4. Hamnet: Love, Grief, and Motherhood

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in your Aldi Nordfiliale. And furthermore, let's get started! Aldi! Good for all! Hamlet, one of the actors said...

...she heard it again as clear and resonant as the strike of a distant bell. There it is again, Hamlet. Ania's bites her lip until she tastes the tang of her own blood. She grips her hands together.

They are saying it, these men up there on the stage, passing it between them like a counter and a game. Hamlet, Hamlet, Hamlet, Hamlet. Ania's cannot understand this. Why would her husband have done it?

Why pretend that it means nothing to him? Just a collection of letters. How could he thief this name, then strip and flens it of all it embodies, discarding the very life it once contained?

How could he take up his pen and write it on a page, breaking its connection with their son? So that was from Maggio Farrell's historical novel Hamlet, which is obviously now a major movie starring Paul Mascale and Jesse Buckley, and we will touch on that later.

But it was published in 2020 and it won the Women's Prize for fiction that year. It's set in Elizabethan England and tells the tragic story of the death of William Shakespeare's son, Hamlet, at the age of 11 in 5096. With the inference that this was the inspiration for his writing

of probably one of his most celebrated plays Hamlet, which has written about three to five years later, and named after his son because the two names Hamlet and Hamlet are used interchangeably in the book. It wonderfully embroidered another side of Shakespeare

who crucially is never named in the book,

and that is him as kind of the family man, and most significantly of all, she rewrites his marriage and halfway, here called Ania's, who's really the main character of the book, and it gives her life and voice and agency,

and it's kind of her defense because Anne Hathaway historically has always been quite condemned, and it paints their marriage in a far warmer light. But above all, it's kind of a study in grief about a family torn apart by death and about two people torn apart

by the unimaginable loss of a child. And Dominic, I know that you read this quite recently because I would catch sight of you sobbing into your lap on our flights in Australia while we were on tour. Thank you. You thought well of it, didn't you?

“I did, actually. I can actually remember coming down”

when we were on tour in Australia and saying to you a breakfast, "Oh, I just finished Hamlet so moving. What a brilliant book." Yeah, you're all puffy and red face.

Red face. In fact, it wasn't puffy and red face to be first.

It's one of the great things about doing this show is I get to read books that I wouldn't naturally read. I obviously knew of the books I knew it's won the prize and only the film is coming out. But I wasn't immediately drawn to it and I really, really enjoyed it.

I think, as you say, it's very clever in the way it uses Shakespeare and we'll be digging into that in today's shows. We'll get the history behind it. Shakespeare's Life and Hathaway's Life, the story behind Hamlet and Hamlet. But actually, you cannot be interested in Shakespeare at all

and still find it a very moving study of a marriage and of grief in particular and the effect that grief has on a family. And it's a brilliant book if you like stories with kind of interiority. So you're getting so much of this world through Anyes's sensibility.

“And Maggio Farrow, I think, does that so subtly and definitely?”

Whether the film is quite a subtle, I think, is something you'll go on to talk about, because we'll talk about the film in the second half. But you love this book, don't you, Tabby? Oh, I totally do. I knew from the very start

that there was something very special about it. I read it during lockdown. And I was drawn to it because I love historical novels. And it turned out to be sort of so much deeper in Richard than that. As you say, it's kind of a study in people

and how terrible, terrible things can transform very ordinary people. But also, it's one of the few times that I've stayed up all night to finish a book. And that's a remarkable thing given that it's not a dramatic story whatsoever. I just thought as well that Maggio Farrow's writing was something quite extraordinary, actually.

She never ever patronizes the reader.

She leaves so much unsaid and unexplained. And yet, you always understand what she's saying. And she does this thing where she plunges you straight into the middle of a scene. Like, we'll see that at the very opening of the book. And yet, you keep pace with her the whole time.

You know, exactly what her character's a feeling. And it's amazing the depths of emotion that she conjures in words.

“It's, yeah, I absolutely love it. I think it's superb.”

You know what, you've absolutely put your finger on something that I was also thinking that she's brilliantly what is unsaid. Yeah. And just a quick word before we get to the plot about the structure of the book. So for the first half, the narrative moves forward and backwards in time.

And it often gives you different characters, perspectives that in a mind, say, the thoughts, but mainly, and yeses. And at the start, we have three plots to follow. So we have the past, unraveling, and yeses, history, her family life, that of William Shakespeare as well.

Then we have the present. And then we have a parallel plot, which traces the progress of the plague from a flea in Alexandria to a glass workshop in Venice, to Elizabethan England, which is very, very effective. And the writing is unusually kind of physical.

It's all about sensation and sound. And I think that comes across really well in the movie, actually. And it's kind of almost cinematic. For instance, she says, in one moment when Ania's is getting married.

She says, the ring in circles her third finger, where the groom told her,

the other day, as they were hiding in the orchard, runs a vein that travels straight to her heart. It feels cold for a moment against her skin and damp with holy water. But then the blood flowing straight from a heart warms it, brings up to the temperature of her body.

So it's very physical. It's very detailed, rich loads of details about the natural world, lots of stuff about gloves and bees, domesticity.

“I think she's brilliant at the sort of physical texture of things.”

But let's talk about the structure of the book and the plot. So to give you a sense, the book, and indeed the film, tell you what to expect right from the beginning. There's an opening kind of caption in both. The boy Hamlet died in 1596, aged 11, four years or so later,

the father wrote a play called Hamlet. So you basically got the juxtaposition of those two things. They're the grief and the loss on the one hand and the artistic creation on the other. And interestingly, in the book, though not the film, we open with the titular character with Hamlet.

So we open with this little boy. He's our window into Elizabethan England and the story of this family. He's looking for his parents because his sister, Judith, his twin, is really ill. And she's got the play because it turns out.

There's the first of many clever little tricks. So he thinks about courting out his father's name, but he doesn't.

And actually his father has never named and the whole book, though.

We know his father is William Shakespeare. We get a real sense of the fear and the uncertainty of the boy looking for his parents. Something is wrong. He doesn't know where they are. That sort of sense of terror almost because suddenly the world has turned upside down

with his sister's illness. Of course, we know, you know, great irony because we've been told a page earlier that he's the one who's going to die. So there's that sort of sense of irony that pervades the whole thing. I mean, while his mother is off looking after her beehives.

So then the narrative switches to his mother and yes. And she suddenly senses, she has this sort of sixth sense which comes up again. And again, she senses that something is wrong, doesn't she? And there's this lovely passage. Every life has its kernel, its habits, epicenter from which everything flows.

Out which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother's. The boy, the empty house, the deserted Y'all, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you have this moment that's foreshadowing a lot of what she's going to think. This sort of the grief.

It's as though she's picturing him standing there in the house on his own.

As he took his first steps, taught him to use a spoon, to blow him broth, blah, blah, blah, blah.

“And all of that sort of stuff, I thought, I mean, maybe this is maybe very simplistic.”

