Hamnet with Maggie O'Farrell and Bernard Cornwell

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello i'm diana reich the artistic director of the charleston charleston literary festival join the conversation and i'd like to welcome you from wherever you may be watching transforming the way that the festival is delivered from live appearances to an online version and offering an even stronger more diverse and plentiful series of events is a reflection of our belief that literature in the arts provide a catalyst for dialogue creativity empathy laughter and tears binding communities together we're enormously grateful to all our speakers who've dedicated their time and talents to the festival please buy their books as a way of enhancing the festival experience it's my pleasure to invite you on behalf of my colleagues and board as well as myself to join the conversation we hope that you'll do so in person next november if at all possible charleston in south carolina is a beautiful historic and hospitable town and the charleston to charleston literary festival will definitely be going from strength to strength i'm suzanne director of development for the charleston to charleston literary festival this year more than ever we are so grateful to our generous donors returning and new who've made it possible to offer free sessions to everyone everywhere building a truly international audience there's still time for you to become a donor we're taking donations throughout the month of november so if you would like to become a sponsor and we urge you to do so please contact me using my email on the website thank you good evening i'm diana reich artistic director of the charleston to charleston literary festival join the conversation it gives me great pleasure to introduce this session hamnet featuring novelist maggie o'farrell and chaired by writer bernard cornwell i'm doing so from london which couldn't be more apt as the event revolves around maggie o'farrell's award-winning novel hamnet about the short life of shakespeare's only son although he never left his birthplace in stratford-upon-avon his incomparable father is indelibly associated with the london theatrical scene hamnet won this year's prestigious women's prize for fiction in the uk it's a multifaceted novel combining an elegy for hamnet a poignant study of grief a history of the plague that afflicted elizabethan england a pharmacopoeia of herbal medicine and an imaginative reconstruction of the origins of shakespeare's greatest tragedy the names hamlet and hamnet were interchangeable at the time maggie of farrell is the author of the memoir i am i am i am and eight novels including the hand that first held mine instructions for a heat wave and this must be the place she lives in edinburgh bernard cornwell was born in london but has spent most of his adult life in america he's well known for his popular sharp series of historical novels the 13th of which warlords is just published his book fools and horses is a fictionalized account of the rivalrous relationship between shakespeare and his younger brother i'd like to express my gratitude to maggie o'farrell and bernard cornwell for their contribution to the charleston to charleston literary festival in this dramatic year and to welcome everyone who's joining the conversation hello i'm bernard cornwell and for the charleston to charleston festival i'm very honored to be joined by maggie o'farrell the author of hamlet which won this year's women's prize for fiction it's an astonishing book on the american cover it is called a thing of shimmering wonder and maggie i must say that in the words of the old hymn i'm lost in wonder love and praise it is an astonishing achievement so thank you very much welcome to the charleston to charleston and i believe you're going to start by reading us a couple of excerpts from this thing of shimmering wonder oh thank you so much bernard it's really nice to uh almost meet you sort of meet you and that's a really nice and generous introduction so thank you um i am going to read a little bit from uh just the opening of the book where hamlet is age 11 and he is running around the house um trying to find someone to help him because his twin sister judith has been taken ill um and he's he thinks the house is empty but he's just come upon his grandfather the room is filled with gloom 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 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 scare the witch out of me he cries whatever 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 a pitcher and aims it towards a 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 hey his grandfather says still mopping his papers his anger at their spoiling seems to unsheath itself and stretch out from him like a rapier hammock can feel the tip of it wander about the room seeking an opponent don't stand there gulping his grandfather who says help me how much shuffles forward a step then another he is wary his father's words circling his mind stay away from your grandfather when he is in one of his black humors be sure to stand well clear of him his grandfather had said this to it he saw his father had said this to him on his last visit when he had been helping unload a carp 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 part john had barged past them into the house without a word his grandfather would take his father 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 you know the humor i mean don't you hamlet had nodded but wanted the moment to be prolonged for his father to keep holding his head like that it gave him a sensation of likeness of safety of being entirely known and treasured at the same time he was aware of a curdling unease swirling about inside him like a meal that his stomach didn't want he thought of a snip and snap of words that punctured the air between his father and grandfather the way his father continually reached to loosen his collar when seated at table with his parents swear to me his father had said as they stood in the yard his voice horse 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 standing well back he is at the other side of the fireplace his