leaning on the sill and watches as the woman moves from the right to the left of the window frame her bird riding on her fist her skirt swishing around her boots then she enters the farm yard moves through the chickens and geese around the side of the house and is gone he straightens his frown vanished her smile forming under his scant beard behind him the room has fallen silent he recalls himself the lesson the boys the verb conjugation he turns he arches his fingers together as he imagines a tutor ought to do as his own masters did at school not so long ago excellent he says to them they look towards him plants turning towards the sun he smiles at that soft unformed faces pale as unridden dough in the light from the windows he pretends not to see that the younger brother is being poked under the table with a peeled stick that the elder has filled his slate with a pattern of repeated loops he waits until they have half finished their exercise before he says what is the name of that serving girl the one with the bird thank you absolutely beautiful thank you oh gosh um can i ask uh when you what is your day like as a writer well um i would say it's not very organized you know i do you know i've heard other writers say and i know other writer friends of mine who say that they will you know start at nine a.m. and they'll work till 11 and they'll write so many words but i i don't know i think i i think i'm not really much of a planner either in life or in writing and i think and also you know i have three i mean my children are still quite young i've got three children and i mean certainly this this year has been interesting it's an awful lot of making things up as we go along you know because i mean i'm quite used to working at home obviously but i'm not that used to having three children at home to homeschool and so my eldest is 17 my youngest is eight so you know i mean and i'm with children as you know as anyone who has children will know that there are days when you sit down you think okay i've got three hours before you know i have to go and pick them up at school and then the phone will ring and it'll be the school and they say you know your child's full the night of a tree can you come can you come and pick them up so you never know you've just got to kind of roll with the punches and i think the same is true of fiction you know i think i it's particularly when i start a book you know i think it's very you know i often have a vague idea of what the plan will be and i have a lot of notes and you know i think that the novel is going to go from you know a to b but often what happens is that it may be a third of the way through or halfway way through the book it takes a right angle um and the novel sort of takes its own you know it says i'm actually we're not going a to b we're going a to c or a to d but i actually i was quite like those moments and i i look forward to them because it seems to me that when a novel does take a right turn um it's a book that's working on its own momentum that it's it's it's got its own pulse suddenly and i'm quite open to that as i think you know it's always a moment i feel that the book is working when suddenly you realize that the place you thought you were going isn't actually where it's going at all it's it's going somewhere else so i really like that and i think you know i mean it is you know there are some weeks i think when i think yeah this is fine it's all working i can do my writing in other weeks where i just think this is all the terrible disaster i'm never going to write again you know life keeps throwing spanners in my work but that's probably true of all of us i think isn't it yeah it's interesting isn't it just thinking and then are you an evening writer as well or does that it does that just change i used to be actually i think until i remember writing a lot in evening when i just had one child yeah and when he was quite young and i used to put into bed at kind of seven p.m and then i would have the evening but actually these days i think i saw having three children sport tiring and also a teenager teenagers are up you know i mean he goes to bed after me now and there's something about the house being busy which i thought you know i find that i really need i work best when it's very quiet and i the phone is off and there's no music and there's no people walking around and you know during lockdown i found that quite even though my husband and i were sort of swapping around that he would do some homeschooling and i would work and then we'd swap over and i would do the homeschooling and he would work but there was one morning in particular where i don't know why i was trying to work i was in my um in the bedroom trying to write and my husband was with the kids but every kind of two minutes there'd be somebody coming in saying mom we need a blue pen mom where are the paints you know where's the book do we need a jam jar and i felt i thought i can't i can't sustain any kind of concentration so actually what i did was i went into my youngest daughter's uh wendy house a kind of playhouse which is tiny so i crashed in there with my laptop and i pulled the door shut behind me and actually it was great nobody found me for two hours so that was the kind of most sustained concentration i can find but it just i think it just sometimes it works another time that doesn't and but i think you know the life the work of a writer anyway it's probably particularly if you're writing fiction there's only a really small part of that or maybe a lesser part of that which that happens when you're sitting at your computer typing you know quite a lot of the work you do i think happens when you're away and you're doing something else you're looking the other way you're doing the laundry or the washing up and so when that's happening you if you're doing your laundry you have a thought would you write do you carry a notebook to write it down um i do i mean i certainly write things i have i have a lot of notebooks all over the house certainly but i do i mean there have always been certain problems you know particularly not you know there's every novel that you write you will come up against a series of brick walls you know there'll be a kind of part where you think i i don't know how to solve this as you know this is a conundrum or