 Welcome to the British Library. I'm Biro Lats of the cultural events team and I'm really excited that we've got Maggie O'Farrell tonight. Been trying to get her for ages. Most recent novel was of course, Hamlet, which won the women's prize for fiction and it was also Waterstones Book of the Year. You might have just caught her on desert island discs too and Maggie will be sharing her work in conversation with Afshan D'Souza Lodi. Afshan is a writer whose debut poetry collection, Redesire, has just been long listed for the Jalak Prize. That's the prize for the Book of the Year by a writer of colour and you can join the Jalak Prize live with the British Library on the 25th of May. So do please sign up for that. Go into the events on the website and make sure you check that out. Back to tonight though. Join us via feed feedback and you can ask questions as well in the box below and of course, buy books. But for now, over to you Afshan. Thanks very much Bee. I'm here not in the British Library but on this fabulous, sexy player with Maggie O'Farrell. Maggie is the author of The Sunday Times' number one best-selling memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am and eight novels after You'd Gone, My Lovers Lover, The Distance Between Us, which won a Somerset Morgan Award, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand that First Held Mine, which won the 2010 Costa Novel Award, Instructions for a Heat Wave, which was shortlist of the 2013 Costa Novel Award. This must be the place which was shortlist of the 2016 Costa Novel Award and of course, Hamlet, the winner of the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. Welcome, Maggie. Hi. Thank you so much Afshan. It's lovely to almost meet you, electronically meet you. Yeah, to e-meet. How are you doing, Maggie? Pretty good actually. Yeah, it's the first of April and spring feels very much on the way, even in Scotland, but apparently it's going to be snowing and freezing next week. So, no, we're fine. We're just coming through this lockdown and hoping for a sort of brighter future, I guess. Yeah, and this is a number of, I guess we've been doing this zoom thing for a while now, so it's a bit strange to be doing this. How's lockdown been treating you, Maggie? Well, we've been really lucky because all five of us have been well and my parents have been well and some of us have been vaccinated and we've got a garden, but we can't, you know, I mean, in a sense, in a writer's quite a good job, it's quite adaptable, you know, we're all quite used to working from home, but what I'm not used to is homeschooling three children, that's for sure. And this past year has taught me, I mean, a lot of respect for teachers, which I had anyway, but it makes me realise why it's a profession, you know, why people have to train for it and why, you know, so I have a great respect for people who educate my children because I don't think I'm very good at it. Well, we're here to talk about Hamlet, the story of Hamlet Shakespeare's been waiting in the shadows for over 400 years, Kamala Shamsi says. O'Farrill's remarkable book, Best with Life, her sentences are packed with commas, as though this teeming, sensual world can only be jotted down in gathered flashbacks described by the Sunday Telegraph. Hamlet is a novel that's not solely about the life and death of William Shakespeare's son Hamlet, but it is what led Shakespeare to write in the tragedy that we know is Hamlet. The novel's about youth, courtship, scandals, illness, and with a sprinkler, something that I describe as like magic or witchcraft or, you know, maybe mythical. There's a story of a bond between twins of a marriage pushed to the brink of grief, but it's also the story of a castrel in its mistress, a flea that boards a ship in Alexandria and a glovemaker's son who flouts convention in pursuit of the woman he loves. It's an amazingly written poetic, beautiful novel that is almost like 400 years in its making. Maggie, I wonder if you could give us a short extract or a reading from the novel to give people that are tuning in a little taste of what's there. Sure. So this is from right at the start of the novel where Hamlet, the 11-year-old in a household, is running around looking for someone to help because his twin sister Judith is unwell. The room is filled with gloom and coverings pulled over most of the windows. His grandfather is standing with his back towards him in a crouched position, fumbling with something, papers, a cloth bag, counters of some sort. There is a picture on the table and a cup. His grandfather's hand meanders through these objects, his head bent, his breath coming in wheezing bursts. Hamlet gives a polite cough. His grandfather wheels around, his face wild, furious, his arm flailing through the air as if warding off an assailant. Who's there? he cries. It's me, Hamlet. His grandfather sits down with a thud. You scared the wits out of me, he cries. What ever do you mean creeping about like that? I'm sorry, Hamlet says. I was calling and calling, but no one answered. Judith is unwell and they've gone out. His grandfather speaks over him with a curt flick of his wrist. What do you want with all those women anyway? He seizes the neck of the picture and aims it towards the cup. The liquid, ale, Hamlet thinks, slops out precipitously, some into the cup and some onto the papers on the table, causing his grandfather to curse then dab at them with his sleeve. For the first time it occurs to Hamlet that his grandfather might be drunk. Do you know where they've gone? Hamlet asks. Eh? His grandfather says, still mopping his papers. His anger at their spoiling seems to unsheathe itself and stretch out from him like a rapier. Hamlet can feel the tip of it wander about the room seeking an opponent. Don't stand there gawping, his grandfather hisses. Help me. Hamlet shuffles forward a step then another. He is wary, his grandfather's words circling in his mind. Stay away from your grandfather when he's in one of his black humours. Be sure to stand clear of him. Stay well back. Do you hear? His father had said this to him on his last visit when they had been helping unload a cart from the tannery. John, his grandfather had dropped a bundle of skins into the mud and in a sudden fit of temper had hurled a paring knife at the yard wall. His father had immediately pulled Hamlet back behind him out of the way but John had barged past them into the house without a word. His father had taken Hamlet's face in both of his hands. Fingers curled in at the nape of his neck, his gaze steady and searching. He'll not touch your sisters but it's you I worry for, he had muttered, his brow puckering. Do you know the humour I mean, don't you? Hamlet had nodded but had wanted the moment to be prolonged for his father to keep holding his head like that. It gave him a sensation of lightness, of safety, of being entirely known and treasured. Swear to me, his father had said to him as they stood in the yard, swear it. I need to know you'll be safe when I'm not here to see to it. Hamlet believes he is keeping his word. He is well back. He is at the other side of the fireplace. His grandfather couldn't reach him here even if he tried. His grandfather is draining his cup with one hand and shaking the drops off a sheet of paper with the other. Take this, he orders, holding out the page. Hamlet bends forward, not moving his feet and takes it with the very tips of his fingers. His grandfather's eyes are slitted, watchful. His tongue pokes out the side of his mouth and he sits in his chair, a sad old hunched stone on a stone. And this, his grandfather holds it