Matthew Adams

His son’s death may have inspired some of Shakespeare’s greatest lines, but he never recovered from the loss

The grief of Hamnet’s parents as they watch their adored child succumb to the plague is hauntingly described in Maggie O’Farrell’s novel

William Shakespeare. Credit: Getty Images 
issue 04 April 2020

Maggie O’Farrell is much possessed by death. Her first novel, After You’d Gone (2000), chronicled the inner life of a young woman who finds herself comatose following a near-fatal car accident. And a recent piece of non-fiction, I Am, I Am, I Am (2017), gave an account of O’Farrell’s own numerous brushes with mortality.

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