But I thought, that's a parent, that's somebody who's a mother themselves, writing that. Yeah, of course. Because that is how you think about your children. This is where they took their first steps. This is where they took their first mouthful or whatever.

All of those kinds of things that a parent carries with them all the time. Yeah, exactly. Yes, the small but significant moments in the development of a life. Yeah, absolutely. But then we have this thing with the time line, because we move back in time.

And it really builds the tension as well, because you want to know what's happening with him and it, but then you go back and we pick up with a young William Shakespeare tutoring the sons of this farming family outside of the town that he lives in. And while there, he sees this girl walking out the forest and becomes infatuated with her. And this is a young and yes.

And she is otherworldly and a funeral. She's known to be a witch in the town. And then we move even further back to her girlhood and her beloved mother, who's also very witchy. And this is kind of mythologised.

Her mother dies horribly in childbirth.

“And we learn about how she grows up with a stepmother that she despises.”

It's like a fairy tale this, isn't it? Maybe we'll touch on this later on. Yeah, it really, really is. Exactly. The style of the writing almost subtly shifts as well.

So then she and the young tutor, that at this point William Shakespeare meet, they fall in love. She falls pregnant and they get married and they move into his family home. And they are happily married.

And then she gives birth to their first daughter, Susanna, born six months later because she's

pregnant, it's obviously at the time that they get married. But the husband at this point Shakespeare is unhappy. He feels oppressed in the house that he grows up in. His father is abusive towards him. And he just doesn't know what to do.

He's stuck. He's trapped. So in years, engineers, his move to London, ostensibly to extend his father's glove business. His father is a glove maker.

But while there, he moves into theatre and becomes an actor and starts writing plays. She then gives birth again this time to twins following a really terrible labor in which she thinks she will die. And these twins are a robust baby boy called Hamlet. Yeah, the irony.

And a sickly girl called Judith, the terrible irony of that. And they look uncannily alike. And the family is very happy. The father returns William Shakespeare returns as often as he can to visit them. And all seems well.

And then we move back to the present, don't we? Yeah, so we go back to the present. And Hamlet has been looking for his mother to help Judith. It was ill. And he has come back to the house from her beehives.

She's horrified to find Judith on the brink of death. Yeah, she's even got the kind of bubos on her neck and stuff. Exactly, yeah, which you see in the film as well. But they're described in the book. And then, you know, because, and yes, there's a kind of witchy kind of person who does a lot

faffing her out with herbs. Faffing her out with herbs.

Yeah, she's always grinding herbs.

Yeah, she grinds up some herbs with no success. And everybody thinks, gosh, Judith is going to die. And that night, Hamlet, I mean, it's a very dare. I mean, such a boring thing to say. But I'm going to say it anyway, just because that's the kind of person I am.

And a very Shakespeareian way, he decides he might change identities with his sister, because he basically climbs into bed with her. Their twins, they're often mistaken for each other. He's going to pretend to be his sister, so that if necessary, death will make a mistake and we'll take him instead.

And the next day, when his mother comes up to the bed, she finds the truth, it's got better. And Hamlet has now got the plague. The shock of that moment, she's confused for someone that has a kind of a sense of things before they happen.

She can't understand why this has happened. Because this is the one thing that's happened that's unexpected, that has defied her kind of sixth sense. And then, you know, big spoiler alert, but obviously it's given away in the very first page of the book. And indeed, lots of people know it, Hamlet does die of the plague.

And the rest of the book is exploring the impact that the loss of that boy has on their family on Anyes and her husband in particular. In the final pages of the book, we discover the effect that this has had on Shakespeare's play, Hamlet, and the relationship as Maggie O. Farrell sees it of these two things. And now speaking of Maggie O. Farrell, we should explain her background a bit and talk about her,

because didn't you meet her, don't it? I did. My brush with fame. Yeah, so this tells you how some people go on to stratospheric things. Another people ended up presenting podcasts. In 2007, we were both named as part of an event that waterstens the book shop did.

“About, I can't believe that after, well, I'd say, do you know why?”

You can't believe it because you wrote this in your notes. I think because you were keen to be recognised as an author of the future.

And I was one of them, and Maggie O. Farrell was one of them.

And generally, Tabby, author's a terrible people. So there was a sort of drinks party type thing, and I went to this, obviously didn't really talk to anybody else as my aunt. And Maggie O. Farrell was there, and she was actually really nice. I said, she stuck in my mind, because I thought she was a nice person,

that lady. I wonder what will happen to her? And she went on and wrote loads of very successful books. And I ended up doing this with you. So that's the, you know, I don't know. It's the bigger loser here, me or you. Anyway.

I'm glad that you say that at Maggie O. Farrell, because I found her in a very interesting person when I was reading about her. So she was born in Northern Ireland in 1972, but spent part of her childhood in Wales and Scotland, and she now lives in Edinburgh. And her household was very bookish. Her parents were both teachers at various points.

And one thing that I thought was really interesting, is she described how she had a terrible stammer as a child, and that this had a massive impact on her writing. She said that she probably wouldn't have become a writer without it,

“because there are certain words or sounds that you have to avoid,”

because you know that you can't say them, which means that you have to become very agile with language, because constantly in your mind, you're having to think of alternatives, or think of synonyms, or think of different ways of rephrasing things. It allowed her to kind of develop a much looser, freer use of language.

I thought it was really, really interesting. But then she actually studied Hamlet, the play, which she was 16, and she said it really got under her skin, and there's actually a photo of her, which I think is excellent. As a teenager, dressed as the Prince of Denmark for a party,

holding a skull, which she borrowed from the school lab. So there you go. It was at school, wasn't it? The one of her teachers said to her, her English teacher, or whatever, said, "Oh, by the way, Shakespeare had a son called Hamlet,

who died before he wrote Hamlet." And it sort of stuck. She said, like, a splinter in her brain. And, you know, she sort of nursed this splinter for years and years. She did English at Cambridge, so it loads the books. She actually had the idea for writing this as a novel,

but then didn't think the time was right to do it, so she wrote other novels instead.

And she would always, I mean, I've read interviews with her,

where she says, you know, "I would read up on Shakespeare." And people would mention in passing, "Oh, he had this son that died when he was 11 and who knows whether it really upset him and whether he grieved and all that." So classic thing actually that people say about people in the past

“did they take child mortality as seriously as we do?”

They sap them of kind of modern emotion, didn't they? Yeah, because there's an assumption that because, you know, a third of all children or something died by the time they enter their teens, there may be their parents didn't care that much when they died, but actually all the evidence is that parents did care, you know, poetry,

what accounts we have of grief and so on. So she became really interested in the story, it kind of nagged away at her, but there's also a sort of personal dimension. So she was very ill herself as a child, wasn't she?

She had viral encephalitis, and she's described how she heard a nurse, said, talking about her and saying, "That poor girl in there is going to die." And that kind of, the omnipresence of death is a really, really important theme in this book.