out, another paper. Hamlet bends forward in the same way, keeping the necessary distance. He thinks of his father, how he would be proud of him, how he would be pleased. Quick as a fox, his grandfather makes a lunge. Thank you. Thanks, Maggie. Really lovely descriptive piece to begin with. There's so little written about Hamlet. Shakespeare said, in fact, he kind of appears as what's described as a footnote within Shakespeare's life. And in fact, I didn't even realise, perhaps my own naivety, that Shakespeare had two other daughters or anything about his wife Anne or Anya. How did you find researching this novel? Can you take us through that journey? Well, I think actually, to be honest, I feel like you're not unusual in that, I think. And that was partly the sort of engine behind the book that I always felt that the boy Hamlet Shakespeare is not well known enough, that he has what you say being consigned to a literary footnote that history and scholarship has completely sidelined him and overlooked him. And not enough people realise, not enough people know about him and know about this extraordinary echo of his name. I mean, I was lucky, because I found out about him very young, but only because I had a really brilliant English teacher at school who, when we were studying the play, just mentioned in passing one day that Shakespeare had had a son called Hamlet and had gone on who died at age 11. And then Shakespeare had gone on four or five years later or so to write the play Hamlet. And it was only really when I went to university where I studied literature that I realised what a mysterious person actually Shakespeare is. There's a sort of old imbalance with him because on one hand, we have this extraordinary output of his poetry and his plays. But on the other hand, we know so little about him as a person. There are these enormous gaps in his biography, which even despite the best efforts of the world's best to experience scholars, no one's ever been able to fill. No one, for example, knows how this boy with only a grammar school education, probably only till about the age of 15, from a small rural town whose father was a businessman and a glover, how he came to be the world's greatest writer on the stage in London. No one's ever, scholars refer to it as the lost years. No one's ever worked out how that happened and how he made that journey. So in a sense, the whole purpose behind the book was for me to, I wanted to give this lost and forgotten and overlooked boy a voice and a presence, and I wanted to put him to stage and say, he was important, this boy was his short life is hugely significant, both in literary terms, but also I believe that he was really loved. It's funny, he read these big 500 page biographies of Shakespeare and Hamlet's lucky if he gets two mentions. He mentioned he was born and then they mentioned he died. And always his death is tends to be wrapped up in statistics about child mortality in the 16th century, which of course was horrifyingly high, but almost as if the implication is that it wasn't kind of that much of a deal really to lose a child because so much. And it's always this really kind of skewed me through the heart because I just refuse to believe that at any point in history, anywhere in the world, no matter what the statistics of child mortality are, I believe that it's nothing less than devastating to lose a child, it can't be anything other than that. So I suppose it's always felt to me that in the kind of brief, the act of him calling this play and this tragic hero and the ghost, of course, let's not forget in the play is enormously significant because he's using the name of his dead son and I don't believe that any writer would do that likely. So sorry, you asked me about research, I'm going off on one now. I mean, obviously there's no shortage of books about Shakespeare. So a lot of the research was very much library based because you mean, you know, there's so much written about Shakespeare, you could spend the rest of your life reading about him if you wanted to. So I did, obviously I read a lot about that and but also actually particularly for the lives of the women and the sort of domestic life of Shakespeare, which is very undocumented. You know, I mean, you can read about, you can read about Shakespeare's career, you can read about his life, you can read about the plays, you can read about his life in London but there's very little about the actual day-to-day lives of his family back in Stratford. You know, you can, it's actually, I mean, I find it actually very hard to know even what the houses would look like and what they would have worn and all these things. So actually for them really to flesh out that side of the novel, I actually did a lot more practical hands-on research. So to help me with the character of Hamlet's mother who, I mean, we all know her as Anne Hathaway, obviously, but I call her Agnes or Annus in my book because that's the name her father gives her in his will. So I decided to give that birth name back to her. So I actually planted my own Elizabethan medicinal herb garden and I flew, I learned to fly kestrel. I went mudlarking along the Thames along Tudor dumps and I dug up Tudor coins and a ship's glass which was used to reflect light into the dark holes and I found loads of Tudor brass pins. I'm trying to think, no, I don't have them here. They're about this big and they've got a rounded end and they were used to keep their roughs on and women to keep their hair up. So I had all these sort of strange talismanic objects. So, but I mean, learning to fly kestrel, that was the most fun thing I've ever done actually in the name of work. That's, I couldn't even begin to imagine that that's like, that's amazing to research a novel and be able to do all of those fabulous things that I'm gonna, I wanna do all that stuff. I'm just gonna do it. I'm just gonna do it. I don't need a reason. It's actually amazing to see and it shows in the detail, actually and in the way that you've written and described the scenes through that, that you have done this stuff. And actually, yeah, of course, it makes sense that you've learned how to fly kestrel because it's there in the novel. So I don't know why it just took me by surprise that I was like, wow, that's pretty amazing. I've realized about historical novels is, there's so much you need to know in order to give you the confidence to create a scene. In order to write a scene with two people, I don't know, having an argument in a parlor in the 16th century, you need to know so much. You need to know what the walls look like. You need to know what the windows are made of. You need to know what the floor is. You need to know what their clothes are like. But I think, I mean, the kind of historical novel that I really like is the one that doesn't read like a sort of PhD thesis. It's the one that isn't kind of heavy with its own research and it's the one that doesn't show all the homework. So you need to know all this stuff, but you need to kind of take out probably 95% of it. But I think it is, I do think the detail is really important. And actually just to give you an example, I had written a scene where she flies the kestrel before I went to actually learn how to do it. So I had written a scene and I thought I'll go and learn how to do it. So I had described the kestrel landing on her glove with a thud. And then I went to meet this and very cool Falconer woman in the borders in Scotland and she let me fly her kestrel. And I realized while I was doing it that the kestrel is probably the size of a really small kitten and the weight of that. And they are