Dinner and a book is supported by the Rex and Alice, A. Martin Foundation of Elkhart, celebrating the spirit of Alice Martin and her love of good food and good friends.

In Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell.

The Black Death looms across England as Agnes settles in with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford upon Avon.

She becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast force in the life of her husband, whose career on the London stage is just taking off.

Then her beloved young son succumbs to a sudden fever.

Let's find out more with my guest, Jane Poe.

Welcome!

Hi, Gail!

Nice to be here.

Well, it's so good to have you.

And you and I both enjoyed this book, and we were taken by the main characters and the side characters.

Let's talk about Agnes and then her husband, the lover, the glover.

We can give him all kinds of of names here, the writer as well.

So let's describe Agnes.

Agnes is a misfit in the community.

She is most at home in the woods and gathering herbs.

She does not get along with her stepmother, who fits the stereotype of the wicked stepmother.

She has an older, biological, older brother that she is Bartholomew.

Bartholomew that she's close to, but otherwise her life is pretty rugged, taking care of a whole houseful of younger half siblings.

And so she retreats and she's most at home.

Away from that house.

Away from the house, away from the children, away from taking care of the house.

She really is very creative with nature's elements.

Right.

She also develops potions for the ill. She takes care of them in.

Her husband is a very good writer.

But what happens to me, he's not in the first part of the story.

He is in the first chapter right after the little boy goes looking for his mother.

They the author is it's almost like a camera scene pans to a street in London and there's a man walking down the street talking.

So we know that's the father.

The their marriage of opposites.

First off, she is eight years older than he is.

They started off with a baby very soon and then they had twins.

He is not happy.

They they share the same house with his parents.

And that's not a good situation.

Oh, terrible.

So she encourages him to follow.

She knows he's very gifted.

She can tell when she feels that spot on his thumb that he has special.

Yes, that he has special powers.

And she encourages him to follow that.

So he goes off to London.

He's happy in London.

She's happy with her garden.

And it's kind of a distant marriage.

And they come together.

He comes back to the village to visit.

He comes now and then to visit.

And if it is today, this would not be unusual.

You know, people could work in different places, but then it was considered, well, they must not get along or what?

He must be odd.

She must be odd.

But they still love each other.

And it is a story.

It's a luminous marriage, but it's not a convenient or conventional marriage.

And so people love to talk about that.

But let's talk about what we're making.

We are making because it's summer and I. Agnes would have gone to her garden, and there's plenty of zucchini.

We have tomatoes.

We have onions.

I'm making a zucchini tomato baked dish with basil.

Wonderful.

And that is one of the best summer recipes you can use.

I'm putting some honey in with butter.

I have some fennel seeds, and I'm going to add some yogurt and vanilla cook and stir it a little bit.

And then to that, we're going to add two eggs separately, and then I'll add the flour that has some powder in it, and we will put it in a nice skillet.

It almost looks like it came from the Renaissance.

If it was led to me by my friend Janice Langland, who has a collection of them, I have the smallest one because I can lift it up.

So we're heating.

I'm heating the butter and the sirup together is the base of this cake.

And, you know, she has beehives, too, so this keeps bees.

She she's always out visiting her bees, the hives.

There's a lot of detail about that.

And that's.

Fact.

That's where she was when her little Hamnet is frantically looking for his mother.

Yes.

But she never forgives herself for not being there.

Well, that's what mothers do.

They take they take themselves very seriously and they can't believe they did something.

I am going to put in about a teaspoon of vanilla to give this a little flavor and then I'm adding some yogurt.

I think it should be a vanilla or a plain yogurt.

This is a Greek yogurt, but it has a little coconut flavoring to it.

We're upping the Renaissance right here a little bit.

So I'm going to beat I'm going to do it just envelop this stuff all together, and then we will add eggs and flour and put it in the skillet, the iron skillet, and then in the oven for about 40 minutes.

So you are you just gone to your Elizabethan garden and gathered your veggies?

Well, of.

Course, among all of the other things that any good wife of the time is doing.

Yes.

Tearing of sheets to make washcloths.

