O'FARRELL: So it was - I mean, it was tricky. KELLY: Because she can't get her head around it, because how could any mother get their head around that you're preparing your son's body for burial? How did - I mean, how did you do that? How did you go about trying to get it right? And Hamnet? The mind will ask again - at school, at play, out at the river? And Hamnet? Where is he? Here, she tries to tell herself, cold and lifeless on this board right in front of you.
And Hamnet? Her unconscious mind casts again and again, puzzled by the lack of bite by the answer she keeps giving it. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their whereabouts - Judith upstairs, Susanna next door. O'FARRELL: (Reading) She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thought like fishing lines towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they're doing, how they fare. This is the mother, Agnes, who is preparing Hamnet, her son's body, for burial. You write so beautifully about that in one passage that I wonder if I could get you to read for us. And that required you to imagine what it would be like to lose a child and the guilt and the fury and the grief that would follow. I mean, in writing this novel, Hamnet - I don't think I'm giving too much of a spoiler away - he dies. I couldn't write a book about a mother who sits down at her child's deathbed and is forced to watch him die and then has to lay him out for burial. And I couldn't write the book, I realize now, until my own son was very safely past the age of 11 - not that there was much risk of him contracting the Black Death, but I just couldn't do it. So I have a son and two daughters like the Shakespeares did. And I realize now, actually, that what was stopping me was an odd superstition. I made several attempts at writing the book, and then I kept veering away from it and writing other books. And it always felt to me that Hamnet the boy wasn't well-known enough. You know, in one of these big sort of 500-page biographies of Shakespeare, Hamnet is lucky if he gets a mention - maybe two mentions. And I think at that point, I was very frustrated, actually, that I felt that Hamnet was really overlooked. O'FARRELL: You know, I studied literature at university, and I read lots of biographies and criticism about Shakespeare. KELLY: So from there, when did you start thinking, well, maybe there's a book in here? And I thought, what does it mean? What does it mean for a man like Shakespeare to call a tragedy like this after his dead son? Spelling in - of course, in Elizabethan times was a lot less stable, so Hamnet and Hamlet are, in fact, the same name. And even then, I was really struck by the names. Henderson (ph), and he just mentioned in passing when we were studying the play that Shakespeare had had a son. O'FARRELL: I had this absolutely brilliant English teacher called Mr. I was 16, and I was in a very cold classroom in Scotland. O'FARRELL: I can remember exactly when it was. KELLY: When did you first learn of Hamnet? MAGGIE O'FARRELL: Thank you very much for having me. Maggie O'Farrell, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. The novel is titled "Hamnet." And Maggie O'Farrell joins me now from her home in Edinburgh in Scotland. In her new novel, Maggie O'Farrell sets out to imagine who he was, how he died and, in doing so, to imagine the interior life and family life of the father, William Shakespeare. Hamnet Shakespeare only lived to the age of 11. How much do we really know about the inspiration for one of the most famous plays ever performed? When William Shakespeare sat down to write "Hamlet," his son - his only son, Hamnet - was some 4 years dead.