Exactly six years ago, in late March of 2020, I was finally starting to feel better after what they said was a bad case of the flu. I’d gone to the doctor for the first time three weeks earlier feeling sicker than I had in years. My own doctor wasn’t in the clinic when I went in, and the one I saw told me I couldn’t have the new coronavirus, COVID-19, since it hadn’t arrived in Toronto yet. It was just the flu. Go home and rest.
When I went back a week later, feeling even worse, I learned that my doctor hadn’t been in the office for my first visit because she’d been working in the new Covid ward at Toronto General Hospital. Slight lack of communication? By this time, the clinic was sheathed in thick plastic barriers with a scant dozen chairs widely spaced in the waiting room. My doctor wore a mask and medical gloves, diagnosed me with a nasty ear infection and—cool pressure of her stethoscope on my chest and back—bronchitis.
Meeting my eyes, she said I might also have Covid, although there were no tests to prove it and they had no way to treat the new virus. Shoving a scrip across her desk, she told me to pick up the antibiotic for my bacterial infections. Afterward, go home, isolate, and rest.
When an antibody test was available that fall, it proved I’d had Covid, but I already knew that. We all knew the symptoms by then, and a friend had put a few things together. In late February, I’d played hockey in one of my weekly beer leagues with a woman who’d been hacking and coughing with what she’d thought was a bad cold.
It turned out her parents had just come back from China and she’d picked up her “cold” from them. Also that she’d played in a couple of other beer leagues that week, and when my friend counted it up, she found 36 people who’d played with the woman had got sick with Covid, although fortunately nobody died.
No blame. We didn’t know anything about the virus back then. We were bewildered, apprehensive, a bit stroppy, entirely unconsoled—and remained so for a very long time.
Now, six years later, I’ve been thinking about the ways life has changed since the pandemic. I’ll leave it to the experts to try to figure out how many of the current international horrors are linked to the subtle effects of the virus on the mind and body—and the body politic—and how much of this would have happened anyway.[1] Polarization. Extremism. Donald Trump.
My question to the policy wonks: Obviously the gap between the top 1 per cent and the rest of us has been growing years. But how much of today’s radically divided society is at least partly the result of the lack of neighbourly contact during the pandemic lockdowns? The lack of human contact, and the way people started spending far too much time online, falling victim to trolls, bots, quacks and fake news that amplified their grievances, real and imagined.
That and the way we’ve stayed online since.
Maybe my readers have some ideas. I come at these questions myself through books and film, and I’ve been obsessing lately about the way pandemics are portrayed in art now that we’ve lived through one.
What do we understand about plagues that we didn’t used to? What don’t we want to read about?
What has changed?
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A confession. It wasn’t the six-year anniversary of my first case of Covid that got me thinking about the far-reaching effects of the pandemic. It was the Oscars. Specifically, watching Chloé Zhao’s movie Hamnet, for which Jessie Buckley won the Academy Award for best actress.
As usual, I hadn’t seen half of the big films when the nominations came out, and rushed to see a few before awards night. I started with Hamnet, having loved the novel by Maggie O’Farrell on which it’s based.[2]
Both book and movie tell the story of the woman who we learned in school was named Anne Hathaway, William Shakespeare’s wife—the one to whom, we were told, he’d left his second-best bed. Here she’s called An-yes, spelled Agnes, which is how the real woman’s name is recorded in her father’s will. She’s portrayed as an herbalist, a woman with second sight, and Will Shakespeare pursues her with a passion.
Agnes and Will have a daughter six months after their marriage, then twins, Hamnet and Judith. Hamnet, we’re told, was a common alternate spelling of the name Hamlet. All three children are born in Stratford-Upon-Avon before Will goes to London to pursue his fortune as an actor and playwright, returning three or four times a year to visit his family. Hamnet dies in Stratford in 1596 when he’s 11 years old.
It’s the conceit of both stories that Hamnet dies of the bubonic plague, and that the trauma of his death causes a rift in his parent’s marriage. It’s only mended when Agnes sees Shakespeare’s new tragedy, Hamlet, performed in London. Standing among the groundlings in the Globe Theatre, Agnes finally understands that the anguish her husband suffers from the loss of their son is equal to her own.
In fact, as Maggie O’Farrell writes in her endnote, there’s no record of how the real-life Hamnet died. Four hundred years ago, one-third of English children died before they reached adulthood, most of them from diseases we can now cure with antibiotics. The Shakespeares were lucky to lose only one of their three children. Not that I should call them lucky. Despite the modern assumption that the frequent deaths in earlier times meant that parents were resigned to the loss of their children, period literature suggests people have always mourned them deeply. Thematically, the novel is about grief.