grandfather couldn't reach him here even if he tried his grandfather was 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 takes it with the very tips of his fingers his grandfather's eyes are slitted watchful his tongue pokes out of the side of his mouth he sits in his chair hunched an old sad towed on a stone and this his grandfather holds 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 everything happened so fast that afterwards hamlet won't be sure in what sequence it all occurred the page swings to the floor between them his grandfather's hand seizes him by the wrist and the elbow hauling him forwards into the gap the necessary space head father had told him to observe and his other hand which still holds the cup is coming up fast hamnet is aware of streaks in his vision red orange the colours of fire streaming in from the corner of his eye before he feels the pain it is a sharp clubbed jabbing pain the rim of the cup has struck him just below the eyebrow that'll teach you his grandfather is saying in a calm voice to creep up on people thank you maggie i think you i and a couple of dozen other people have written novels about shakespeare when which shakespeare is a character but yours has a peculiar distinction you never mention his name not once that's obviously deliberate why did you do it well i think i i'm always really impressed by you know people like you or say anthony burgess who can get that name and harness it and make it completely your own because i found that i had such i don't know how you felt before you started your shakespeare normal but i found i had a terrible vertigo you know wanting to inhabit the skin of this man and wanting to put words into his mouth i don't know if he did as well you could not have seen exactly the same and totally intimidated i mean how could you put words into shakespeare's mouth no who would dare who would dare to do that um but also the sense that you know he's not it's also i think there was also that sense that um that we all have our own relationship with shakespeare inside our own heads don't we i mean i don't mean novelists who writer says but everybody you know we all do you know he's sort of affected our he sort of continues to um sort of define how we view ourselves and how we view others and our relationship with others and he you know he pervades our very language he's the reason why we say so many phrases and so many sort of um yeah sort of uh sayings that we reach for all his you know so so it was also that but also you know i think but the book for me was um you know i've wanted to write this book for such a long time and i've always felt that hamlet and hamlet's death has been much too overlooked you know he's been really um sort of forgotten really by history or overlooked by scholars and academics and biographers and also actually i think you know um popular culture in a sense but always for me i've always felt that the biggest sort of drama of shakespeare's life really happened off stage you know it happened in stratford and i think i think without this boy this 11 year old boy dying in that hot summer we wouldn't have the play hamlet and we probably wouldn't have twelfth night so i suppose what i was asking people to do was to try and sort of forget our readers trying to get readers to forget everything they think they know about shakespeare's story and of course you know there's a very valid reason as to why most novels or you know obviously biographies or scholars have concentrated on shakespeare's career in london because that is that's the main it is the main event we can't argue with that but it seems to me i think i i wanted to write the story behind it in a sense the the story behind the tapestry or the aris um uh and so i suppose i i wanted to divorce him from his name you know i wanted people to think of him as as a man because i think that's what he was back in stratford actually i don't think he was this he was necessarily a player or a playwright or a genius i think he was just a bloke in stratford he was a father he was a son you know he was a husband um and i think you know i think when i was writing but i don't know how you felt that i was intrigued at how people in stratford might have seen him at the time what he would have been like i mean he must have stuck out like a sore thumb don't you think i'm sure he did i meant to begin with a question from from somebody who wanted to ask this of you it's from catherine salmannovitz and her question intrigues me she asks is it really true that you dressed up as hamlet when you were a 16 year old i'm afraid it is i have to confess it is true i was studying the play um hamlet for my hires my scottish tyres and um and so and it just really i don't know i don't know what age you were when you first read it but it really got under my skin as a 16 year old you know it just it was the kind of play that spoke to me and i felt that hamlet the prince was sort of part of my dna in a way you know i felt kind of related to him you know he was probably my cousin or my maybe perhaps my brother and so i did a problem are you a goth black makeup oh god i did wear quite a lot of black i wasn't really a goth i didn't have all the masses of eyeliner and the black hair but i wasn't far off possibly um but i um and so yes so there was a fancy dress party in which i decided to go just assembler and i did i did actually when i when i say the word borrow um it's not quite true i did borrow the skull from the laboratory from the biology laboratory in my school and i did put it back the next day well i said well i didn't exactly ask but i did i did put it back and it was um so i did it's actually very handy there was a kind of i think it was real actually this you know it was this kind of silly skill so i did i did hold that all night it's quite easy to hold a skull i discovered there's a kind of there's a very neat hole you can stick your thumb in just on the base of the skull you probably know this burns alas for yorick now novelists i know do a very different kind of research from historians because where there are gaps and there are so many gaps in shakespeare's life you bring imagination to bear what did