WHEN MAGGIE O'FARRELL TALKED TO THE CAMBRIDGE CRITIQUE
Maggie O’Farrell author of Hamlet
On the day the Oscar for Best actor goes to the irrepressible Jessie Buckley for her role as Shakespeare’s bereaved wife The Cambridge Critique has unearthed an early interview we did at the Cambridge Union, with the woman who inspired the book and the movie,
Maggie O’Farrell. Could she have imagined when she gave this moving interview., her book would become an international success and award winning, top-selling film.
Hamnet is inspired by the short life of a sixteenth century boy – the son of the playwright William Shakespeare.
“People often dismiss children who die in history” she asserts,” As if it they don’t really matter and the loss of a child was somehow easier than today. I don’t believe that for a moment. “
I concur. With the grisly apotheosis of this cavalier approach to the anguish of life in the past reached in the Horrible Histories tradition, the temptation of trivialize personal suffering of our forebears is surely well worth revision. This writer has captured all hearts in her version of that grief.
Maggie O’Farrelll realized early on in her novel that a writer needs to know all about her characters’ surroundings. “ I began to write and then questioned, but what was it like in that room? How did the floor feel? The ballustrades? She knew she couldn’t just start her story straightaway without knowing, she had to look behind the scenes in detail and she went off to Shakespeare’s house in Stratford on Avon, ‘miraculously preserved’ to ask dozens of question about what it was to be a sixteenth century family living there together. Only then did she begin her task . One little vignette struck charmingly home in a sequence about hunting. I had written, ‘the hawk landed with a thud on my glove’ or something like that. Only when she went on a hawking trail did she realize that “ The bird is only grams light, when it swoops down onto your arm, you don’t even know it’s arrived..”
Lively, confident engaged and personal – this writer brought her imagined world to everyone.