And the movie?
As I hit rent, I was especially curious about ways in which Zhao’s film, made after the Covid pandemic, was different from the book, which was written before it.
Also why O’Farrell had chosen to kill Hamnet with the bubonic plague, and whether it works dramatically.
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The novel came out in 2020, just as our modern pandemic struck. Publishing schedules mean that Hamnet had been finished for at least a year beforehand, and O’Farrell says in interviews that she conceived of it much earlier. In her endnote she also points out that the plague isn’t mentioned by Shakespeare in any of his plays, and writes, “I have always wondered about this absence and its possible significance; this novel is a result of my idle speculation.”
Did Shakespeare shy away from mentioning the plague because it killed his son? Given the fact he’d written nine plague-free plays in the years before Hamnet died, I doubt it.
I’m not criticizing O’Farrell’s choice. The book is a novel, not non-fiction. She was free to do whatever she wanted. And in fact, a massive outbreak of bubonic plague swept in England in 1593, three years before the boy died. Afterward, the fleas that carried the bacterium remained dispersed throughout the country, biting their way through the populace and leading to other localized outbreaks of what was then called the pestilence. Somebody might well have died of the plague in Stratford in 1596, and it may even have been Hamnet.
Yet now that O’Farrell has raised the question, I’ve also started wondering why Shakespeare never mentioned the pestilence in his work. He left no record of his writing methods or the way he chose his subjects. Left few records, period. But surely to some extent his plays were meant as escapism from the muddy, nasty, flea-bitten lives most Londoners lived during the Elizabethan era. Maybe he believed his audiences didn’t want to watch characters die from a disease that might have killed members of their families a few weeks earlier. I doubt they did.
I also can’t help wondering whether O’Farrell’s publishers considered delaying the release of Hamnet as Covid broke out, afraid we didn’t want to read a book about a plague.
I asked that question here on my website in 2024 about Elizabeth Strout’s novel, Lucy By the Sea, set during the Covid lockdown.[3] Were we ready to read a pandemic novel two years after the virus appeared? After revisiting the book this week, I don’t think most people were. Sales figures are closely guarded, but checking a few sites leads me to believe that the book did far worse than Strout’s big books, Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton, even though it was critically praised.
I liked it much better than Lucy Barton myself, but it has fewer than one-third as many ratings on fan sites like Goodreads. My own review of the book has chalked up only a few dozen hits on this website compared to around 10,000 for my best-read posts.
On the other hand, my most popular review looks at Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice, an apocalyptic novel published in 2018, the story set on an Anishnaabe reserve in the Canadian north as a killer plague rages down south. Maybe O’Farrell and her publishers gambled that a pandemic-adjacent novel would draw readers who wanted to both acknowledge and escape their worries about Covid. Maybe we’d want to examine the experience sideways.
If that was their theory, it worked. Hamnet was a success from the start.
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I read the novel when it was published and re-read it again recently after watching the movie. This time I noticed something that had escaped me earlier: the lack of an organic reaction to Hamnet’s illness and death among the people of Stratford. I still think the book is brilliant. It’s gracefully written, psychologically acute, moving and imaginative. It’s also deeply researched, and that’s how the subject of the plague surfaces in O’Farrell’s book: through her research.
In one important chapter, O’Farrell traces the journey of a flea carrying bubonic plague bacteria as it jumps from the coat of a monkey in Alexandria to the head of a cabin boy from a British ship who’s been sent ashore. The flea settles into the red scarf around the boy’s neck, riding him back to the ship. Once on board, the flea hops into the fur of a ship’s cat, then into a hammock where it bites a sailor, who quickly sickens from the plague. After other fleas bite the sailor, they carry the infection throughout the ship. Cats and crew begin to die as the plague-ridden ship sails toward England.
Only five sailors are left when the ship docks in London, where its cargo is hastily unloaded. Among the trade goods are glass beads packed in rags full of flea eggs. As a courier on horseback delivers the beads around England, the eggs begin to hatch, so he’s bitten by a new generation of fleas. The rider’s lymph glands already swelling into buboes as he drops a box of beads in Stratford, where a seamstress has been waiting for their arrival so she can finish an elaborate wedding gown. As a treat, she allows a local child to open the box: Judith Shakespeare, Hamnet’s twin. And Judith is bitten.