incredibly light and totally silent. And when you are waiting for them to land on your glove, one minute they're not there and the next minute they're there, you don't even feel it. So I have to go back and rewrite the scene. So it just shows because there are people out there who will know what it's like. And if they read that, they think, well, she doesn't know what she's talking about because no kestrel thuds anywhere ever. And how was that that kind of like balance between researching and then writing? Cause I guess when you're writing a historical novel, there is, and this is like, you know, there's 400 years worth of history here. And like there's so much written about it. How did you find balancing that, the academic texts, the history, and then the fiction, the sort of emotional storyline of a mother, of twins, of courtship, of love, of pregnancies? Well, I think, I mean, it's funny. I think when you're writing something as long as a novel, you know, cause a novel will take, I don't know, two or three years or, I mean, even longer possibly sometimes it's often hard to sort of sometimes pinpoint the point at which you actually do begin to work on a novel cause it begins long before you actually start to write it, I think. And in a sense, you know, I think there are sort of different stages of research in a way because there's a research that you need to do to sort of prepare the groundwork and to find out which characters. And particularly, you know, if like Hamlet, you're writing a book which is inspired by real people, you know, you do need to do a lot of groundwork for that. But in a way, there's awful, I mean, I don't know how you find it when you're writing a poem, but I think sometimes there are things that you, you don't know you need to know until you're actually in the moment inside the work, you know? In a sense, I think it's a little bit like driving along a road at night. If you're driving along a country road, the way at nighttime, the only way you can illuminate what's ahead is by your own headlamps. So in a sense, in order to drive that road, you're gonna have to beat on it. You can't look at a map and think, yes, I can drive this road with my eyes shut. You've got to actually be doing it. You've got to be in the moment, you've got to be on the road, you've got to be doing the work. And it's only then that you realise what's ahead in a way. You know, because there are things that you don't know, you need to know until you're writing it and you're writing a scene and you think, well, I don't know, how are fence posts put in the ground? I have the faintest idea, I better go and find out. You know, so I suppose, you know, I think there was this sort of preliminary research, particularly with a novel like this. And then there's research that you do as you're, you've got to find things out as you're going along. And then there's other things that you are inspired to do, like planting a garden or flowing a kestrel. So, but it's great. But I mean, research is fantastic. I realise because, you know, as I'm sure as writing poetry, you know, there are always so many brick walls that you hit with anything that you write. You know, and there are days when you sit down and just nothing is happening. There's nothing going on upstairs. And actually, if you're writing in a contemporary novel, you just get frustrated. But actually, if you're writing in a historical novel, you could think, I'll just go and do some research. I'll just go and read one of my history books. And you feel as though you're working. You feel as though you're doing something, achieving something. It's, you know, I definitely, I tried writing a play once about Sophia Dilip Singh and a feminist of Frijat. And I really struggled with the responsibility of wanting to depict her life as true and as real and as, you know, close to her own existence. You know, even though there was so little written about her versus wanting to write this emotional storyline where I wanted to just write and almost imagine and speculate what her life would have been like. And I wonder if you kind of battled with some of those, the same ideas, I guess, with that, was there ever, did responsibility ever come up as a question for you of like, am I depicting Hamlet or Judith or, you know, the Agnes in a correct manner? No, absolutely. And I think particularly if you are writing fiction, you know, whether it's historical or not, which is based on a real person, I think you've got an enormous responsibility. You know, I don't think that can be overstated. You know, I always tried, you know, when I was making any decisions at all about the people they were to remember always, first and foremost, that they were real, you know, even though half a millennium has passed, you know, give or take since they were alive, you've always got to remember that they are real. And, you know, that in that churchyard, there is, there are the bones of a real boy and, you know, they were all written. So you have to respect that and that must always come first. So I tried, my sort of lying in the sand was always never to go against any fact that I could find it was true about them. So I tried never to, even if some things, I turned up something in a book or a document that didn't fit with my sort of fictional vision of it, I would always try never to ignore it and just think, I'll forget that. Because if it was true, you know, I mean, the thing was that there's people, you know, we think we know little about Shakespeare, but there's almost nothing we know about his wife, for example, or his children, you know, I mean, Hamlet, we know Hamlet was born and we know that he died. We don't even know how he died, you know, the black death in my book is an invention of mine, you know, there was no cause of death recorded in his burial. So it is, you know, I think otherwise, it is a kind of fine balance. So I think you have to respect the facts and respect the fact that they were real, but you have to always remember that this is fictional. You know, I mean, Hamlet in my book and the real Hamlet Shakespeare are different people, you know, and they always will be, because I've written a novel, it's not a work of scholarship. So yeah, I think it is something you have to tread very carefully and be respectful always. And just on that, I guess, you make this choice to never name Shakespeare. And I think I kind of started reading the novel and I was like, oh, when's he gonna pop up? When's he gonna pop up? And then I never saw his name. And I was like, you know, he's always referred to as the father or her husband or John and Mary's son. Can you walk us through that decision? What, you know, just not leaving it? It was, there were lots of reasons for it. I mean, the first one is that his name is actually in a novel, it's actually quite distracting, because his name carries such enormous heft and weight and significance. You know, we all have our own version of Shakespeare inside our head and our own relationship with him in terms of imagination and language and, you know, how we think about ourselves and think about literature and art and what it can do. And also, you know, I found actually that I couldn't, you know, I couldn't actually write a sentence like William Shakespeare sat down to eat his dinner, without just thinking, this is that, you know, I'm an idiot, I'm totally, this doesn't work. This is ridiculous. You know, I felt that every time I would try to write his name, I would get pulled up out of the book. And I thought, well, if I can't stay submerged in the narrative, you know, I can't expect readers to. But also in a