this scene isn't working or this part of the book isn't working and actually i think what i think the really good thing about having children is that you constantly pulled out of your ivory tower you're constantly pulled out of your study and you don't sit there with your head in your hands you have to just go and engage with life and i often found that when i'm doing something else i'm pushing a pram or pushing a swing or you know playing in the park with my kids that something will just twist and fall into place and i'll think aha that's what i need to do you know i do think that every book you write there's a kind of engine it has its own engine it runs at the back of your head all the time and sometimes even you can't even hear it and then somehow something will slide into place or something will become unknotted and the solution will appear yeah and then of course there's all the you know the buckets and buckets of research that's obviously gone into this book which what's one of the things everybody that's so beautiful about this book is that it you know i feel like it it doesn't at all where it's research like a top you know like a top gallon hat or whatever those things are called it the research is seamlessly woven into this story and and it makes me think of there was a comment once by a writer that i loved it was something like um um storytelling takes suffering and makes it something that we can live with and so i was thinking about your own life and the you know beginning with when you were hospitalized for a year when you were a child and then you've had you know the famous 17 brushes with death and thinking i wonder whether those uh the the intensity of those experiences has have actually contributed to you being able to take this suffering and make it something that you can live with does that sound too trite no i don't think so i mean i think it's inevitable every you know a writer's experience will inevitably filter into the fictions you know i think you know it's i think all fiction is the kind of patchwork or palimpsest of things that you make up you know from things that you maybe borrow from research or you've heard people talking about and other things that you might have experienced yourself i think that's i think that's always going to happen there are always going to be elements but i think and i think you take it but i think i think the odd thing about fiction i think you know life alchemizes into fiction certainly in certain ways or certain strains of it but actually by the time you've recast it and redrafted it and rewritten it and maybe placed it in the 16th century and you know reimagined it in a different place it doesn't feel like it's yours anymore it feels like kind of at an arm's length and of course there will be you know i think that's why it's odd for people who know you well to read your books because sometimes they can see the joins you know and i think it is a strange experience oh i find that you know reading books written by close friends or my husband or you know there are certain things that you suddenly think oh gosh i remember this you know and there it is in a different you know a different guide or you know a different time a different person the words are coming out of a different person's mouth but i think that's i think that's always going to happen um oh we have the lovely Laura back with us um there is one question i'd love to ask but i'll save it um and we'll go to audience questions right well i'll start with the first question which i put in the chat i'd like to know more about how you came to this very specific kind of voice which is actually i think the novel has a sort of magic the way that you've written it just draws you in and you're kind of in this spell of this whole time and place and also about your discoveries and how you did research and what was unexpected and surprising and how that infused or informed the writing of the book well i think the voice i mean the voice is something that i i try hard i try hard not to think about it too much it's a bit like staring at the sun you know i think i think you have to allow novels in a sense to sort of a bit like bread though you've got to allow them to prove and you and you mustn't look at them too much you know and i think the voice is something that you know i think novels will find their own shape and assume their own level somehow a bit like the water table and you have to just trust that will happen um and i think you know i think one of the things i really wish that i someone had told me when i was starting out writing is that you don't have to begin at the beginning you know you can start halfway through you can start a third of the way through the important thing is is just to put words down to you know be in a room with your characters and get them talking and see what happens actually i think there is that i think it's really important particularly when you're starting something especially something that's so distant in time or so unfamiliar to you know your own world you've got to just try it out see what happens you know try one thing if it doesn't work just try another so i think it was more with that but i'm certainly the research for the book was very i mean obviously a lot of it was a library based you know because there's so much written about Shakespeare you know it was written by him and about him you know you could spend all of your life in a library reading about Shakespeare and you'd probably at the end of your life still there's still books you hadn't read so i did do a lot of that and that was that was fascinating you know and i learnt so much and you know and i tried wherever possible in the in the years in which i'm writing about his life never to go against something which i could see was true you know in a kind of documentary evidence i always i never tried to ignore anything that or just if it wasn't convenient to what i was saying i thought well i have to take this on board you know because especially when you're writing a book like this you have to always remember and respect the idea that these people were real you know and you have to be careful with that you can't ever forget that there is a real boy called Hamlet Shakespeare in that churchyard somewhere who was buried and you have to be careful with that