The chapter is precise and shapely. O’Farrell is a very fine writer, her prose a pleasure even for hard-to-please writers to read. In another chapter, she deploys her research just as seamlessly to bring a physician to Agnes’s door. The man wears the odd bird-like mask that plague doctors wore at the time, which I mention as an excuse to attach the picture above.
Yet the relentlessly heightened anxiety I think most of us felt during the Covid pandemic is absent. Obviously, O’Farrell hadn’t experienced it when she wrote the book, and as a result, a layer of social panic is missing from the novel; the shying away that kept our shoulders swivelling and footsteps hurrying, something that surely happened in earlier centuries as well. Hamnet’s death in the novel raises so little concern in Stratford that he might just as well have died from an infected cut, which the local people would have known wasn’t communicable, even if they didn’t know why.
It’s a small point, and it doesn’t affect the overall success of the book. But here’s where my final question comes in. Director Chloé Zhao and O’Farrell wrote the script for the Hamnet movie after the pandemic. As I settled down to watch it, I wondered how this had changed the story.
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If you didn’t know Chloé Zhao’s work, you could conclude that the covid pandemic entered the film version of Hamnet through landscape. The movie is alive to nature in the way we grew self-consciously alive to it during the pandemic, walking when we couldn’t otherwise exercise through parks and ravines and countryside that seemed even more beautiful in the quiet of a non-mechanized time. Cars stayed parked as we worked at home, foxes delivered their kits under the boardwalk, rabbits chewed on gardens—my garden—as coyotes trotted down the laneways and the unpolluted sky seemed to rise higher above the city.
Hamlet is a visually stunning film, the camera often following Jessie Buckley’s Agnes into a primeval-looking forest where she flies her kestrel into the treetops. She tends a tangled herb garden. Keeps bees. And yes, the unpolluted sky rides high.
But if you’ve see Zhao’s films, you know this is simply her style, and it has been from the start. Zhao released her first feature, Songs My Brothers Taught Me, in 2015. It’s set on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, and like most first features, it’s obviously low-budget and a bit knock-kneed. Yet Zhao already shows her feeling for wide-open landscapes, a talent that flowers in her feature Nomadland, which earned both her and Frances McDormand Oscars. (If you’re an actor, you want to play the female lead in one of Zhao’s films.) As it follows McDormand’s nomadic journey across America, Zhao’s camera marvels at the desert landscapes, the low hills and eroded hoodoos. She even makes an Amazon warehouse appear monumental.
In one interview,[4] Maggie O’Farrell says that the process of adapting a book into film is like constructing an hourglass. You start with the novel’s expansive plotline and its large cast of characters, narrow it down to a svelte waist of story, then broaden it out again into a script. The broadening comes from the director’s vision, and in this case, Zhao’s strong visual sense.
Yet here’s the thing. Yes, the film is different from the book, its sub-plots and minor characters snipped away. But I didn’t feel it had anything more to say about pandemics. Zhao shows a couple of people taking a corpse down a stairway in Shakespeare’s London rooming house, but I didn’t see many other differences from the book. No Elizabethan social distancing. No flagellants hoping to ward off God’s wrath. No poor soul collapsing in the street.
Which makes me circle back to my original question. Are we, the audience, still not ready to confront the pandemic in books and film? Soldiers coming home from war are famous for not wanting to talk about what they went through. Is this how we all feel about Covid?
As a result, I wonder if artists are reluctant to write about the pandemic and to film it head on; to make us watch it and read about it; to subject us to stories that hit too close to home. Best to tell the truth but tell it slant, as Emily Dickenson advises—and as O’Farrell believes Shakespeare did in the tragedy of Hamlet.
Are we the poorer for this? Or is pandemic-adjacent the best artists need to manage? I’d be interested in your thoughts.
And now for a few footnotes.
[1] I’ve recently read about a new book called After Covid by journalist Jason Gale that I plan to order. According to the jacket, “The Covid-19 pandemic may have faded from headlines, but its shadow remains. In After Covid, award-winning journalist Jason Gale delivers a gripping, deeply researched account of a crisis that has fundamentally changed the world, and continues to reshape it in ways we’re only beginning to understand.” It’s available here from Johns Hopkins University Press.
[2] You can order Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet here.
[3] The review is available on my website via this link. Other reviews mentioned here can also be found on www.lesleykrueger.com
[4] Find the 10-minute-long interview with Maggie O’Farrell here on youtube. She also did a lovely interview with CBC’s Tom Power. You can find the half-hour version toward the bottom of this article, and the longer version on Q with Tom Power wherever you listen to podcasts.