As Mark Twain supposedly said, history never repeats itself, but sometimes it rhymes.

Hamnet
MAGGIE O’FARRELL
(TINDER PRESS, 384 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

As Mark Twain supposedly said, history never repeats itself, but sometimes it rhymes. I read Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet during the first stages of the ­coronavirus outbreak, and found something very prescient in her depictions of sixteenth-century public events cancelled because of plague, and of desperate family attempts to protect loved ones from fatal sickness. Historical fiction may deviate from the known facts of the past, but it can reveal much about our contemporary attitudes and preoccupations.

Shakespeare’s wife is often considered a rather dull, provincial woman, from whom the playwright gladly escaped for London’s glamour and excitement. He famously bequeathed her only his second-best bed. In Ben Elton’s television series Upstart Crow, Liza Tarbuck presents her more sympa­thet­ically as an earthy and grounding influence upon the dramatist.

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