The death story was lurking around the corner. But also the confusion, children don't know, like they don't understand, they're confused, they don't know what's wrong with them, they don't have the answers, and you get that in habit when he's looking for an adult,

to kind of save the situation. And also this issue with her daughter,

“I gave Farah's talk to quite movingly about her daughter,”

it has an immunological disorder, so she suffers like tremendous allergic reactions and things. And she wrote a memoir and she said, "You know, I have to live with this thing that you love somebody, but you know that at any moment they could be snatched from me."

I mean, to some extent, of course, that is the human condition, but in this case, it's obviously an entirely different league. Yeah. And actually, an anus is with her son in the book. There are lines that reflect on this,

what's given, maybe taken away at any time, cruelty and devastation, weight for you,

round corners, never for a moment, forget them,

fit them, they, meaning your children or whatever, maybe gone snatched from you in the blink of an eye, born away from you, like, thistle down. And also, ham and its death in the book, it feels so personal, it feels like death has come

and done this to anus, you know, specifically, which is organizing. And so, understandably, she put off writing the book for ages, and she said, in part, in an interview in 2005, she said one of the reasons she kept putting off writing it

was because she had this weird superstition about writing it, she wanted to wait until her son had was passed the age of 11, and she also, for instance, she wouldn't write the death scene and ham and its burial scene in the house,

in which her children lived. She had to go into the garden shed, again, the strange superstition. And she also said that there was a strange vertical about writing a book about Shakespeare.

She was kind of like, can I really do that? Yeah, of course, because I mean, the life from this writer in history, right? Yeah, the pressure of that. But then eventually, she did start to write it in 2017,

and did extensive research. I mean, if I was ever to write a historical novel,

Yeah. She learned Vulcanry. She cultivated her own Elizabethan herb garden. So she was flapping around with herbs herself. Yeah, she was flapping around, and also, she actually looks wonderfully which she might get a barrel.

So of all of this, I thoroughly approve. If she's listening, tabby means there's a compliment just to be clear. Or someone from your co-hosts, so. Right, yeah. And she'd make tinctures and poltuses brilliant.

So you can see from her own experience as they're how she climbed into the mind of this wild healer, so successfully. So it's talking about the research. Let's talk a bit about the history behind it,

“because that's what fascinates a lot of people.”

So the real Agnes, or Anne Hathaway, as she's better known, was born in Warwick, 2015, '56. We know so little about it, and that's why Maggir Faradah is able to, as you say, tabby to embroider. It's a letter of imagination, kind of run riot.

So she's born west of Stratford upon haven. She grew up in Helens Farm, which is now called Anne Hathaway's cottage, or there's not a cottage it's a farmhouse. It's quite fine, actually. It means it's definitely quite well off.

Yeah, her father was a young and farmer. So relatively affluent, she was unmarried and taught she was 26, which was not unusual in Elizabethan, England, because often the older daughter would care for her siblings. So there's nothing sinister there.

And then in '52, so when she's 26 years old, she appears in a historical record, because she marries a glovemaker's son from Stratford. And he's only 18 years old. She's the oldest surviving son of his family.

He has been educated at the Oklahoma School where he would have studied Latin, hence the Latin tutor. And his name, of course, is William Shakespeare. Then completely obscure, you know, no reason to believe, anyone would ever think of him again.

And as we've already described, she was pregnant when they were married,

because their first daughter was born six months afterwards.

So biographers have speculated. Oh, maybe it was a shotgun marriage, and he didn't really want to marry her. Maybe there was some, you know, who knows? Actually, there is no reason to believe that whatsoever.

And she would have been quite a big catch for Shakespeare, wouldn't she, because she's from a well-off family. And actually, his family is struggling at this point. You know, his father, the glovemaker,

“who'd been an older man, there's no longer an older man, I think.”

Their first daughter, Susanna, is born six months later. And then they have two more children, twins, Hamlet and Judith in 1585, who were probably named after family friends. Their friends could hamlet Sadler and his wife, Judith. And the name Hamlet in case people are wondering,

there are different origins of it. So there's an old Germanic name that it comes from, but there's also a place named Hamlet. There's a few Hamlets across England. It means a kind of high farmstead.

So there they are. They're in Stratford. They've got Susanna, and they've got these two twins. And we know nothing else at all about their inner lives. Although, at this point, or at some point,

when the twins are pretty small, their father moves to London. And that's the moment that's obviously the making of him. Yeah, and we also know just from the facts of it that by the time the twins were seven, their father William Shakespeare, his plays were being performed

on the London stage. But again, as you say, we know nothing about them, except then that on the 11th of August, 1596, Hamlet, then age 11, was buried at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. But we don't actually know how we died.

The idea that he was born of the bubonic plague is just hypothesis, because it was very common of children's dive at an English countryside. And 1596 was England's most deadly plague year. And it's important to point out here, this is not unusual

about the third of all children died before their teens at this time.

Yeah. And Stortus Susanna ended up marrying a local doctor. Shakespeare's other daughter, Judith married a tavern owner. Interestingly, they were later excommunicated. But that's a whole other story.

And half the ways, and Shakespeare's marriage was spent very much apart. He lived in London, and she lived in Stratford. We think returning for a time each year, but we don't know for certain. And this also has feels speculation that he

loved his wife, and lived in London, or to get away from her. But again, this was not uncommon. No. The travel at this time was extremely difficult. It was normal for people to stay away for months of the time.

And then you generally travel, kind of seasonally, I guess, when the roads were better.

“Exactly, and this is a classic example, I think,”

to be a historian and biographers, just desperately piling implications, and significance on what very few facts we have.

So basically, they say, well, Shakespeare didn't go

to Stratford that often, or we don't think he did. Therefore, he must have hated his wife who was a terrible woman. But there's no reason to think that whatsoever. I mean, his job is in London. And this was not uncommon for people to be apart from her own periods.

But also, in defense of their marriage, we do know that when Shakespeare retired from the London stage in 1613, he came back to live with her in Stratford. And so, surely, that's symptomatic of, quite a sort of geneal marriage, the very least.

Right, of course. To tie up the story, what are the rest of the facts that we know about these two characters? We know that Shakespeare died in 1616, so he's come back to Stratford.

We don't know why he died. A vicar of Stratford was later quoted about 50 years later, saying, it is said that he died of a fever after he'd been out drinking with some mates. He leaves his will. He leaves most of his estate to Susanna, his daughter.

He barely mentions An and his will, which is again a great spur to biographers. But most people think, though they're the argue about it,

that she probably got a third of his estate, which would have been the norm.

But the famous thing is he left her his second best bed. Oh, yes, the mystery of the second best bed. The one fact, people kind of know about Anne Hathaway. And Tabby, the second best bed, do you think this means that he hates his wife, or that he thinks she's brilliant?

I do not. Contrary to scholars like Stephen Greenblatt, who doesn't really like Anne, and he claims that this was because Shakespeare hated his wife. So he just said, I'm not going to give my wife of all these years my best bed. She can just have the second best one, the throw away.