sense, I wanted there to be, I suppose it goes back to what we were just discussing, I wanted there to be an awareness that this is a novel, you know, it is something that I have made up. I've taken a sort of framework of the known facts that we have, and I've used that as a kind of place to hang my own, you know, preoccupations of my own story, my own book. So in a way, that was sort of creating a gap in the sense between the real people and my fictional characters. And I want to talk about Agnes, because I love her. She's great. You know, in my eyes, she's this like feminist, magical person who just is just amazing. Because that's all imagined. That's all, you know, you putting that into the novel. Where did that come from? Is it just something that you imagined? Is there research that, you know, is there anything, oh God, academic maybe, that maybe like, you know, draws up on this idea that maybe she had this gift of prophecy or there was this element of witchiness to her existence? Well, Agnes is, I mean, you know, I mean, I think, well, I should probably say that I did become enraged actually while I was doing the research for this book, how the woman who Shakespeare married, his wife has been treated over time by scholars and by historians, by other novelists, by writers of Oscar-winning screenplays. You know, I feel that she has been treated with such hostility and opprobrium and vilification and actually just barefaced misogyny. But without any reason or any evidence whatsoever, you know, I've read very respected Shakespearean scholars who've said that she was a strumpet, that he hated her, that she was ugly, that she was a literate, she was stupid, you know. He had to run away from London to get away from her, he regressed his marriage, he trapped him into marriage. I mean, it's just astonishing. I was so unprepared for it and I cannot find a single shred of evidence about to support any of those theories whatsoever. You know, there's no evidence. I mean, yes, she was three months pregnant when they got married. She was 26 to his 18. So he was fairly young at the time. She was about the average age of a woman to get married. But the point is it was not unusual for brides to be pregnant on their wedding day in those days because they had a ritual called hand-fasting which is a little bit like an engagement and often their relationship was consummated. And actually, I think it's something like a third of brides in Warwickshire in equivalent time were pregnant when they got married. And, you know, I mean, people will always invoke the famous behest in Shakespeare's world, the second best bed, you know, which Prusie hated her and, you know. But actually, if you look at the world, it is a very strange and arid document. It's devoid of any kind of emotion that he, when, yes, he doesn't show his wife any affection with the behest, but he actually doesn't show any affection at all. I mean, the man was dying. Let's not forget, probably of typhoid. He would never think that this was a document written by the same man who wrote, you know, probably the greatest sonnets, the greatest lines of that love ever written. And actually, what is never mentioned by her detractors is in Jacobian times, the widow of a man, the widow of a man was entitled to a third of his estate. So the idea that she was thrown out on the street with just an old bed is nonsense. So it's not true at all. And, you know, what's always spoke more to me of their marriage is the fact that it, which is fact at the end of his career in London when he retired from the stage. He lived anywhere. He was incredibly wealthy at this point. He was the equivalent of a multimillionaire. You know, he was a very, very good businessman as well as being, you know, an actor and a pretty good playwright. But he chose, he could have lived anywhere, but he chose to come back to Stratford to live with her in his retirement to see out his final years. And every single penny he earned on the stage in London, he, he sent back to Stratford. So he lived even at the end of his career in very modest lodgings in one room in London. And all his money he sent back to Stratford, he bought his wife and daughters an enormous mansion of a house a year after Hamlet died. He bought cottages, he bought fields, he leased land and he rented it out. So he was a very wealthy landlord actually in Stratford-on-Avon, which I always wonder whether people in the town actually just saw him as a landlord instead of a playwright. But all that, you know, none of that speaks to me of a man who regressed his marriage or hated his wife. And as for the fact that she was ugly, there's one picture of her in existence. And actually she's very beautiful. She's got this very narrow face with high cheekbones and she's, there's a starting resemblance to the actress Seisha Ronan who I think we can all agree is very far from ugly. For sure. And I guess like one of the most interesting parts for me about this novel was the way that, I guess the trauma and pain that Agnes faces is contrast that the courtship storyline. And I know you've written a little bit about the experience of writing that, but for people that haven't read your writing around or read your interviews, could you talk about the experience of writing Agnes and death and pain in the way of our mother sitting by the bedside to see her child dying? That was hard. I mean, I think with the character of Agnes, what I was asking readers to do really was to set aside or forget everything they think they know, everything they've been told and the narrative they've been told about and have to wait and just open themselves up to a new interpretation, which is that perhaps they did love each other. Perhaps there was a match, a partnership and a match and exchange of different types of intelligence. So I wanted to give her, you know, I think, I mean, it's always interesting to me about Shakespeare and a lot of other people about Shakespeare is the astonishing range and fact of his knowledge, you know, he displays such incredible expertise in a huge number of subjects in his themes and his metaphors. And so that in the play Hamlet, for example, in the scene where the nemadophilia is handing out plants to people, each of those plants is a well-known Elizabethan cure for some flaw she perceives in their character. So I, and it's clear from reading that and reading texts from the time that Shakespeare knew exactly what he was talking about. You know, he was working from a very informed knowledge while he was writing that scene. So I decided to give that expertise to her. And also there's a lot of openly and hawking images in Shakespeare and in Hamlet and in Taming of the Shrew. And so again, I gave that to her as well. But once the thing that did put me off, I think it put me off, but certainly I had to pause when thinking about writing this novel because it is one I've wanted to write for a long time was the idea that I knew I was gonna, and if I was going to write this properly and do the real Hamlet Shakespeare justice, you know, the engine behind the book was always to dignify him and amplify him and show that his death was a big event. It wasn't just something to be elided over and it wasn't just an insignificant side in Shakespeare's life. I've always felt that the biggest drama in the sense of Shakespeare's life happened off stage in Stratford and that was with the death of his son. You know, you only have to read the opening scenes of the play through that lens to realize that the whole play is underpinned by an enormous sense of grief and loss. And that it is, you know, the play can be read as