you know even though it was so long ago and everybody who knew him has been long long dead he was still real and i think what that was always at the forefront of my mind and i had the printer that on my pinboard the entry from the Stratford of Moneven parish register about his burial you know which is just it's so heartbreaking to see this beautiful copper plate handwriting and in latin filious of William Shakespeare so that was something but actually for Agnes in particular Hamlet's mother i you know because her life is so you know if we think we know little about Shakespeare what we know about his wife is so scant you know that i mean her birth isn't even recorded because she was born before parish records began and we just we know basically that she got married and she had three children and one of them died as a child and not a great deal l certainly and so for her and also because her lies of women in those days were so so distant and so unfamiliar to mine as a woman in the 21st century so for her i wanted to give her i mean i mentioned you know wanting to give her her own sense of intelligence and artistry and so i wanted i decided to give her two of the areas of expertise which are very prevalent in Shakespeare's plays one of which is herbology which of course makes a it's quite evident in the play Hamlet particularly when Aphelia hands plants to people those plants are cures the um floor she sees in their character so i wanted to give that to Agnes and also Hawking there's an awful lot of metaphors in Shakespeare about Hawking and so i i actually and this is the funnest thing i've ever done in the name of research for a book i went to the Scottish borders and i learned to fly a kestrel in a woods and that was that was fantastic i did on really really rainy days and i wore the leather gauntlet and i because i'd actually i'd written a scene already where Agnes is flying the kestrel and i had described the kestrel landing with a thud on her glove and actually when i flew a real kestrel they're about the weight of a kitten and they're so silent and they appear on your glove almost without you noticing they just glide onto it and one minute there they went so i had to go home and completely rewrite that scene because kestrel's tiny and very light and the other thing i did was um plant a cultivating plant my own elizabethan medicinal garden with all the herbs that would have been used and actually i i read somewhere that every household would have had them and every woman of the house would have known how to use them because of course you know the doctors were expensive and medicines were so scarce and you know so people women handed down knowledge about these plants that you could help your children and your parents and your household with so i i created my own garden which i still have actually i still cultivate it um it's so it's a yeah i think of that lovely passage where or heartbreaking passage where aphelia hands go through the room and of course we have rueful as regretful looks good so it's it's just interesting thinking about the roots of these words as well to keep them ongoing um so we've got um a couple of oh so i'm sorry um laura was there somebody who wanted to ask a couple of questions from the chat uh yes there are there's a question from alex christy and it's is on i know you touched on the care you take for writing about historic figures what is different alex's question is what particular care you have to take when writing about real historic fixture figures versus invented characters how is the how is the approach different well i think you have to be i mean i think it goes back to what i was saying about the research you know i mean there are very there are you know as i was saying a few concrete facts known about shakespeare and there's an awful lot of swirling rumors and conspiracy theories about him too so i read i i gathered as many of the concrete stuff where there's actually documentary evidence of him being in a certain place at a certain time um and i also read through a lot of the conspiracies you know of course that you know there's all these theories out there that he didn't he didn't write the plays there were a number of people who wrote the plays or you know there are theories about him being a spy and i mean you know there's anything you name it there are people who are convinced that he's this or he's that or you know he was gay or he was you know he was um i don't know i mean you name it it's about and there's the one theory that he he was in the in the name you know he went to see and traveled all over the place and you know and it's you know it all kinds of stuff so i think i i read through all those and tries to decide whether or not any of them had any and it's for me any any kind of credence and i think i tried really hard i mean there were any i think there were only a few i think there's only one or two things that i went against one of the things i actually renamed one of shakespeare's sisters um he had one surviving sister that he had there were two sisters older than him who died in infancy and then there was a not actually there was one who died when she was seven called an and then he had another sister who was called jone who actually he was clearly very close to because she lived a long time and he left he allowed her to live in a house that he what he she's mentioned in his will and he gave her permission to live in the house on henley street look at the apartment but so i had to because um agnes's mother or possibly stepmother was called jone it's too confusing in a novel to have two characters with the same name so i gave her a different name but i don't think there was anything else that i went against i think you just you have to be careful and you have to be i mean the only person i think who possibly i may need to apologize to is shakespeare's father uh john shakespeare who it's quite possible he was a very charming man and lovely and he and william got really well i don't know but um in my in my book he's a bit of a violent despot um because there is an awful i mean compared to his william actually who i was saying there are very few documents john his father um who was a very successful glove maker has an absolute reams and reams of documents about him mostly um finds and he's owing a