Her father can reunite his fictional twins, separated in a shipwreck, and for Viola and Sebastian the aching loss can be magically healed, but he can do nothing to heal his family’s grief revived every birthday.” Judith no longer had her twin to celebrate their joint birthday. “According to John Manningham’s diary, the first recorded performance of Twelfth Night took place exactly 17 years later on 2 February 1602. “The twins had been baptised at Candlemas 1585,” said Greg Doran, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. It is also unclear whether Shakespeare attended the funeral. In an era of frequent plague outbreaks, the cause of death was not always set down in parish registers, so the circumstances of the boy’s death are uncertain.
He was buried in the churchyard at Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon in the summer of 1596, one of the most productive years of his father’s early London career. The agreed facts are that Hamnet was indeed twin brother to Shakespeare’s second daughter, Judith, and that he died at the age of 11. In the novel, O’Farrell, 48, a Costa award-winner in 2010 for her book The Hand That First Held Mine, follows young Hamnet, who is thought to have been named after a family friend Hamnet Sadler, as he searches for help for his gravely ill twin sister. O’Farrell’s Hamnet, out at the end of March, takes an unconventional approach to literary history and has already been hailed as a critical hit, with the award-winning writer Kamila Shamsie declaring it: “Dazzling. “I was always baffled and saddened by how little mention he receives in biographies and literary criticism, so I decided to write a novel about him, to attempt to give him a voice and a presence.”
“I have been fascinated by Hamnet ever since I first studied Hamlet at school,” O’Farrell has explained.
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