I mean, all kinds of things that go on and spinning and taking care of those animals and.

Brewing beer and.

And so I don't think she she doesn't ever seem to be mad that he's gone, but he's gone.

It's very important times.

That's what really upsets her, particularly when their little Hamnet is ill and well.

At first, it's the twin sister that.

Yes.

And she recovers and then Hamnet succumbs.

Well, you know, Hamnet wants to take the place of his sister.

He thought maybe they could fool the devil and that she would be spared.

Instead, he he succumbs to the Black Death.

This is very sad.

Extra.

Really sad.

And when you're when any of your family, your children had the Black Death, the plague, the telltale signs were these bulbous growth in their necks and their armpits.

And then they their skin was start turning dark.

And it was a sign me this just went from one village to another.

And the facts that we do know about Shakespeare, there are very few that he did have the first child, Susanna, the older sister, and then the twins, Judith and Hamnet and Hamnet died at age 11.

But there's never any cause of death given.

Well, and.

And none of the adults seem to get it in the in this story.

So we have.

Will, who is in London and she she doesn't read or write, so she can't be as interested in what he's doing.

He has.

A sister, Eliza.

Yes, of course.

Makes the correspondence.

And then, of course, they have to send any message by a courier from Stratford to London.

Okay.

I'm going to do something that I hadn't thought about before.

I'm going to add these fresh eggs to this hot stuff.

Let's just hope it doesn't scramble.

So I'll put one in and stir it a little bit, and then we'll add the second one.

Then we'll add the flour and pour it in the skillet, and I don't even have to turn the burner on for that.

So I think the scariest part of the book is the father of the tutor.

He is John.

Oh, my gosh.

Is he cruel?

And he hits his kids.

He hits his grandchildren.

Well, he's angry.

He has lost status in the town where he had been a bailiff.

He lost that posting.

He was looked down on because he failed to show up in church regularly.

So he lost his position as a bailiffs.

So he's fallen socially in the eyes of the town which to make up for that.

He goes to the pub and drinks ale when he should be making more gloves.

Yes, making gloves.

And of course, he's he's drunk most of the time, too.

So that violence and that embarrassment, Jane: Classic, classic case Gail: He doesn't go to He didn't go to church.

Go to church.

So they shunned him early shunning.

And it was England.

That's where we got the shunning from.

And I mean.

And remember that 100 years later, from this time, we're still hanging witches in the new world.

So anybody that doesn't fit the social scheme of the town.

Yes.

Is an outcast.

Well, and they kind of both were he's gone and she's out, you know, tending to her bees and nature.

In fact, when she has her first child.

She gives birth on the forest floor.

Yes.

She doesn't want to be around the women.

This is one of my favorite details.

The author, when her husband and her brother find her with a newborn babe, she's lying on the fecund leaf, damp forest floor.

I loved that.

I'm surprised she is not kicked out of, say, the town of Stratford.

Now, I'm going to add my flour.

And, you know, if this comes out lumpy, I don't know.

It might be just the way they did it in the Renaissance times in England.

We don't know what their cakes look like, but this is a honey cake, so we're kind of getting ready here, finishing up this first part and the second part.

We want to talk more about the development of the family, family life, the book, and then what happens to the father and the mother as some of these incidents take place, the mother starts to get a little bit.

The wife unhappy about the fact that her husband doesn't come home when the children have good luck, the plague.

So we're going to pour this in the skillet, put it in the oven.

It's like a mush at this point.

And so in the meantime, we want to show you the gardens of Anne Hathaway and or Agnes's.

We want a call her so you can appreciate and maybe you've seen that house in Stratford upon Avon.

And then we'll be right back.

And we are thoroughly enjoying this book.

Jane and I were meant for Hamnet weren't we?

I think so.

It was meant for us.

Yes.

Which I just love this book.

And I. I should stop talking and put my renaissance honey cake in the oven for 35 minutes.

All of these ingredients are ready to go.

And here we go.

Okay, Jane, how are you doing now with your vegetable medley?

Well, I have layered my vegetables from my garden and yes, tomato and zucchini and onion.