lot of money and he is what he's uh he's in court because he won't go to church and i mean he's a very he's a strange character i got the feeling from all these documents that you can see about him because he had been a very successful businessman and he'd been a high older man he'd been a bailiff which is basically like being the lord mayor of strafford and he had lots of civic duties but then at the time william married ann or agnes um the family fortunate in taking this huge nosedive because he'd started trading will illegally you weren't allowed to trade outside your guild membership and he he obviously owed a lot of money all over the town um he he did bizarre things like he at one point he's fined for dumping what they describe as orger in the street just outside his house i mean i'm not quite sure what that is whether it's i mean you know obviously he was a glover so you think they're kind of waste material from making gloves from skinny animals it probably could have been pretty vile stuff but just you know i just got the the impression of this rather erratic um personality and also i suppose i was thinking about the in shakespeare again and again a lot of his plays you see he's quite angry despotic men whose ambition uh you know their reach is exceeding their grasp and ambition comes back to bite them and i just wonder where that came from now i thought that was beautiful also shakespeare's father in real life um got fined for having his dung heap too close to the neighbor's house that's right yes he did he's a very interesting he's a very interesting character clearly um grimes asks what scene was the hardest for you to write well it's probably no huge surprise that it was hamlet's death that i found the hardest to write definitely but the two scenes of his death and then the following scene where his mother lays him out for burial um i think you know i mean i always knew that obviously i was new when i was starting to write the book that the scene was coming um and i do remember i do remember when i was coming closer to it with the book when i was coming closer to the halfway point in the book thinking i really don't want to do this you know because you get to know this child i mean the tips obviously the fictional hamlet and you know i i'd been i knew this time you know he i felt like i'd been living with him for such a long time and then i realized that at some point i was going to have to do this because it's unavoidable um and actually i was looking back in my diary recently for the rather i was looking back for something else a completely other reason and i came across this completely blank um double page and on it i had written i killed hamlet today and i knew i actually found that i couldn't write it in the house when my children live i wrote it in outside in the garden in a shed i mean it's not a glamorous nice shed it was a kind of filthy disgusting old potting stone which is actually now blown down in a storm but i sat in there and i did it in sort of 15 or 20 minute bursts and then i would have to go out and walk around the garden then i could write it again because it is it's heartbreaking but how could it no but that was a whole my whole impetus behind the book that i wanted it to be heartbreaking and i wanted to say this boy was important he was greed you know without this child without his death we wouldn't have hamlet and i don't think we'd have 12th night either you know his death was you know caused a huge impact and it's given us you know certainly one of the greatest plays ever written if not two or three i so agree with you um maddie do you write in longhand or on the laptop to begin with well a bit of a mixture actually i do take a lot of notes so i have notebooks for every novel and i take a lot of notes in those and again if there's research i take those in longhand but when i'm actually great writing the book creative but i will type yeah um so um there's a question from tony snipes and it's it's dealing with what he feels is a bit of misdirection and we were expecting judith to die but it turned to hamlet how did this twist come about how did you what was behind you well i think i've always been into it i mean i i wanted but this book to be i mean two things really i didn't want it to be the kind of book that could only be read and understood by people who knew a lot about shakespeare i didn't want to exclude people who perhaps haven't had the opportunity to see the plays or read them um but i also didn't want to make too many usually clunking obvious references to his plays it would seem a gross imposition i think for me you know to come along and say oh this is where he got this idea from this is where he got that idea from you know just very very crass but i think you know there are i hope anyway very very slight glancing references that are there if you want to see them and not if you don't you know and i think you know obviously there's a there is a very strong motif in a lot of his work about boy and girl twins and about them separated or being mistaken for each other or exchanging identities you know 12th night the play which the globe theater dates a year or so after hamlet is about you know obviously that features a pair of boy and girl twins who both think the other is dead and that they spend the whole play confused and people mistake them for each other and they put on boy and girl clothing and you know there's all this kind of confusion which is part tragic and part comic of course and then at the end they're magically reunited and they fall into each other's arms and it oh they're not dead after all you know and you read that in the light of what happened to her you know ham hamlet and these this boy and girl twins who are separated and how you know how could you not how could you not think that this is what was at the forefront of his mind and one of the things i read when i was researching the book when i realized i saw a playbill for the first ever production of 12th night and there was something about the date on it that caught my attention i looked at it i thought that date i recognize that date why do i why do i know that date and the opening night for 12th night was on what would have been the twins 16th birthday and that gave me it was like a it's a really strange sort of feeling it's like