The taming shrew: Agnes in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet as (early) modern husbander

Whilst attention has already turned to Hamnet’s debt to Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet (O’Neill, 2020), another play, The Taming of the Shrew (?1590–2), merits an intertextual reckoning to help understand the protagonist Agnes. Shrew’s Katherina is headstrong and animalistic, like O’Farrell’s Agnes. Katherina’s successor – Maria – from John Fletcher’s Shrew sequel, The Woman’s Prize (?1609–11), offers another significant staging post for Agnes. 

Boosted by O’Farrell’s declared intertextual influences from early modern texts covering botany and falconry, it becomes clear that O’Farrell does not merely update an early modern tragedy, but concretely organises her narrative around early modern husbandry – just as Shakespeare did in Shrew, and Fletcher in The Woman’s Prize. I argue that through this intertextuality, Hamnet becomes a novel recasting womanhood as ‘gentlemanly’ proactive cultivation of nature – of animals and humans – rather than the narrative of a meek, patient wife. Ultimately, Agnes husbands Shakespeare into the Bard we know today.