And I have sprinkled it with a mixture of parmesan cheese.

That's kind of cheating.

I'm sure she didn't have Parmesan.

But she might have had something else.

She probably had.

She raised animals.

She had the pigs.

She took care of the cattle.

And and I mixed it with some basil, which, of course, I would have gotten from my garden.

And then I'm dotting it with butter, which she's probably churned.

She has, yes.

I'm so glad I'm not living.

Then there life was circumscribed by just surviving day after day.

And then I am baking this.

Okay.

And how long is yours In?

45 minutes.

All right.

I'm heating some butter and some oil, and I'm going to be making a soup here.

A fennel soup.

And I don't know if you cook with fennel, you can go in this supermarket and you find these great chunks, these bulbs, and you just cut across horizontally and you chop these up.

I am putting in now some onion and then I'll put in some garlic.

I preach chop this because 10 minutes goes by so fast.

All right.

And then I have a stock of celery.

I had a medium onion stock of celery.

And then I'm going to put in a little garlic.

They grew garlic.

You know, they were they they had all kinds of things that we we didn't grow in Indiana.

At least my family didn't.

Okay, we have that.

And I think we have all the veggies.

And now I will add now my chopped fennel.

It smells like anise.

It's such a nice aroma here.

We're going to brown this a little bit and then I will cook this for about 5 minutes here and then we'll add some other things.

We didn't we didn't bring our beer that we brew.

did we?

No we did not.

See, that's another job she does Ale or mead, I'm sure all of those Yes.

Yes.

The work was incredible.

And to have a complaining mother in law and an angry, hostile father in law and a husband away, she doted on these children.

And of course, the Black Death, the plague made its way to Stratford upon Avon and all of her children are affected in some way.

But talk about how in the beginning everybody thought it was Judith who was dying.

Correct.

And she miraculously recovers.

Now, I did do a little research on this.

There's so little known that daughter never learns to write.

She signed her name with an X.

The older sister, Susanna was the one that married and managed things and built the new house for her mother.

That her father sends back money from London to move Agnes out of the cohabitation with the in-laws into her lovely cottage that we known as Anne Hathaway's cottage.

When you make your pilgrimage to Stratford and so she is set up a little better.

Eventually she sends her husband back to London because she has as fine sense of smell.

The central details in this book are marvelous.

She smells the melancholy on him and tells him he needs to go back where he belongs.

And so she does send him off, although that doesn't help the pain when he's not there, when she's nursing the sick children and Judith survives and then Hamnet succumbs.

And this, this is.

Well, the whole thing you could imagine is such a tragedy for any of those people losing children.

She describes making the shroud and sewing it up and decorating it that they're going to carry him to the cemetery with.

And of course, they do the procession where you carry the body.

And it to me echoes some things that Ophelia's said later in the play Hamlet about carrying the bodies to the grave with many a tier and so on.

And, you know, lives were people lived to their forties, maybe they were lucky children died very early, so they are acquainted with death.

But this family had it.

This is their first encounter.

So the husband and wife again do not react in the same way he arrives.

Too late, but he's deeply moved.

She plays a very good game with him.

She wants him to express his feelings and he can't, won't.

And she doesn't fill in for him and lets him flounder.

And the whole irony is that he couldn't talk to her then or express what needed to be expressed.

The great wordsmith of all time couldn't do that.

But he goes back to London and within four years has written the play Hamlet.

Hamlet, and we will get into that our affects Agnes to it is amazing you just touched on this these references to smell in this book.

I mean, it is it is overpowering, isn't it?

You can smell what ever she is describing.

It's punch, it's accurate, it's sour, it.

Swims, it's sweet and she can smell, she smells.

He comes back from London and gives her a bracelet and she smells another woman on that bracelet.

And so she takes the bracelet out into her garden and buries it.

And I thought that was amazing.

It is good.

What a way to get rid of that.

Right.

So it really is intense.

It's lush, the descriptions of smell and everything from the gloves to, you know, what you just mentioned the food and like you.

There's a scene in the Apple House that is amazingly erotic and sensual.

Oh, it is.

It really is.