you discover about him that surprised you i don't know i mean so much that's the thing you know i mean i studied literature at university and you know i read lots of um scholarly works about shakespeare and i hadn't but i hadn't really read much about his biography at all actually until i started researching this book and so i want you know i think we i think in a sense it you know if you are if you do have a degree of familiarity with his plays you there's a part of you that thinks you know about him but then actually you start reading these books and you realize that actually he's really very unknowable you know even if you can read these massive 500 page biographies of him and in a sense they're all they're all they're all a bit novelistic actually aren't they i don't know if you found this when you were searching for your shakespeare book yes there's a lot of a lot of sermons and you're first of writing about the lost years i mean your book has two time frames one is when hamlet is i guess 10 11. and the other goes back much earlier to when william shakespeare meets his bride why did you choose the two different periods well i think i i was very i really wanted to start with hamlet the boy and i wanted to have as much of him the child as i possibly could um i was very intrigued i think 11 actually because he he died when he was 11 and almost a half that almost 11 and a half and to me it's a very sort of specific age you know it's a very kind of specific developmental stage it's the kind of last it's the last gasp of childhood in the sense it's the high water mark of childhood you know it's the last few months seeing the last few years um before you know that child starts tipping into adolescence and then tipping into being a young man so it is it's a it's a particularly poignant phase i i think in the child's life so i was really interested in just having the having the the book open when he is 11 and it's a fortnight also before he dies um and to have to really i wanted readers to see him and to appreciate this boy was real you know he was a real living boy with a beating heart um and he was loved you know he was loved by his family because he's such a he's such a you know if we think we know a little about shakespeare we know so little about this boy you know so little we know a little bit more about his sisters because they lived to an extraordinary advanced age actually suzanna was in her 60s and judah for hamlet's twin was in her early 70s which is astonishing really for the uh early 17th century um the hamlet the boy is very mysterious we don't even know where he's buried you know we know he's buried somewhere in that church um but we don't know where he has no gravestone and i walked around every single inch of that church just to make absolutely sure and i knew that he was there somewhere under my feet but i don't know where his bones are nobody knows um so i wanted to give i wanted to give this boy this forgotten boy an absolute presence and a voice and to tell his story well you did do that and the book is an extraordinarily emotional book um i don't mind admitting that you took me to tears many times i mean not just the death scene but when his mother lays him out or before that when he lies beside judith which is an extraordinary scene did you cry when you were writing it i did actually yeah i would be i think you'd have to be pretty stoney sterling if you didn't i mean i did um i did sort of dread writing those scenes you know because i knew you know it's one of those things you know i i i don't know if you find this as well you know you kind of you create these characters and you set them living and you set them chatting and breathing and talking and laughing and then but the horrible thing is i knew you know before i started the book at some point i was going to have to you know do away with this child i was going to have to imagine this death and i was going to have to write it and that was quite painful i mean one of the reasons i i put off writing a book so long as it's a book i wanted to write for a really long time um is that i have i mean i have a son and two daughters as as the shakespeares did i mean their age is different that sort of order of the rage is different but i found that i could not write this book while my own son was um under the age of 11 i needed him i needed him to be older than 12 before i could even even begin to write her or even kind of grapple with the subject it's not i mean i'm not a particularly superstitious person but there was just i just couldn't do it i couldn't i couldn't i knew that you know to write that i would have to put myself inside you know i'd have to put myself in the place of a woman who sits at her child's bedside and is forced to watch him die and then of course lays him out for burial because that's what you did in those days you laid out your loved ones it was the woman of the house um and i also found i found you know i mean going back to sort of um talking about shakespeare i've tried where possible you know and has scant you know how has there are a few such scamp details about him i tried wherever possible with the book never to go against something that was actually known so i tried to gather as much as i possibly could and i did i tried not to ignore any fact so i discovered that he there was evidence that he shakespeare was on tour in kent when hamlet died so it's not even known whether he was at the funeral which is so heartbreaking you know i mean imagine getting a letter saying your child has died and then you know you return home and they're already buried you know it's it's agony it's an agonizing thought so i had to i had to put that into the into the novel and then the idea that she was there their mother was there on her own without him without the father and she had to deal with this on i mean not obviously there were other people in the household but to deal with that on your own it's very heartbreaking so i did no i did cry absolutely quite a lot actually i'm not surprised you talk about hamlet's mother um the awful frank harris in his life of shakespeare which was written just over 100 years ago says shakespeare's loathing