But again, there are plenty of reasons why this is Tosh. So according to the National Archives, beds and other pieces of household furniture were often the sole request of a wife, and it was common for the children to receive the best items and the widow of the second best. Beds were also extremely valuable in Elizabethan England.

So it's not the minor requests that we think of it today. But also guests were typically given the best bed in a household. So married couples would usually sleep in the second best bed, in which Kate Shakespeare is actually leaving his wife their marital bed, which is quite touching. And Maggio Farrell, this is her line. She very much disagrees with the idea

that the second best bed needs that Shakespeare didn't like his wife. Yeah, she does. I'm basically a bit in the book, isn't there? Where basically they've been given a new bed, but she wants to keep their original bed and all of this. She doesn't want the fancy new bed.

She wants the bed that they've always slept in together.

Yeah. And this is Maggio Farrell saying this is why she gets the second best bed. Well, more specifically, she says that, say otherwise, would be Bullocks. So really, pieces, wow, that's strong words from Maggio Farrell. But also, she points out that Shakespeare said all the money

that he earned from the stage back to Anne in Stratford. And it was quite a significant amount. Of course. And that's not something that you do if you regret your marriage. Yeah, of course. And died in 1623, she was 66.

And she was buried next to Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church. So this is where Hamlet was also buried.

“Well, here's the thing, I'm Maggio Farrell's often struck, wasn't she?”

There was no monument to Hamlet or to Indy to Judith. And so she took it to one herself. I think this is lovely. To plant two row entries in the Churchyard in Stratford. One for Judith, one for Hamlet, and they both got kind of plaques with quotations from Shakespeare, don't they?

Which relate to this period that we're talking about in the book. For Hamlet, she chooses a song from Hamlet, a failure song. Here's Dengan Lady, here's Dengan and that's actually a pierce at the front of the book. And then for Judith, she used a line from the 12th night when the twins Sebastian Viola reunited.

And it's an apple cleft into is not more twin than these two creatures, which is lovely. And has lived on in literature and not particularly favorably, I would say. Unsurprisingly, writers have used her because so little is known about this person, married to this Titanic figure. You know, they used her to project their own concerns onto her, like,

sort of color in the tension between them, color in the gaps in their marriage.

So in James Joyce in Ulysses, he suggests that she's given the second bed

because she was an adulterous. Many early 20th century writers portray her as cold, money-hungry, a cradle snatcher. The famous movie Shakespeare in Love, which I love, by the way. But in that, she barely appears. She's barely mentioned and only then to say that their marriage is dead.

Yeah, it's basically Shakespeare and Shakespeare in Love has got this thing going on with Gwyneth Bulltrow. Yeah, the inspiration for Viola, no? Yeah, and Anna Hathaway, who cares about her?

“She's just some boring old person off-instrafford, right?”

Yeah, that's a mark against that movie. Definitely, I can't believe you're defending that film. Do you know what people now say? I love that film. Tabby, do you know what? It's the famous, it's like the big example of people

give when they say the Oscars give it to the wrong. They say it should have gone to saving private Ryan. Oh, yeah, no, I agree with that. That was actually, um, that was actually Harvey Weinstein's work. Yeah, it was Harvey Weinstein's work.

Yeah, he got her the Oscar. I find saving private Ryan a bit like promos. So seriously, I love saving private Ryan. Yeah, the end with a flag over there. Yeah, it's great.

All of that, no, no, no, it's true. This actually reflects your views on the Hamlet movie. So we're going to have to get to that later. But in defense of Anne Hathaway, Jamay and Greer. Yeah, I read a bit of this.

She wrote a book called Shakespeare's wife, which defense her.

“And I think, well, actually, I read a bit of it yesterday.”

Yeah, you think, well, it's Jamay and Greer. I do. Well, I do now. Well, that's nice. I do on this particular subject. You know, I don't think that about the Jamay and Greer personally.

I actually find her very amusing. So there you go. God, we've been all over the place. Like, that promised show. We've got to, we've got to impact a lot into that half.

They didn't expect to make Greer saving private Ryan.

Well, let's get into the book.

Let's get into the novel. Talk about the character, Anne, yes. Talk about Hamlet, the character.

“Obviously, to where Shakespeare and address this question of whether or not”

Hamlet's death really did inform an inspire. Shakespeare's greatest play, Hamlet. But what I want to do is not to be a part of the whole studio. The master-writer, who's been hit by the soft-handed internet, is a master-writer.

I'm saying, you can say that you're a hero. Yeah, you're a hero, right? But you don't believe it. Exactly. The man is jealous.

He's just doing what he's doing. And if he's done working, he's a catch-in. That's right. Safe. What's that?

He's going to give you a call.

Now, let's get started. Welcome back to the book club. Before the break, we promised you that we would discover whether or not the death of William Shakespeare's son, Hamlet, really did inspire his play, Hamlet,

as my hero, Farrell, suggests, in her book, Hamlet. So Dominic, what do you think? What's your consensus? We're discovering it.

“You make your sound like it's absolutely divisive verdict.”

This is the ultimate reveal. Right, well, okay. So, Hamlet and Hamlet, Hamlet died in 1596. And actually, when you look at what William Shakespeare's writing in the following years, they're mostly comeders.

And actually, there's a scene in the book where someone says to, "And yes, oh, by the way, he's writing a comment." She's like, "A comedy." And she's like, "How can he be writing a comedy when our child is just died?" But we know that you did.

I made someone extremely much do about nothing. Actually, like it, 12th night. I mean, they're actually the most celebrated Shakespeare's. That's, well, yeah. That's best work.

Then he writes Hamlet. He wrote his book between 1599 and 1601. And obviously, running right through Hamlet Shakespeare's darkest, in many ways, and most sophisticated play, are the themes of grief and vengeance.

And it's all inspired by this relationship of the ghost of a murdered father and his son. Now, just on the name, the issue of the name is actually a little bit more complicated than people think. So, in the epigraph to her book,

Matthew Farrell quotes the great Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblath, "Hem Tabi has already disted."

"Dist in the first half."

Sorry, Stephen. "About the second half." "Mind much of your work." Stephen Greenblath says Hamlet and Hamlet are the same name. And they were interchangeable.

But there is a different derivation for the name Hamlet in the play, which is that it comes from a character that's called Amlet, or Amlet, who is a prince in medieval Scandinavian legends recorded by sex or grammaticals. And basically, there's this story of Amlet, who is a Scandinavian prince, who

avenges as far the fain's madness, does all Hamlet style things. So, in other words, you don't need Hamlet, the child, to get the name Hamlet. You can get it from this Scandinavian legend. So, scholars actually still disagree about how much, the title of that play, the name of the character,

how much they really are informed by Shakespeare's son. I have to say if it's not informed, it's a hell of a coincidence. I mean, it definitely would have occurred to Shakespeare himself when he was writing it. But also, it seems bizarre that Greenblath writes that in the 16th century, those names were interchangeable.