You know, they saved their apples and stored them never touching for the winter and they could go in and get them.

And all of a sudden, one before these people are really you know, they are married.

No, no, they aren't married yet.

The apples start shaking in this little imagine.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What's going on in there?

In any case, I now have my my a broth in here.

It's really stuck.

And I'm going to add some spinach for a little bit of flavor, a little taste and nutrition and nutrition and color.

So we have all the ingredients here for this soup and the modern recipe says, now use your blender and blend it all up.

And you know, it splatters around and it'll be nice and smooth.

And I look like something out of a nice restaurant.

And I'm thinking, did she beat it down?

She didn't have a blender.

How would you think they served it?

Pretty poorly.

They have something like a potato masher and just mash it.

Oh, you're too smart.

Yeah, I grew up without a blender.

It's true.

I should've brought my masher.

I brought my wand instead, and I thought, this doesn't seem right.

Doesn't seem right.

Okay, we have a few minutes.

I have a feeling this book impressed both you and me very much.

How would you tell people how to read this book?

You know, in our fast lives, we want things to kind of move.

I want to see this.

I want to be able to think about things and pick up the phone and just read on.

Can you do that with this book?

No, you can.

You can read it for plot the first time being.

I think some people that were confused by it that we've talked with didn't catch that.

Every other chapter goes back into flashback.

If you missed the little part 15 years earlier, a young tutor is standing at the window and don't realize that this is a flashback.

But I read it the first time and thought, This is brilliant because we know so little about Shakespeare's life and that she was able to extrapolate from that and create a very believable scenario.

Yes.

And then the second time I read it, I was so moved I had to put it down because I couldn't stand the grief when they were trying to make their marriage work after burying their son.

And the communication wasn't happening.

Beautifully, said Jane.

You know, I I've read the book, too quickly the first time, and I couldn't even tell you what happened.

That's how fast.

The second time I luxuriated in reading it, I shut the world down.

I moved into a back bedroom and I read it and it washed over me.

And that's the way I feel about this book.

I am now going to let this soup cook a little longer.

Let's check one time here in the oven, see what we've got going on.

We have a little more time to go.

And so since you've seen now the Garden of Anne Hathaway or Agnes, they're one and the same.

As is Hamnet and Hamlet are one in the same name.

Yes.

And we haven't come to the very end.

Well, keep that for the next portion of this show.

In the meantime, let's look at the man, the menu for today.

We'll be right back.

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell.

A wonderful book.

Wonderful.

Absolutely.

I highly recommend it.

And we want to show you some Renaissance food from the 16th century.

The ingredients are fresh, though.

Okay.

We have a fennel soup made from a nice fennel bulb.

We added some spinach.

Then we have now a honey cake.

And tell us about your zucchini tomato.

Summer Garden Bake.

Yes, right from your garden.

Your little kitchen garden, right off the back of your bed.

Yeah.

Oh, listen, I just love this book, and I have to say, the reason I really appreciate it is because the author decides that everybody has written about William Shakespeare.

And I'm sure you've guessed he's the subject of this book.

Well, he's not the subject.

He's a side to main subject.

So she wanted to write about Anne Hathaway, the wife of William Shakespeare.

So that's why I was very touched by that and I love that.

Tell me what you like.

I loved the words, if you love Shakespeare, you'll love this book because she knows which words to use.

So I'd like to close with the words that Shakespeare closed his play.

Hamlet now cracks a noble heart.

Make clouds of angels sing day to day rest.

And talking about his little Hamnet who you know died.

Remember me?

Yes, I remember me.

Very moving, very touching, beautifully displayed.

And thank you so much for coming and sharing your talents with us all.

It was fun to talk about such a loaded topic.

I loved it is right.

I loved it.

And we are so glad you watch.

We want you to come back.

We'll wait for you.

So remember, good food, good friends, good books make for a great life.

We'll see you next time.

Bye!

This WNIT local production has been made.

Possible in part by viewers like.

You.

Thank you.

Dinner and a book is supported by the Rex and Alice A Martin Foundation of Elkhart, celebrating the spirit of Alice Martin and her love of good food and good friends.