cold water tricking down my back and i thought you know here is the you know the lead player of the chamberlain's men who's written this play of course of course he decided that that should be the date that that play had its first premiere you know the first night of that play was judas that would have been her or even just her birthday of course but it would have been hamlet's birthday as well and that again it's a bit like the the moment where i you know looked at the names of hamlet and hamlet it felt as though you know there was a hand reaching out from history and saying i don't know i could just get a sense of shakespeare the man and the sense of his grief and what was fueling his plays perhaps and what's so beautiful about this book is you can read it if you've never even enjoyed shakespeare so it you can read it um as a just as a beautiful novel and it doesn't have the kind of heavy handedness of some historical novels but then if you've lived your life in shakespeare you then also read it with absolute fascination oh well that's good i'm glad because that's what i wanted to do i didn't want to make it an exclusive book but i think also the kind of it i think you know often you write the kind of books that you enjoy and i myself actually when i'm reading a historical book what puts me off more than anything or what's more likely what's most likely to make me shut it and chuck it across the room is it this kind of idea that a writer is showing off how much research they've done you know i find that really irritating you know the historical novels where you know they'll say she picked up the phone which was made of bakelite and early form of plastic and i just say oh god please no don't don't overload the story with all your research you know i think with research i mean what i decided i think in the process of the book is that you know you need there's so much you need to know you need to in order to write a scene in a room you've got to know what they're wearing you've got to know exactly what their clothes are made of you've got to know what the the cup that they're holding is made of and you've got to know what the floor is made of that they're standing on and what what's on the walls and what the windows look like but actually you have to edit out you've got to get rid of 95 percent of that you need to know it to have the confidence to create the scene but then you need to ditch most of it and wear it you need to wear its history very likely yes i so agree yeah um one of the the readers has been one of the listeners today has been saying um something about the book have i read the book i imagine interviewing you and not having read the book i love the book i've read it three times i love it thank you uh do we have more questions pan there's one from donna here can may i read that pan if you're having trouble getting on i'm sorry i had a little trouble i had a little trouble getting through um amily has asked about it's a john updike book about the backstory of hamlet's mother hamlet's mother gertrude and he had hamlet's mother gertrude used falcons eyes being sewn shut as an image of women's eyes being shut at the time of marriage did the falcon association with shakespeare's first sight of agnes derive it all from this history was that part of my might have been part of what inspired it it's i don't it wasn't updike that inspired that bit i mean it was mainly there is there are references to hawking and falconry in there's one in hamlet you know it's like a hawk to a hansel and particularly in um the taming of the shrew there's an awful lot of hawking metaphors there you see which actually again i suppose maybe that's where updike got his inspiration from the idea that you you know you tame a woman you make her you know come to your bidding come to your glove in a sense but i always think those shakespeare's you know always is doing that with a great knowledge and it's tongue-in-cheek i'm not sure i don't think he's advocating this is how you treat women in that play thankfully um so it was yeah it was something that i yeah i suppose it was in the back of my mind it wasn't it was more it was more probably taming of the shrew in hamlet than updike or do i i do like updike i'm looking to see if there are any more um questions yeah there's a lovely one here from donna um i'll i'll do it so donna says i love this book so much i finished it last week and can't bring myself to pick up another book and turn away from your book can you tell us a bit about how you crafted the multi-page passage about how the plague made its way to agnes's children it was fascinating and heart-stopping this passage um well i think actually that was that was a passage which i didn't plan it wasn't something that was in my vision for the book as a whole it just became clear to me i think that as i was writing the first it comes where it comes about halfway through the book and i you know because the most of the first bit of the book takes place in in mostly in one house or one street in stuff the ponave and i mean it also takes place in agnes's you know the hathaway farm but and it just felt i don't know there was something about that point i wanted to kind of throw the book open wide and say you know this to kind of give it a perspective it wasn't just about this small town the plague was a a global issue as you know we can all very much appreciate now and i do remember at the time it's i mean it's strange looking back at it now because you know when i wrote it two years ago or something um i do remember sitting in my you know my office in my centrally heated house thinking i wonder what it feels like for there to be this illness spreading across the globe and knowing that it could come any moment to your door and you know it was a sort of in it was a kind of thought based on research you know i was imagining what would it be like you know um for a pandemic to be creeping across you know and but i mean the thing about the black death is it's such a you know it's still very vivid i think in our folkloric memory yeah particularly perhaps in europe i don't know i mean it was a while you know it was a long time before i actually reached america i mean actually i think it came to san francisco first didn't it um yeah i think that was by way of hawaii that's right yeah