I mean, it's definitely no coincidence that he names that play after a son. I just think that's... Yeah, okay. They're something in that. Or maybe he can bind Amlet and Hamlet.

Maybe combined. And now there are other ways in which the death of his son may have influenced Shakespeare. Harry, our social media guru, was recommending us in the break for not talk about the son it? I know, apologies, Harry. And now I'm going to make Harry very happy by talking about son it 33.

Even so, my son won early-mounded shine with all triumph and splendour on my brow. But how to lack he was, but one hour mine, the region cloud, has to master him from me now. And the pun there is son and son. You know Shakespeare's talking about the son as in the board of fire.

But thanks to that. Yeah, thanks to everybody. Everyone really appreciates me explaining that. There's a moment where I thought Christ and I have to explain what the son is and I don't really know. It's a star, isn't it? It's a star.

“That's really close and that's why I see things.”

There were rather stars. How much did you take over the rest of the science next week? Yeah, exactly. We're kicking you off this show. Getting Mago Farron again.

I think he's on the science guy. Oh, really? Yeah, brilliant. Anyway, Hamner is also reflected though in a much more famous Shakespearean work, which is his play a 12th night. 12th night, great play.

Great play, I love it. Written in 1599, or roughly. And in that, a girl, Viola, believes her twin brother Sebastian has died. And so, dresses up as him and passes as him because they look so alike and it's believable. And obviously, Shakespeare's children are twins.

They dress up as each other.

Can I ask you a question, Toby? Do you have a dress up as your brother? No, I didn't, but God, he's going to kill me for this. Go on. My brother, I did want to dress up my brother as a girl.

Yeah, and very striking. How old is he? 26. He was about, yeah, he was about 19. Anyway, my poor beloved twin brother.

Anyway, let's talk about another male twin. Let's talk about Hamner himself as Mago Farron portrays him in the book. So, here's a big difference for the film. The film is really all about Anyes, as in Anne Hathway. Jesse Buckley's performance that has got so much attention and praise.

“And rightly so, I think, her performance is brilliant.”

Although, actually, I don't want to get bogged down in the film, but I think she's not quite the Anyes's book. No, I agree. Not how I think she's. I think it's brilliant performance, but it's not for me the Anyes of the book.

We start with the boy, and we see everything at the beginning through his consciousness. It's the narrative experience of a child, he's reflecting on his life, on his schooling, on the Latin and Greek that he does, the high expectations that his family have of him. So, again, that kind of irony, he's the one who's going to take over the glove business. He's the great scholar, the great businessman, the only one of them with any sense.

Sort of this, and of course, we know he's going to die. But there's also that he has some of his mother's witchiness, doesn't he? So, that's this wonderful line. He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real tangible world around him. And enter another place.

Actually, I say his mother's witchiness, but that's also true of his father,

who has this landscape in his head that he's always kind of disappearing to.

And he loves his father, like he's always looking for him. He's imagining him. He totally idolises. Yeah, he does, definitely, so there is that. So, we know that this boy is bright and really kind of adding to the tragedy of the story.

So, there are constant references to his vibrancy and his health, particularly in contrast to his twin sister Judas cycliness. And, you know, as we said, she's born the more frail of the two. But, you know, he describes having this golden hair and how he struggles to keep still. And he's constantly looking around him.

And that's just, I mean, that's the opposite of death. But that highlights another massive theme in the book, which is particularly for children, the frailty of life. Yeah, that you can seem so vital. And so dynamic, but death is, I mean, that this idea about some

death lurking around the corner. At one point, William Shakespeare's mother reflects this, that she has these lines about, like, death being around the corner. You know, your children can be taken away from you, like, fissle down this lovely image, kind of blowing away in the breeze.

“And yes, has this concept of death herself, doesn't she?”

Yeah, this is very potent, I thought. Go ahead, tell her, you talk to her. Well, she kind of describes it as being a room lit from within. And within the room are the living and around the outside of the dead. And they're kind of pressing their faces against the windows, looking in.

And so there, you know, you can see how death is painted as something almost conscious. It's prowling just a wall away. And then equally, the plague, I thought, interestingly, it's journey to England. It's invisible, but it's sentient.

It travels across the seas and enters Hamless and Judas. And there, it becomes death and death. It's almost anthropomorphic. The book says he can feel death in the room, hovering in the shadows, over there beside the door, head ofverted.

It is waiting, biding, it's time. Well, that's the sort of image. If you think, well, I don't know, engravings and pictures and stuff in Elizabeth England, they would have pictured death.

“You know, effectively, you know, with this kind of side or whatever,”

the image of the skeleton. Well, that brings us to Hamless death.

We always know it's coming.

You know, we've known it's coming from the moment we open the book. You know, it's coming by the time, when you buy the book, frankly, but it's part of her achievement as a writer, you know, the sensitivity, the nuance, the power of the emotions in her prose. But when that death scene comes, it's really, really difficult to read,

isn't it? Because it's so physical and so agonizing. Until the very end, you think, oh, come on, he's going to be able to get out of this. They'll save him, even though you know what's coming. She said, and I completely see why that this was very difficult to write. That was a tough couple of weeks.

For a parent writing them about the death of a child from the perspective of the mother. Yeah. But hard to do. So Hamlet, in some strange way, it's not clear whether or not, you know, as with his mother, anus is witchery.

It's not clear whether or not it's actually happening or as in his own head, he believes that he can switch places with his twin sister one last time and trick death into taking him instead of her. As a twin myself, it was quite painful to read in a way. Because you know, you know, that feeling when you're a child.

And you see that you're sibling or someone's very, very ill. And you kind of sit by the bedside and you don't really know what to do. And yeah, so it kind of reminds me of that. So he exchanges his life forward, Judas. And so he says, it occurs to Hamlet, as he crouches their next to her,

He and Judas have been playing on people since they were young, to exchange places and clothes.

“And then there's this bit, you know, it kind of puts you right in the moment”

and she writes, he breathes in, he breathes out. He turns his head and breathes into the worlds of her ear. He breathes in his strength, his health, his all. He will stay is what he whispers and I will go. He sends these words into her.

I want you to take my life, it shall be yours. I give it to you. They cannot both live, he sees this and she sees this. If either of them is to live, it must be her, he wills it. He grips the sheet tight in both hands, he haven't decrees it.

It shall be such spectacular writing, really powerful.

Really, really powerful writing. But then you have that, so that's in that obviously in his head. And then you have his mother discovers the trick, she discovers that he's dying rather than Judas. And then the physicality of it, we talk about the physicality of the writing.

Yet hard, real physicality of what actually is happening to him. So, his death, she smells it on him the plague, it has a musty, dank, salty smell. It has come to them from a long way off from a place of rot and wet and confinement. In his head, he's in a landscape of snow and ice and it's cold and he kind of closes his eyes and sits down. And then this very moving ending to this scene, it's halfway through the book.