for his wife was measureless now i think you have completely recast and or we should call her agnes hathaway she's an astonishing character in your book and brilliant what lay behind that what why did you in a sense make her the central almost the central character yeah well actually i became so furious when i read um things like the blank canvas i mean you know i would love to actually have sit down and have a coffee with frank harris and say where did you get this from show me your evidence how do you know this you know because i can't find any evidence to support that theory and the problem is it's such a popular theory it's one that we have constantly fed you know through biographers through academia through screenwriters every you know we're constantly fed this narrative that you know he she tricked him into marriage she was an older peasant she was stupid she was illiterate um she trapped him uh she was a strum pit she was you know he had to run away to london to get away from her i mean there's nothing there's nothing that i could find that supported any of this at all um i mean of course everybody will throw up the second the famous you know behest of the second best bed but you know if you look at the actual document of the will um the second best bed because it is an interliniation because she would have been entitled to i think a third of his property that's that was just the law in um at the early 17th century so she um so you know he squeezed in this second birthday between two other lines i mean to be honest i'm sure you've seen it bernard but the will is is a document completely arid and emotionless you know you would never ever think that perhaps the writer who wrote the greatest lines about love you wouldn't recognize him at all in this you know that he doesn't yes he doesn't show his wife any affection but he doesn't show anyone else any affection either there's no affection for his daughters or his sister or other people who have mentioned it it's a very odd document but you know forgetting to say the man was dying i mean probably of typhoid which is a particularly nasty death um but also the things that always were really important to me was that at the end of his career when he retired and he was equivalent of a multi-millionaire he was incredibly successful businessman as well as being a pretty good playwright and probably a pretty good actor as well um but he chose to come back i mean he could have set up house anywhere he wanted but he chose to come back to stratford to deliver his retirement with her and that doesn't speak of a man who's hated for his wife is you know measurable every single quality he earned you know he lived in really modest lodgings in london and he sent all his money back to stratford he bought his wife and daughters an enormous house after hamlet died he bought fields and cottages and he leased them out he was this incredibly successful landlord so and again that doesn't seem like somebody who regretted his marriage no it doesn't and there is senate 145 sonnet rather 145 which seems to be addressed to anne hathaway but you call her agnes because that was the real name well i found one of the things i um looked at again was that which was another will the will of richard hathaway who's the one we know is anne hathaway's father he died a year before um they married and he left her a very generous dowry and in it he refers to her as my daughter agnes uh and i felt so i'm so shocked when i saw that because i thought you know on top of everything else you know have not only has she been called a trumpet and a cradle snatcher and an ignorant peasant for almost half a century but we've been calling it by the wrong name because presumably anyone who knows the person who knows would know her proper name would be her father really so i just oh sort of i just it was such an opportunity in a sense you were talking about going back to kind of um you know breathing life into these spaces all these voids between these characters you know the sort of story of these characters i just wanted to give her a whole new lease of life and i wanted to suggest that actually the idea that their marriage was a partnership they did love each other because there's so many examples in his plays you can find i mean i know you have to be very circumspect about reading too much of his biography into you know out of it just extrapolating his biography from his plays but there are a lot of very faithful loving wives in his plays you know it's a kind of recurring motif these women who stay perhaps with men who are perhaps a little bit flighty you know but there is a lot of faithful marital wifey love in the plays and i think you know the idea that there was actually a sort of um exchange of artistry between between them because you know it doesn't it's not it's obvious that yes she probably was illiterate because what daughter of a sheep farmer in the 16th century would have been taught to read what would be the purpose of that but it doesn't mean she was stupid so i wanted to give her a kind of artistry of her own which is why and i uh there's a lot of um you know one of the things of course about shakespeare that's so fascinating to all of us is the reach the extraordinary range of knowledge that he displays in his metaphors and in his plays and um there's quite a lot about herbology in hamlet uh and you know it's very sort of informed you know when the mataphilia hands plants to people those plants are a particular cure for some kind of character flaw she sees in them and so i i decided to give that expertise to her to agnes um and also hawking there's a lot of hawking metaphors um in shakespeare's work and so i i decided to give her a kestrel which also meant i could go and learn to fly kessler which is probably the most fun thing i've ever done um in research but what about you what's the most fun thing you've ever done in the name of research very different i walked all wellington's battlefields in india while we were talking about birds of prey i saw an eagle owl which was a ringstand of about six feet and it was just quite quite glorious but let's get back to you some time ago you wrote i won't call