a message from a father in one realm to a son in another. So I wanted to dignify his death, but it was very hard writing those scenes. I think in a sense they were the hardest scenes I've ever written in a way not in a technical sense, but in just in the emotional place, you know, the place you have to go to be there, putting yourself inside the skin of a woman who is forced to sit by her son's bedside and to watch him die. And then of course, the next scene is that she has to lay out his body. So I did, and actually one of the things that I delay with writing the book was a guy in superstition in a way, because I have a son and two daughters, as the Shakespeare did, although my son's the eldest, so the order is different, but I couldn't write this book until he was well past the age of 11, because I knew that I would be thinking of him and picturing him while I was writing the book. And actually people who know him well have said that Hamlet reminds of him. There is quite a lot of my son in my Hamlet, they're my fictional Hamlet. So they were hard. And actually I found that the scenes were, I mean, it's funny, I sort of put off writing the scenes of his death. As I realized as I came about to the halfway point through the book, I was sort of resisting, I was thinking I don't really wanna go any further. And I would go back and I think I'll just need to fix the chapter one, and I should probably just have another read draft of chapter three. So I did resist it, but then I just had to kind of, I knew I had to just buckle down and do it. And actually I found that I couldn't write it in the house where my children live. I actually wrote it in a shed in the garden. And it wasn't a nice writer shed, it was a really horrible spidery potting shed that has sins blown down in a gale. So I wrote it in short bursts, that's the death scene, and then the laying out scene, the burial scene in a sort of 20 minutes or so. And then I would have a walk around the garden and I would go back in and do another 20 minutes. And it took me a while. I can't even imagine that, I reading it there was, I definitely had to put the book down and I didn't do a walk around the garden, but I did a kind of like deep breaths, deep breaths because it is, and I didn't think it would hit me in that way, even though we know, I know the story of Hamlet and that it inspired Hamlet and that he died. And that's kind of as far as my knowledge went for a long time. So I knew that it was coming from the very start of the novel, it just, the way that it hit me, I think I wasn't expecting that. So there's something really beautiful in the way that you've written it. And perhaps it kind of, there was a parallel that I saw as I was reading from the references to the plague and COVID. And I think an American reviewer described a scene, this sort of like beautiful institute where you pause the story to take us through this journey of how the plague arrives to Hamlet via this flee and he describes it as contact tracing, which is, you know, it's just so, you know, the parallels for me were like, and then you kind of like take us through this and you get to the death and there's something so emotional about the time that we're in right now and then reading this story. Did that ever enter your mind? You know, was it, was it, yeah, did you ever kind of think, oh, this might parallel something that's happening in the world? I don't think you probably wrote this before. No, it was written completely before lockdown. In fact, it was published when it first came out in Britain almost exactly a year ago, which was the first week of lockdown. So it was written long before any, I'd even heard the word COVID actually. So no, it is, I mean, it's all looking back on it now because when I wrote that chapter, I mean, you know, the chapter where I traced the journey of the plague, you know, from Alexandria, from it appears on a monkey in Alexandria and then it comes by a flea on a ship to England. And, you know, when I wrote that, it felt, you know, I hadn't planned to do it. It was one of those things that have appeared that I was writing the novel because when I, I felt that there was a point at which the novel about halfway through where I felt that the whole novel had been quite claustrophobic in a sense, you know, it's happened in one or two houses in a small market town in London. And I felt I wanted to kind of break it open in a way. I wanted to give the sort of global perspective because the more I read about the Black Death, it was just, I was such a horrifying, you know, pandemic that swept in several ways, you know, through the population of Europe and on a kind of macro scale, it was horrific. You know, I mean, one outbreak, killed a quarter of the world's population. And, you know, on a micro scale, that when you read about symptoms, it was just absolutely horrific. I mean, the pain of it and the agony of it. And, you know, and I think, you know, I got this sense of the fear that everybody would have had of it, this absolutely all consuming fear that every single Elizabethan would have known, everyone would have known the signs of it and the symptoms of it. And, you know, it would have been a thing they most dreaded and most feared. And they knew that as soon as there was a case in their town or in their city, the city would be shut, the gates would be closed, there'd be watchmen everywhere, nobody would have been allowed out of their houses. And if you had a case in your house, you know, your door would have been boarded up for 40 days, there would have been a watchman stationed outside your door, making sure nobody came in and came out. So, I mean, it was a huge cloud over their lives. So I wanted to give, and I was thinking about that chapter, I wanted to give it, I suppose I wanted a sense of the perspective of it. So that's why I wanted to kind of in a sense, pull the lens back and look at it in a global situation. But when I wrote it, I mean, I do, I really consciously remember having the thought, you know, what would it be like to be living in a world where this could happen? You know, where knowing that there was this disease out there, outside your door, outside your house, outside your town, outside your city, outside your country, that would stop at nothing. It'd recognise no borders, it'd recognise no nursing, it'd recognise no remedy whatsoever. It would just cut its way through your house and town and family and just imagining the terror of that and the living, you know, so, but at the time, it was just the sort of act of research, really, in imagination. But the strange thing is that, you know, I had a, it took me about sort of two weeks to write it and I, again, it was a lot of research and I researched sort of Elizabethan trade routes and I researched the life cycle of the flea, which is revolting. If anyone ever wants to feel really sick, have just have a look, have a look at that. But I had these big maps of Elizabethan trade routes and the sort of arrows of the way the plague passed from Asia through Europe. But actually, you know, a year ago, when we were all looking at the infographics as it was arriving in Italy and then Europe, they looked exactly the same. That was the strange thing. You know, I was looking at them on the website and thinking, well, this is the same as the map that I had up in my study when I was writing the plague chapter. So it is strange, but I think in a sense, you know, I think, you know, our experience in the last year has tied us closer to previous populations. You know, I think it's expanded our capacity for compassion, perhaps, and sympathy. You know, in