And you can absolutely feel, I mean, this may be a very tried thing to say as a pair and myself, but you can absolutely feel how Maggio Ferros investment as a parent in writing this scene. There by the fire held in the arms of his mother in the room in which he learnt to crawl to eat, to walk, to speak, ham that takes his last breath, he draws it in, he lets it out.

Then there is silence, stillness, nothing more, very moving. Yeah, very, very moving. They actually did that slightly differently in the film. I thought they did kind of the build up to that quite well. You cross between, you know, what's happening in the present.

His plague racked body and then you see him kind of walking into death. But it almost looks like a theatre. But I thought that moment when he actually dies, the agonizing stillness that Maggio Ferros conjures in the book, I thought it was a shame that they made it so visceral in a funny way in the film. It's all about the mother screaming.

Do you know, I actually think that's true generally the film.

“I think that the book often prioritizes stillness and silence and kind of emptiness.”

And we said at the beginning what's not said and what not, and understatement. And the film is not an understated film. The film is very dare I say tabby, a little bit heavy-handed, at times. Well, you know, I disagree, but I will give you my defense later. First of all, let's talk about Aniaz in the book because I just love her character.

So let's start with her name. So obviously, Ophara uses Aniaz and not the more famous and half away. And that's very effective because it gives her a distinct identity. You know, you get to learn about how you get to know her a fresh. When I think about Aniaz, where I think that's--

Woman in a kind of white character. Yeah, I think that's true trust. Quite materially. Yeah, exactly. I think that's true trust.

Scums. I think about that. And I was, I think, about Aniaz, and a teeth coming out and lame as a rob. But anyway, so Maggio Ferros brilliantly and beautifully gives Aniaz an identity of voice and an interior life, a rich interior life, an agency.

And the character is wonderfully witchy. She's immersed in the natural world. And so my favorite passages are these kind of dreamy, lyrical descriptions of trees and birds. She keeps a hawk.

She spends long hours in the forest. She actually gives birth to her first child in the forest. Yeah. She has her herb garden.

She's always mixing up healing lotions and potions in the same way.

Her herbs, as I said. Yeah, that is so patronizing though. She's not fafting around with herbs. What? I can't believe this.

She keeps bees, which is lovely. And she even looks ethereal. She's tall pale. She has long dark hair. She's very slim.

This is me just being a pest about the film again.

“Do you know I think Jesse Buckley is too earthy?”

I did think that actually. Yeah, I did. But I still thought she was superb. But she wasn't quite the Aniaz of the book. Yeah.

So she said to be too wild for any man. And I think maybe it's that, you know, she's an outsider. I think maybe it's that the draws her to William Shakespeare's character in this. She's also an outsider and kind of lives in another world in his forehead. And she has this sixth sense. She has a sense of what will happen to people and herself before

it does. She claims that she can learn everything about a person by squeezing their hand between thumb and forefinger. And if you are watching this rather than listening, I'm Dominic is demonstrating for it. I am demonstrating for you right now.

Yeah, with his typical witchiness. You're saying Zany? What would I see if I did that to you, Tabby? Bordum.

Yeah, a deep sense of regret that you'd never agree to do this.

Exactly. You'd see worlds, worlds, and layers, and depth. I don't think I would. I think that's wonderful. I love that.

I love that little detail. Yeah, I think that's a cool detail. And it's that means that she's first drawn to this kind of slightly feckless nobody, the young Latin tutor who turns out to be willing to Shakespeare because when she touches him, like that, she sees that there's so much inside him.

OK, I'm going to give it anyway.

Well, actually, you'll never get one from me on this show.

She watches people the whole time. She's some servant. She's like the novelist. She's like a writer. You're right, actually.

She has the eye of a novelist, you're right. Maggie, if I were to say specifically, she is a gatherer during this time of information of confidence is of daily routines of personalities and interactions. She's like a painting on the wall, her eyes missing nothing.

Which, I guess, is what a writer needs to be. Yeah, it's definitely the case. And it's interesting because when we get her backstory, her life with her mother before she dies, you're in unyes as head, but unyes as taking you back in time.

And she almost tells you the story of her mother as a fairy tale. So she's writing that for us. And that's wonderful.

So she, her mother, is also kind of witchy.

She says, the women in my family see things. And those forest sequences, this woman walking out the woods with long hair, training leaves and her skirt, it kind of recalls some of Shakespeare's plays. It's very kind of the forest in the mids and the night stream.

Yeah, kind of ancient mystery and enchantment. So then you have her mother, this kind of diaphenous wood witch. And then that's contrasted with the hard material stepmother. And that's also quite Shakespearean. Yeah, they kind of very, get the comical characters.

They're like characters from chores or something, like the wife of bath. The locals. Yeah, contrasted with these kind of more fairy-like, elf-like characters.

And she has a wonderful quiet to her.

“And I think this is what allows her to watch, as you say.”

Yes, exactly. So I think there's that. There's her stuff in the woods, whatever. There's also the stuff in domestic spaces, which is really great.

The stuff about being a mother about what it's like to be a wife and mother and as a reath in England. How the motherhood ends up defining you to some degree. Definitely, and it kind of those sequences, the domesticity, it kind of mels the rituals and practices,

often as a beath in England with kind of today, the modern day, the role of the mother today, which I loved. And so much of the book operates within these spaces. So we are in this book in the jurisdiction of women in a sense. The only exception really is the journey of the plague that I mentioned,

which actually really effectively takes you out of this quite claustrophobic, small world. And introduces you kind of into the world of men in a funny way. But the herdomestity and the tiny observations that she makes her, you know, role as an author, as you said,

is a massive contrast with that of her husband, who is much more learned. And who writes worlds that are much bigger and broader and adventurous, whereas, and yes, as well, is like small and tight and confined. And I think that's really, really nice.

And obviously, motherhood is a huge, huge theme in this book. I mean, it's kind of it's beating hard in a way. You know, and interestingly, I thought, my Giofaral has described how she had a very dramatic experience of the childbirth in 2003, when her sezerine section went wrong.

And you can feel this in the second birth scene

when an year's gives birth to the twins, the trauma of that, the desperation for the children to survive. So I definitely, definitely felt the echoes of that. Yeah. And then you get from there to the grief. Obviously, when she loses her child.

“And I think, I mean, we were talking actually in the break.”

And Nicole, I produce her a St. God. It's has a great book, but it sounds so bleak. Yeah. I guess I don't want to make it sound bleak, because it's not a... It's not. It's a warm and colorful book, actually.

It's a really warm book, but it doesn't shy away from traumatic feelings. And emotions and grief is obviously a huge theme of the book. I think it's really clever in the aftermath of Hamlet's death. The writing, the actual words on the page, the paragraphs become very, very short.

Right. So you have a paragraph here, tiny, tiny detail observation. And then she moves you to another point in time. And then so it's like the shock of grief. Like you don't know what's happening.

It's brilliant about reflecting how grief changes you. How you're not the same person. So she's been somebody who's quite a potent figure. You know, as we talked about her six cents, the her business, you know, all of that stuff.