that's right i did read that anyway so i mean i suppose it's just you know i mean the first sort of nursery rhyme was a child in britain your tool is um ring a ring of roses which of course some people think is about i mean i think it's about the plague not everybody would agree but but it was just as i suppose it's just like you know an interesting idea and i was thinking well how would it get then you know and the elizabethans were were quite materialistic you know in a sense that the world was opening up to them and they they could they liked you know they brought all this huge numbers of trade routes you know that's obviously where the why the plague was you know was able to sweep all the way across asia across you know and at one point it killed a quarter of the world's population you know and it would have been a forefront of every single elizabethans mind they would all have known the signs of their symptoms and you know they would have been terrified it was a it was so such a virulent bacteria that it could kill completely healthy young 20-something person within a day and shakespeare's career would have been constantly interrupted you know because the first thing the authorities did was to shut down the playhouses i mean actually there is a a play bill that proves that shakespeare was in kent on tour when hamlet died so nobody actually knows whether or not he made it back for the funeral but obviously he was on tour because they'd shut the globe in theater in london so it was a play you know fascinating also they didn't know how it spread so now we know it was the fleas on rats but actually that was a very late that was only discovered in the late 19th century yes so it's kind of fascinating thinking this thing well it's so like covid isn't that that we you know at first we thought it was through touching then through aerosol um yes maggie what are you working on now um well i'm just finishing i i wrote a children's book which is just coming up so i'm writing a second children's book and i'm also i've started another novel which is also set in the past which i realize it leaves it quite open the class is quite large but i'm quite super i'm a bit more reluctant to talk in detail about things that haven't finished but it is yeah i mean i'm enjoying it actually it took me a while to get over leaving these people behind it took me a while to take all my strapped up on avian maps and photographs of henley street down off my pinboard but now i'm i'm deep into another world now so i'm really enjoying it wonderful and the children's book you've finished is that out yet like can we get it yes yes it's that it's cool where snow angels go and it's about a little girl who wakes up to find the snow angels she made the previous winter he's manifested in her room and he's there on a mission to save her life great where snow angels go wonderful i have a question from valerie sofer how much time did you spend in strafford and how did you spend there your time there to absorb the place and would you consider writing another novel about shakespeare well i would never discount it you never know what might happen um and i did i went to strafford on two i spent several days there actually um and i i i mean i would say to anyone who's even remotely interested in Shakespeare and if you ever get to britain again please go and see all the houses of the 6th birthday stress because they are so incredible you know this is i mean let's not forget this is a man who we only have six examples of his signature but through some incredible magic of history and restoration you can walk into the house where he was born and he grew up and you can stand in the room where he ate his meals i mean it seems astonishing but it's right there and you can see it and you know the doorways are still there the floors the same the staircases so it is it's a magical place and i would say if anyone ever gets a chance please go so i um went around all the houses several times and i took about 300 photographs and i talked to the people who work in the these houses museums are incredible you can ask them anything and they will they will know they're a really incredible resource and they were so helpful so and i i did an event online actually in strafford and and i said please if you were there in the autumn of 28 17 or something and you remember this kind of slightly crazed curly head woman asking you a thousand questions just thank you very much oh i love it um i think we've run out of time i'll just say one little thing which is that um laura very helpfully gave a couple of bookstores where you can order the book from please get it for everybody for christmas it's so good and then the other thing is um if you can't get hold of it from one of the bookstores go to amazon where you can buy it for your kindle wonderful well i want to thank um author maggie o feral and uh dramatur from cal shakes philipa kelly this has just been such a delight and inspiring afternoon with you both and also this novel is so prescient with with our time during covet uh and also this really searing beautiful family story so both historical and personal view of shakespeare's life and family and i want to thank you for this for this great great interaction and conversation and please yes get your books at alexander.com or whatever way that you can and we hope that you'll join us again for another conversation and please go to cal shakes.org to see all the wonderful things that philipa's doing online with california shakesphere theater and also at mi library.org and we look forward to seeing you very soon again so here's a i'm a half a minute to say hello to everybody and thank you so much unmute yourselves if you want and just say bye it's good to see everybody and also somebody mentioned uh bookstore.org is a fantastic place to order from thank you so much thank you everybody you're coming thank you thank you you're very well very well hi sandra you're going to be last i think oh it's this is what a bookstore is excellent in menlo park great oh and we've got so many of my shakesphere students here to listen to you today i'm so happy thank you philipa we hope to come back to mechanics again thank you so much this was wonderful okay i'm gonna go ahead and close the doors everybody it's great seeing you bye bye loved it bye