a way, I feel closer to the Elizabethans now. I feel that we can understand them a little bit more. And I think also we need to remember how lucky we are actually compared to them. You know, that we know what causes, we know how our disease spreads because they had no idea whatsoever. They thought that it was caused by, I don't know, sin, they thought that, you know, people flagellated themselves and burnt heretics. And at one point, there was a whole theory that it was caused by looking at a sick person, looking at a healthy person. They had no idea how it was being spread. At least we know that, and at least we have vaccines, we have ventilators. You know, and I know, obviously, that COVID has cut a terrible sway through our population and through our lives and friends. And but at the same time, there is a sense of perspective if we look back at them. And I think we can learn from lessons of the past. We can learn from their resilience in a way. No, for sure. And I definitely saw, you know, even though we have a lot more information, there's a sense of panic, I think, at the start last year that really parallels some of the panic that you draw upon in that novel of, you know, disease coming to the street or to the house. And that definitely struck me as something that was, I was just like, oh my God, this is such a coincidence. Is that a coincidence? Or did she have this in mind? Did she know something? Before anybody else knew something? I could say yes, but no, I didn't. Did you have fun? Did you prophesize this, Maggie? Is what I'm asking? I really didn't. Don't forget, people that are tuning in, that you can post questions in the box below. So if you've got any questions that you're dying to ask, Maggie, or you just want to ask Maggie, anything you want to know about herself or the novel, then do please stick them in to the box and we'll have a chance in a couple of minutes to be able to read them out. I can't imagine what it's like to even like try and tackle four centuries worth of literary speculation, academic theories, emotional trauma, this journey, this courtship between two immensely amazing historical figures. Did you face or have you faced or are you facing any form of criticism in the way that you've depicted the Shakespeare family, as it were? Well, not that I'm aware of actually, but that's possibly because I'm neither on social media nor read any of my reviews. So I take a kind of, I take a completely ostrich approach to anything like that. So it's quite possible. Yes, there's many people out there who are furious and livid, but actually I live in this entirely, you know, cushioned bubble where I know nothing about it, but people said, I mean, not to my face, that's all I can say really. I mean, certainly I did have a lot of vertigo, I have to say, approaching the Shakespearean myth in a way. And there's also so much myth and conspiracy theory and people are passionately adhere to these theories that there's all sorts of quite crazy stuff that circles around Shakespeare, whether he actually, did he write the plays? Did he write some of them? Was he a spy? I mean, you name it, it's been attached to him. So I think what I always tried to do was to avoid any of the conspiracy stuff and only really stick to what I could see that was concrete, which actually isn't much, you know, he is very mysterious person. We've only got six examples of his signature, which is extraordinary, we need to consider his output. So I tried always to sort of steer a path through what I can absolutely, you know, concretely prove about him. You know, so there are certain, only there are certain things known about, and we knew roughly where he lived in London because there was a church, you know, it was compulsory to attend church once a week. And if you didn't, then you got fined, you know, it was against the law. So we know that he lived in the parish of Bishop's Gate and he went to St. Halland's Church in Bishop's Gate, which is still there, you can go and see it if you want to. But that's, there's not actually a great deal else. There are a few playbills that proved that he was in certain plays and that he went off on tour around Kent or, you know, wherever, but apart from that, it's pretty scant. But then on the other hand, we have all his plays, but only thanks to his colleagues and friends. So Shakespeare, unlike say, Johnson and Marlowe, who before they died made sure that their work was preserved for posterity. So they put out publications of their collected work. Shakespeare didn't. I mean, he had quite fairly long retirement back in Stratford when he redrafted King Lear a couple of times, but he never at any point thought I should probably publish my plays so that they're preserved, which it really intrigues me because I think, you know, did he not know what he had? Did he not realize what he had done in his lifetime? And the only reason we still have them is because his colleagues and friends, Hemmings and Condal, after Shakespeare's death, got all the plays, all the foul papers, all the manuscripts and edited them and put them together and published the first folio. Did you, how many of his plays did you read or have you read? I think over the, probably most of them, I mean, over my life, I didn't really read most of them, a lot of them when I was a student and because I studied English Lit and in my life, I've read most of them. Some of them I like a lot more than others, I have to say, and some of them I've only read once, but I probably shouldn't say which. I was gonna ask which is your favorite one, but which is your favorite, Shakespeare? It's gonna be Hamlet, always, always, always Hamlet, yeah, I absolutely love it. I was hoping you said Macbeth. I love it, I'm listening to Clare Patrick and I love Macbeth, probably my three, my top three. What about you, what would yours be? Macbeth. I can definitely sense like Macbeth in there. I was like, oh, I wonder how much of Macbeth has like influenced this novel. I wonder where it's come from. Yeah, I think Agnes was a little bit inspired by some of the witches. You know, I think that there's an awful lot of super nature, super natural and prophecy in Shakespeare and superstition. And I think actually generally in those days, people were a lot more superstitious and, you know, they had a kind of sense of being tied much more closely to that sensibility in that world. And certainly I used a lot of that in putting together the novel. We have got some questions coming through. I'm gonna read a couple of them out. This one is from Alex. The question is for Maggie. In several of your other books, there's also the theme of loss and grief within families. They're always really moving, impactful and written with a great depth of emotion. For example, in The Hand that First Held Mine and This Must Be The Place, I was wondering if there was something that draws you to this theme in particular? Well, I think what interests me about grief and loss is that it is, for me anyway, the other side, although the other side of love, you know, I think if you love somebody, a large part of your attachment to them is fear of what your life would be like without them. So in a sense, I think grief is love pulled inside out on itself like a sock or a glove. And so it's never that huge a leap of the imagination. It's part of what informs our connection and our bonds with people. So I think that's why it interests me. A question here from Anne Doody. I absolutely loved Hamlet and couldn't put it down. Thank you so much. At the end of the novel, you mentioned that you put off writing Hamlet whilst focusing on other work. Are