She's somebody who's in control in many ways for a lot of the book. Then she has this terrible sense of powerlessness when her child is dying or as child as ill. And then the grief breaks the old anyes. To quote, anyes is not the person she used to be, so she's utterly changed. She can recall being someone who felt sure of life and what it would hold for her.

She was able to peer into people and see what would before them. But that person is now lost to her forever. She's someone adrift in her life. She's unmoored at a loss. She's someone who weeps if she can't find a shoe or overboard. The soup or trips over a pot.

Small things undo her and nothing is certain anymore.

“I think that's one of the great passages just in literature.”

Completely. It captures the disorientation. The sense that you've lost something that was yours. You're not who you were. Then nothing will be the same again once you've lost a child. It also shows how much of her had become motherhood.

If half of you is cut away, you know, you're not the same person. She falls into a terrible depression and I found this bit horrible and kind of harrowing. And it made me feel depressed when I read it.

point in cooking. And she was so rooted in this domestic sphere. She was so good at it. Now, she's disheveled and care-born and she can't be bothered to live. It's interesting because her grief is so immediate and consuming.

It's rooted in her body and it's kind of rooted in place. She wants to remain in the home where he died. She says they'll be no leaving. They'll be staying. They'll be with the closing of doors.

Whereas her husband kind of transposes his grief into something untouchable into art, into words, and into writing. And he needs to get away from that place because the grief of being there. His grief is claustrophobic and has full of grief is claustrophobic. And so the moment when he tells her that he's going back to London after

him that dies, her puzzlement and her confusion at that is just heartbreaking, actually.

“Yeah, something I think breaks in their relationship when he does that.”

And you can completely see how it would. Everybody knows if you've read about bereave parents, how difficult it is for them to keep their relationship alive, how everything almost becomes tainted by grief and people find it very, you grieve individually. And it can be hard to reconcile that with your, with your other half.

And when he says, I'm going back to London, he really shocks her because he says, "There are people, life doesn't stop. There are people who depend on me and love them. My company is coming back from Kent and the season is starting and they depend upon me being there. How many people reading that book would have recognised something in their own lives?

Where something terrible has happened?" And then one person says, "Look, I have to go back to work." Let's move on. I have to move on and I think that is really, really, again, it's not heavy-handed in the book at all. It's very well observed.

She's shocked, she's really disappointed and something has snapped in her. It actually says how were they to know that haven't it was the pin holding them together? They would out him, they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cop shot at on the floor. All of that, his leaving and stuff is not to say that he is not grieving. I mean, he is grieving.

There's this terrible moment when he gets a letter basically to say that Judith is very ill and

like you to die. So he rushes back home to see her before she dies. And he bursts into the house and sees his little girl, standing there. So he's like, "Oh, it's all fine. Judith's alive and well."

And then he looks behind her and he sees this shroud and this corpse laid out. And his shock, his confusion, it's realising that it's hamlet that stead is, "God, it just rips you apart." Yeah, he makes this noise. Yeah, and Paul Mascald does this very well in the movie.

I have to say. Yeah, although it's diminished in the film. God, I'm just being so harsh in the film. People who like the film would have switched off by this point.

“It's diminished in the film, I think, because they both do it in the film.”

Jesse Buckleek gives us a sort of animal cry first and then Paul Mascalders. So they're both done it. Whereas in the book, if I remember right, only the husband does it. You don't see her give this great howl of anguish. Well, it's because hamlets death scene itself in the book is kind of from hamlets perspective

in a funny way. So I guess it's fair in the movie to then show what we the audience are seeing. But yeah, in the book, the sound that comes out from his choked and smothered, like that of an animal forced to bear a great weight.

It is an always of disbelief and anguish.

And years will never forget it. At the end of her life when her husband has been dead for years, she'll still be able to summon its exact pitch and tamper. Oh, so it's all given the husband. I mean, we have called him William Shakespeare at times.

He is never called that in the book. And I think that's a really, really good trick. As soon as you hear the words William Shakespeare,

“you think of a little beard and his rough.”

And you think of the play right, you know, the most famous writer of all time. I mean, by denying him his name, you actually restore his humanity in a weird way. You make him around his character again. He's just the father or he's the latin shooter or he's, you know, he's defined but interestingly by other people in relation to other people,

kind of in a funny way as Anne Hathaway historically has been.

And she's always been defined in relation to him.

But also by never referring to him as Shakespeare. By denying him his Titanic reputation, it means that she can get him to do very trivial mundane things. There could be really comical, like the idea of William Shakespeare, I don't know, polishing his boots or whatever or making a pair of gloves,

is kind of silly. And it also shows you that he's not the point. She is the point, Anne is the point in their family. Yeah, that's right. The glimpses we have of him are quite mundane, you know, or they are.

They're ironic. So his father's saying to him, you'll never amount to anything. You're a waste of space. His father being abusive towards him. Later on, of course, we really feel for him.

He's depressed. His puffy, gray. He doesn't need, you would use me being puffy. I did, I know, that's why, that's why.

But then actually, she is the person who is the prime mover in getting him to London. It's her idea that he goes to London to become a playwright. So that's Maggie Farrell very much placing her centre stage.

And basically, not exactly saying that he's a subsidiary character or her puppets

or anything like that. No, but he's not, I mean, as you said, he's not the point. She's the point, really. His character's actually wonderful in this. I like the contrast between this teenage boy wanting to sleep in,

can't hold down a job. And then the kind of destiny, almost or whatever, is the layers that she sees in him. Because he is a man of extraordinary depths, you know, his inner world.

Maggie Farrell does hint at the genius underneath it all. Because, you know, as we described, Ania says, you know, there's more hidden away inside him than anyone she's ever met.

“And that's why she marries them just by his kind of disliked family.”

His age is poor work, I think, and all that.

There are layers and layers within him that maybe only she can see.

Exactly. And there are kind of landscapes inside his head. There's that bit where she's doing that thing, but pressing the muscle between thumb and forefinger when she sees into you. Her magic power.

And she says his mind is crammed with the cacophony, with strife, with overlapping speech and cries and yells and yelps and whispers. And she can feel all this and there's fear, there's a journey, something about water, perhaps a sea. I think all that's anticipating amlets where he goes on the sea journey and all that kind of thing.

But also the book so cleverly anticipates his plays altogether. So you say a journey, water the sea. You know, that calls to mind for me the tempest or twelfth night or whatever. Then also the way that she uses ghosts. So constant illusions in Hamlet to Hamlet as a ghost.

You know, early on, his grandmother is startled by him. He says, oh, you look like a ghost. His sister, Judith, after he dies,

“actually sees his ghost and follows it at home and feels like she's lost him all over again.”

And then, and years after he dies, he's constantly looking for his ghost. And she hears a knocking and thinks it must be him. You know, some specter, like a ghost racking on the door, like weathering heights or whatever. And it turns out to be Shakespeare returning from London.