it a memoir but a wonderful book called i am i am i am in it you recount your brushes with death and i'm wondering how that informed hamlet particularly judith illness well i think i mean i i'm sure you find this as well but i always think that every book you write is a is a kind of reaction to its predecessor you know i think every book you embark upon there's always something you don't quite know how to do and the kind of process of the book you try and learn or you make an attempt to learn it and then at the end you know it might be something technical like i don't know writing a book from multiple points of view or using the present tense so i don't know whatever the first person singular or it might be some kind of thematic thing that you need to grapple with you know in a sense every book is i find anyway it's it's almost a kind of a puzzle that you need to solve for your own interest either sort of thematically or or technically i think and i think certainly i think that you know writing i am which is all about our relationship with death and then you know how what it means to us to have gone through a near-death experience how it changes you you know how it change it sort of takes up residence inside you um you know and i think i couldn't really have written hand that unless i had that as a kind of building block gonna say or a kind of springboard you know i think there was something you needed i needed to write about i needed to explore my own relationship with it or my own experiences of you know brushes with death and then i think maybe only then could i go on to write this book i'd wanted to write for a really long time now the question i've been wanting to ask you and then i'm going to ask you some of the questions which people sent to us but this is the one i really want and i'm going to read from your book and i'll hold it up so that people can see it in case they see it here we go maggie this is talking about the unnamed william shakespeare we'll just call him the author and it's just before a performance of his play he cannot tell as he stands there whether or not this new play is good sometimes as he listens to his company speak the lines he thinks he has come close to what he wanted it to be other times he feels he has entirely missed the mark it is good it is bad it is somewhere in between how does a person ever tell so maggie tell me about hamlet is it good is it bad what is your feeling about this book now that you've finished told her are we talking hamnet or hamlet on your book i don't know i mean i think again i mean it's funny you pick out those slides it would only be another writer i think who would pick those out i think you know there are i think there are certain points in the any book actually any novelist where perhaps a novelist lets his or her mask drop and i think i was talking without my mask at that point i mean it i think it is it's really hard i think in a sense the the writer of a play or a novel it's probably the worst person in a sense to to judge if it's any good you know and i think something is if you ask yourself the question yeah i think we're always asking ourselves that question are we when we're writing or when we're editing or when we're it's always and i think there are some days when you look at it and you think yes okay i've come close to what i wanted it to be in other days where you just think this is an absolute waste of time this is all rubbish i should start again i should find another job no absolutely but i think in a way i don't know i've always found you know the the process of writing a book is a as a kind of wave pattern you have these kind of surges of optimism where you put words down on paper and you think yes i've got momentum this book has a pulse it's it's happening and then you have this huge crash where you think it's all absolutely rubbish what am i thinking i need to cut you know three chapters at this it's all awful and i think that so you have this kind of creation of words and then you have the edit and then you have another sort of surge you think no i can do it i've got a new lease of life and then you have another crush but i think you need both of those phases you know you need the optimism and you need to self-criticism because otherwise you just write sort of you know 2 000 really you know 200 000 baggy words of nonsense i think that the words on the front of your american edition are right a thing of shimmering wonder it is an absolutely brilliant and wonderful book um now susan rivers coming from here it really does that means so much coming from you so i'm so grateful thank you well you made me cry um susan rivers asks i would like to ask miss o'farrell about her own experiences with playhouses the scene at the globe towards the end of the book proved remarkably moving for me as someone who spent many years working with others to achieve that kind of ephemeral miracle in professional theater which she achieves in the novel does the author have a theatrical background and if not what sources did you draw on to achieve that level of i don't have the authenticity background at all in fact i um i would would be and am terrified of actually going on stage i would never ever have been an actor i would have been a terrible actor one thing i have i have had and continue to have a problem with the stammer so just the idea of having to you know relay lines all at once so i haven't i was i mean i was very briefly involved in student theater a long time ago but only behind the scenes um so no i don't i mean my only experience really at playhouses and uh theaters are being in the audience and i did go to the globe you know the kind of reconstructed globe um several times to try to imagine what it was like and it is roughly on the on the site but the one thing i did discover during my um research was that of course the site of the original globe was across the river it was in what's now the city of london east london and i discovered that when i first moved to london i lived in a really um it was sort of 1990 probably 1994 and i lived in a really kind of dilapidated actually i squatted in a really dilapidated warehouse apartment i mean it wasn't