there other books in your head that are waiting to be written? And what prompts you to begin a particular story? Do the characters start nagging you for their chance to shine? Well, I mean, yes, there are other books that I want to write. But I always try, you know, in a sense, I always think that it's not you who chooses the books in a way, it's the books that choose you. And I think I always try and go, I always try and choose the book that I'm going to write next on a sort of instinctive level. I think the best book you are going to write is the one you can't not write. It's the one that's shouting the loudest. It's the one that's tugging at your sleeve, the one that's insisting that it needs to come next. And actually when I finished Hamlet, I really couldn't decide. I had two ideas that I really liked and I didn't know which one was going to sort of take the lead in the sense. So I did something that I've done before, which is I set up two desks in my study, which is actually very small. So it was a bit cramped. And I wrote for a week, I wrote one book on one desk and then I would switch and another week, I would write the other book on the other desk. And I wanted to see which one was going to win the race in a sense. But actually what happened this time is that I was sitting, I was actually sitting outside someone's house while waiting for my daughter who's having a play date there. And this was the last play that she had before lockdown last year. So it was just over a year ago. And I suddenly had this other idea, idea three. And I thought, oh my God, this is the one I have to do, forget those other two. So I went back to my study and I just got rid of those other ones, put them all away. And I thought, no, I'm going to do this new one. So, you know, sometimes you just have to, you just have to go with what, go with what appears. I love it, absolutely love that. I wouldn't have the patience with myself to do that. I just ended up merging the two stories. I'm like, no, there's two novels that are completely different. I'm just going to merge them into one. And that way I've done. Everybody has their own methods. We've got another question here from Jane Morgan. Did you dream about the world as Shakespeare's time while you were writing as a so much spiritual and or intuitive material in your wonderful book? I think if I ever do dream in some of my books, I'm not sure I do. I mean, I sort of daydream. I do a lot of daydreaming. And there are certainly days. You know, I think what you, I don't know. I mean, I think what you learn with every book is you want to put into practice the next time around. And what I've learned actually over the years in which I have been writing is that those days when you are sitting in front of your computer and you feel as though nothing is happening and you feel frustrated with yourself and you think, you know, I've only got two hours and I've got to go pick up my daughter from school. I need to hurry up and get something done. Actually, I don't think those days are ever wasted. I mean, they might feel it because in terms of word count, but actually sometimes you just need to do a bit of daydreaming. You just need to do a bit of, you know, we need to let your brain sort of slow down and have a kind of white noise for a little bit. And then I think, I think, I don't know, I often think that a lot of what writers do happens away from the desk. You know, it happens when you're looking the other way. You know, I once had a brilliant, I know I've been worrying. It was when I was writing a book called Distance Between, no, not Distance Between. This must be the place. And I had been worrying over this one conundrum and I couldn't do it. And I'd sat down and I tried to write it and I only got really frustrated with myself. And then actually a few nights later, sorry, this is a bit of a horrible story, but my daughter was sick everywhere, all over me and all over the bed. It was sort of tipped in the morning and I was taking off all these pajamas and putting it all in the washing machine. As I was doing it, I suddenly thought, oh my God, I know what to do. And that's what I think that's a very instructive lesson for me because it just shows that the solution will arrive at some point where there's a kind of engine at the back of your head which, often without you knowing it, your book is still running when you're doing other stuff and a solution will appear. Yeah, I had to start taking a pen and paper with me when I used to go running because that is always when the solution, or that or in the shower because it was the only two times that solutions would ever come to me for something that I was writing and I'd always be frustrated trying to recite the line or trying to stay in that kind of the story as I was running back or drying myself off coming out of the shower. So it's definitely a lesson that I've had is to keep pens everywhere around the house. That kind of boredom and boredom or downtime is very important. I'd say this to mind, my children get really annoyed with me because they often say, can we do this or why? And I say, no, just sit, just see everything's gonna be all right. Not always, but sometimes. It's good that we all need to do nothing a lot more. I think certain ways in which modern life is set up is very bad for that. Yeah, but the writers never do nothing. The writers always writing something in their head. I mean, it's fine. I mean, it doesn't outwardly do nothing, but actually inwardly a lot is a lot, a lot's going on. Yeah, exactly. We've got another question here from Heidi at the links and I think some of the stuff you're saying now, it sounds like you had a great time doing the research for Hamnet. Has it turned you into a new direction? Do you think you write further historical novels? It's possible. I mean, you never quite know. In fact, the book I'm writing right now, I'm about three quarters of the way through first draft and that actually is a historical novel as well. But I don't know. I mean, actually, certainly with Hamnet and also the one I'm writing now, I try never to actually think of it or talk about it to myself as a historical novel because I think it's quite inhibiting in a sense. I try always to approach it just as a novel, just as I would any other novel and the history is just incidental in a sense. So who knows, but I've no idea. Obviously, I'm so what I'm gonna write after this one, but the next one I can say is historical, but that's all I can say about it because I'm very wary about talking about books I haven't finished. I always feel if I talk about them, then I'm sort of draining myself of the urge to write them. So that's it. I'm sorry, I can't say anything more about it. No, that's absolutely fine. I will say that reading this has definitely inspired me to, I don't know, re-look at the novels, not the plays that I thought were too difficult to write because they were big historical figures and I didn't want to ruin their life by making something up. And I was reading this and I was like, Agnes is basically a witch. What is going on? Shakespeare is not Nick. And I was like, this is amazing. Just the craft that is in the novel has definitely as a writer inspired me to kind of go, do you know what, it is possible. Because my if, you know, I'm going to have sets of training for me to do this, but it is just the way that you've done it has really inspired me. So I'm not quite a historical author next to me. I was based on this. It's like, if Maggie can take on Shakespeare, I can take on another historical figure. So once more. No, no, no, no. We've got a question here