And then that obviously ghosts in Hamlet, it's massive part of the play. It's also a play in motion. Yeah, Shakespeare wrote 12th night just before Hamlet's. And 12th night is so different. But the huge theme there is twins is doubling.

Is the reuniting of twins who believe that the other is lost. So you can absolutely see that. There's the whole stuff about which craft and atmosphere. Yeah, my friends with Beth the other, with some of his dream. Exactly.

So all of this, I guess, brings us to the point where the two strands meet. The grief, the family story, Anis has lost on the one hand. And William Shakespeare's titanic reputation as literary career on the other.

“She discovered from her wicked stepmother.”

Though her husband in London has written a new play, it's a tragedy. And it has this title, Hamlet. She's gutted by this. She's horrified, she's bewildered, she's so shocked. How could you take our son, his name, and distort it.

And as you said in the reading, flinch it of its meaning and just use it to sell your Dopey plays with your company of actors. And so she goes to London with her brother to see it. Yeah, she writes London and she enters the globe, the theatre. It's obviously not referred to as that.

And she is actually unimpressed by what she sees. She doesn't get the spell under which the audience seems to have been cast. The anticipation, the excitement of it all. She's so angry. And then we get to the passage that this whole episode starts with that I read at the beginning.

Hearing these actors on stage speak her beloved son's name. And she says, it's just as she feared. He has taken that most sacred and tender of names and tossed it in among a jumble of other words in the midst of a theatrical pageant. So she's prepared to go.

She gathers her skirts, ready to walk out. And then the actor playing Hamlet walks onto the stage. And she realizes the truth. Do you know what, this is such a moving scene? Oh, yeah.

Perhaps one reason why I'm a bit more critical of the film than yours.

That I actually found this so moving in the book. I even found it moving when I was writing down the notes for this episode. I know. I watched the film. I didn't find it moving at all. And so I was disappointed.

The actor comes on and that these lines, she's looked for her son everywhere. She's just in these past four years. And here he is. You know, basically, her husband has trained this guy to play Hamlet as her son. As a son would be if he'd grown up.

If this is him grown into a near man as he would be now, how he lived on the stage. Walking with her sons gate, talking her son's voice, speaking words, written fame by her son's father. Her husband has pulled off a man out of alchemy. He has written words for him to speak into here.

Playing the ghost, playing the ghost of Hamlet's father.

And Hamlet is alive. And it's an immensely moving scene that she's standing there surrounded by all these people. And it's as though her husband has brought her son back to life for her and for everybody.

“That's what he's done. He's brought him back to life.”

And this freeze both an years and actually kind of the ghost of Hamlet from his spectral form. It means that he's not frozen in time, a frail, sick, pale little boy. He's kind of born again as flesh, golden and beautiful and grown up. And so he's liberated him from this painful death and after life. He's given him, he's allowed him to grow up.

Yeah, it's agony. God, I felt like I was tearing up there.

Yeah, no, it's so moving. It's actually really moving. I knew it would be moving to talk about him. You mentioned the movie. Let's discuss that a little bit. So you didn't like this scene in the movie. And I remember you said when we discussed this, that you didn't think it needed the music that they

used. You know, it's the classic sad music. Is it Max Richter? Max Richter, he used it in a rifle. He used it in the sad song. And I read a little review saying this as well. You know, did you really need to beat the dead horse? It's the equivalent of playing Colby at the end of the films. It's not. I think this scene is so beautiful and sad.

And I thought I would say this about the movie altogether. Mago Farrell, the genius of this book, as we said, is the things that she doesn't say is the gaps between the words. That's very, very hard to put on screen. Because it's very, this book exists in the interior, not on the exterior.

“So you have to show that. And I think with a story as so”

a bleakly tragic as this, how could it be anything other than, you know, hand up a little bit. And I actually do think that the movie got the silence of the book. To use a very tabby phrase, I felt sometimes the film insisted upon itself, which was a favorite phrase. I think, I think there were a couple of moments there were two heavy-handed. So for example, in the book, she clearly feels deserted by her husband

and feels gutted that he wasn't there when Hamlet died. But she doesn't explicitly say that to him. Whereas in the film, she says, "You weren't here when Hamlet died. Where were you? Brother, Brother, Brother, I mean, that could have happened. Sure. And it's not a dramatically implausible scene. But it's not in the book. The book doesn't do that. It suggests it rather than overstate it. There's also a moment, I really didn't like, where it shows Shakespeare.

He's gutted. His son has died. His riven with grief. He's depressed. He stands looking into the tems. And he ignites. And he says, "To be or not to be." That is the question. Whether it is no Blake, et cetera, et cetera. When they actually did that, I actually, unfortunately, said out loud in the cinema. Oh, no, don't do this. Yeah, no, I agree with that. But I would say, and I agree with, you know, the movie is much more

than ours. It's far less subtle. But I can understand why you'd have to do that with a book like Hamlet. And I thought that kind of overall it was very moving. And I came out with a profound sense of catharsis. Oh, you've said that in a certain way that's who can down say.

“So listen, I mean, it's basically a question of taste. Because I think there's people absolutely”

adore this film. Is your heart shriveled? Are you cold and cynical? Or do you have a bit of soul? Dude, I can't believe you're accusing me of being cold and cynical. When, as you know, I was fighting back tears in that last section. You and that redeem to you. So, because we are

such profound people, we always like to give books. Mark that I said. And we're in practical

teachers. And what are we marking this one in? I think we should rate this in ghostly apparitions. So ghostly apparitions out of Ted. Okay, are we going to give him up to the film as well? Yeah, go on there. That'd be exciting. Yeah, it makes it up. So I'm going to give the book I'm not going to give the book nine. Nice, good for you. I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it. I mean, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've given it more than I've given like Frankenstein or whatever,

which is this great kind of canonical monster of a book. You go girl. I'm going to give this nine. And I'm going to give the film a shocking six. Wow. Brutal. Yeah, go on. What about you? I am going to give the book a ten. I think once in a while, you stumble across a book that you feel is almost touched by, I don't know, some kind of a grace. And I felt that of this book. It has the writing is beautiful. It's wonderfully subtle and disciplined, but but beautiful. And

the characters are superb. You wrote and it left its mark on me for, for months after I read it. Yeah, you were desperate to do it on this show. Yeah, I was so. Yeah. So 10, 10 for me. And then for the movie, I'm going to give an 8.5. You left the point five. I do. I do. Eight and a half. Okay. So brilliant. What are we doing next week? So next week, we have a very different book. We have 1984 by George Orwell. Come forward to that. All right. So please get ahead with your reading,

But do send us your, for two, send us, send us your thoughts. We'd love to hear them because we're

“absolutely transfixed with excitement when we hear from listeners, I mean, Tubby. Yeah, and some”

suggestions for future books because we're all ears. I'd love suggestions. I'd love nothing more.

All right. On that bomb show, thank you very much, Tubby. Bye, everybody. Bye.