a kind of cool where has parliament you know nicely done it was actually really quite manky and freezing cold and i realized that that i realized looking at the map of where the original um theater was which was called the theater the original shakespeare's theatre was on that road where i'd moved to london it was just on the corner which was such an astonishing moment so i was looking at the mouth and i suddenly got my god that's the strictly street at the corner at the end of the street that i first moved to london and i lived on and i lived there for however long it was a year and i must have walked past this site of the original theater so many times but so that gave me a strange kind of shiver down my spine and catherine selmanovic who i asked one of her questions earlier she also asked another some scholars reject the idea that hamlet the play has any connection with shakespeare's son hamlet you don't obviously you disagree with that and your book suggests that shakespeare transposes his grief onto perhaps his best work can you speak more about that yes i mean certainly you know i think i mean the thing about shakespeare is there are so many theories that circulate and revolve about him and and so many um just ideas about you know you know people are so intrigued with him and continue to be and we'll we'll probably always be actually and we would all want to kind of fill in these voids in these gaps the point is we nobody really knows so nobody is right and nobody is wrong because but to me it seems unavoidably significant that he would call the play so he you know he calls the play he calls the prince and he calls the ghost after his dead son i mean that's that's not nothing is it i mean how can it not be connected i mean it's an extraordinarily significant act it's a strange act you know i mean it's so to me it speaks volumes i i i sort of i find it hard to believe that anybody wouldn't see that as significantly just think oh well he was just couldn't think of a name so it's like why not i'll just use my dead sons i mean that doesn't happen does it it's so significant and if you read the play through that lens i mean obviously the there are a thousand different interpretations of all his plays and all of them you know are pro have a certain amount of validity but if you read the play looking at it through those eyes through that lens of the loss of his son i found it really extraordinary i mean i found just i found this a reference which could is possibly apocryphal you never know with shakespeare and these things but that shakespeare himself did take the other the part of the ghost in in the in the first productions of hamlet which again is really peculiar because of course you know what they're looking for in the first opening scenes is the ghost they want to find this ghost you know and they want hamlet the prince the elect they lie prince and of course the ghost is also called hamlet so you've got this kind of personality that's split one of them is alive one of them is dead the alive one is desperate to see the dead one and it's a you know he's inverted the father and the son um and that to me feels unbearably poignant you know because i did i i did originally think that this book was going to be a ghost story and i was going to have hamlet hamnet the boy um haunting his father but actually what seemed to me as a bit when i started embarking upon it what seems to be much more poignant and much more painful and more realistic actually is the fact that you might be desperate to see the ghost of your dead son to have some connection but what's more realistic is that you can't you never find him you never make that connection because he's gone and in your final scene in the book there's almost i mean this is a book of heartbreaking grief and yet when agnes sees the play it kind of soothes her yes well i thought i always wondered um how his wife might have felt about him writing a play with their dead son's name i'm not sure i would have been thrilled but i mean even i was wondering well did he ask her did he say by the way this is what my new place called well i mean i don't know it is extraordinary it's extraordinary for him to do it but i often wonder how how she felt about it and whether she ever saw it and whether how she felt about the play so i and that was the kind of that was there was that question in my mind and i always knew the book was going to have to end at the globe and i always knew that it was going to end with the you know the the final the early the very earliest production of hamlet with of course the famous player words remember me in the role of the ghost i mean how could you not i mean how you know knowing that as a novelist how could you just kind of ignore it so it was always going to happen but i always and i i wanted her to see it you know because there is a lot of debate about whether or not his wife and his daughters you know judith and susana ever saw his place it's it's not entirely certain i mean you know the it took four or five days to ride you know to walk from stratfor navy to london it was not it was not a an inconsiderable journey or if you if you rode a horse it would probably take three or four days so it wasn't undertaking to get there um but i i like to think that if she had watched any of the plays it would have been hamlet yes i hope so maggie it's been an absolute and total pleasure talking to you um and for all of you who are watching this all i can say is buy and read this book it genuinely is an extraordinary work of art i shouldn't use the word masterpiece but mistress piece sounds so terrible but i think i like it all right it's a mistress piece and maggie pharaoh thank you so very much for talking to us above all for writing hamlet thank you so much bernard it was such a pleasure to almost meet you and i hope i hope we get to meet in person one day well you have to write another book just as good and then you can come to chelsea okay then i'm done you

Channel: Charleston Literary Festival

Views: 5,821

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Id: L_p0uJU6xvQ

Length: 42min 33sec (2553 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020