from Anne-Marie Cody. She says, I believe that as Lexi's fatal swim is a sadist, most gut-wrenching, poignant death scene I've ever read. I reread often and soft out loud each time the loss of a child is as you described in variable. But do you not think that for a mother to know that she is dying and not going to be there for the children is a greater pain? As a mother that was my terror when children were young in a particular, but having as in I am, I am, I am experienced rushes with death, was that as difficult to write as Hamlet's death or worse? I don't know, actually. I mean, in fact, that scene in the first time I went with Lexi that the whole sense of the novel came to me when I was actually swimming in Dorset. I was swimming in Lime Regis and I swam quite far out because I love to swim in the sea and I swam quite far out and I looked back on the shore and my husband and my son who was then two, I think were standing on the shore and I did think to myself, I'm really quite far out now and I should probably swim back in. And as I was swimming I could feel the tide pulling me back out, but I did luckily, obviously I was okay, but I had that moment where I thought, you know, if I don't get back, this is what my son is going to not have. Somebody else will be performing these tasks for him. It won't be me. So I really, really have to swim as hard as I can and get back to that shore. So it was that point at which the novel sort of appeared to me in a sense. So I thought when I came out of the water, I had this sort of tiny, tiny germ of an idea and that's where the novel grew from. But in terms of writing that, I think all books are so different to write in a way and they all have their own joys and their own challenges. It's hard to sort of compare them in a way. For me, I couldn't say that one is harder than the other or more emotional than the other. I think they're all so different and they all demand different things and they teach you and give you different things as well. So it's sort of impossible question for me to answer. It feels like an impossible equation in a way for me. Now, I fully understand that. And another question from Audrone. I absolutely loved Hamlet. As a mother, I wouldn't normally read anything to do with child loss, but I found your writing so sensitive and beautiful. Surprisingly, there was also humor and likeness in the book. I wonder how you came up with the scene at the Apple storage shed. It must be one of the best sex scenes ever written. Oh, well, that's good. Thank you. I think I, at that point, I can't remember when I got the idea, but I knew that in order to write the scene where basically where they conceived Susanna, that first child. And I thought, well, you know, this is a love scene involving the man who writes the best about love. You know, he writes the most incredible, you know, love in all its forms. You know, he's an incredibly sensual writer. He's all these emotional connections. So I thought I've really, really got to pull it out the bag here. I need to have a, you know, think about, think of something that justifies, you know, writing a story about Shakespeare. So I thought I have to really put out the stop. So that's, I mean, and I cannot for the life of me remember where Apple's, I think possibly because when I went to Stratford, it was a really beautiful autumn week. We spent, we went down in half term in October and the cottage we stayed in had an enormous apple tree. So that's the only reason I can think where the apples came from and somehow the two things got woven in my head. And actually I found a, I have an apple that I picked up from a tree in Anne Hathaway's cottage, which I planted the pits and it now is in my garden. It's very small, but hopefully one day it'll be a proper Stratford tree. That's amazing. I love that. I love that. I think they're not naming of Shakespeare within that scene. Kind of the powers given to Agnes and for me, when I was reading that, I was like, I also thought it was amazingly written. Perhaps because I didn't view him as like Shakespeare, the great, I just saw him as like Agnes and a man. I said this again, but like Agnes was my favorite character and this is my favorite character til the end. So, there is that. We've got a question from Roberta Sisson. When you write your novels, how much do you love your characters? I think I do love them a lot actually. And also, I love them with the good things about them and also their flaws. I think you have to kind of embrace them. And I mean, it's a sort of, it's a very, it's quite similar actually to being a parent because your involvement with them is brief. If you think about the sort of span of a novel and the span of a lifetime, the lives are long and novels are actually quite short. So your involvement with them, with your characters is sort of, is finite in a sense. You know, there is a, but obviously unless unfortunately like Little Hamlet, they die, you know, when the novel closes, they have this other meta-life that goes on without them, without you, which is probably a little bit like having children, I think, the idea that they grow and then they leave home and then they start, obviously they start their own life. So there's a kind of poignancy to it in a sense of being close to this character and you do love them and you, you know, there's so much investment you have in them, but then you have to let them go, which is always a strange experience when you finish a novel and you have to release them. Not so much add into the world, I mean, obviously that's a part of it, but the fact that you, they move on and so do you. Wow. Another question here from Elaine, which writer's new novel would you push your granny aside to get a hold of? Which, sorry, which, which what, which... I love this question. Which writer's new novel would you push your granny aside to get a hold of? Well, I would never push my granny aside, I would like to say, if they were still alive. Which would I, I mean, I would really, I do get very excited when Elizabeth Stratt publishes a new book, that's for sure. Who else, if, I mean, am I allowed to anyone at any time and space? I think, I think you're leaving. I always wish she was still around. I would love to read the books that she might have written, had she not left us so soon. Who else? This is a really interesting question, I love questions like this. I mean, Alice Monroe, I think is fantastic. I would read everything she wrote. There's an American short story writer called Edith Perlman, who I love. Who else, William Boyd, I'd be very keen to write Vikram Seth, yeah, any of those, but I would never push my granny. I would just like to sit and point that out. That's always good to know. You guys have been an amazing audience, even though I can't see you, just from the questions that are coming in, it's really lovely to see that the range of questions that are coming through for you, Maggie. It has been amazing talking to you about Hamnet and just talking to you in general. And like I said, it's definitely inspired me to write and read more historical fiction. I think I've always been quite scared of it, thinking it might be quite academic and not as emotionally driven as this form was and it really took me. And maybe I'll start reading more of Shakespeare's life as well, maybe I'll read a play, who knows, who knows. I've been Afshan to Sozolodi with Maggie O'Farrell talking about Hamnet for the British Library. Thank you all for an amazing, amazing time. Thank you Afshan so much. It was a real pleasure to meet you. I hope to meet you in flesh one day. Thanks, Kost. Take care.