William Shakespeare was born in 1564 during one of several outbreaks of the bubonic plague that killed about a quarter of the population of Stratford-upon-Avon, his hometown. Supposedly, he survived because his parents locked themselves in their house. But three of Shakespeare’s sisters and his brother are thought to have been among the plague victims.

When he was working in London, from about 1585 to 1612, additional outbreaks occurred. The Globe Theatre and other playhouses were forced to close in order to slow the spread of the disease. Many people went broke. Players, theatergoers, and hundreds of ordinary citizens died during these outbreaks, which killed more than a fifth of Londoners. These outbreaks also killed citizens of Stratford, including, many believe, Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, who died in 1596.

His death is the focal point of Maggie O’Farrell’s evocative new novel, which re-creates about 16 years in Shakespeare’s life. The narrative covers everything from his first meeting with Agnes (a.k.a. Anne) Hathaway, his wife — who is the novel’s protagonist — to the production of the play Hamlet, about four or five years after Hamnet’s demise.

O’Farrell is an award-winning Irish author of seven previous novels and, most recently, a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am, which recounts 17 near-death incidents that happened to her or her daughter. It was originally written as life-affirming journal entries to give a message of hope to her daughter, whose medical condition makes her especially vulnerable.

Although Hamnet deals with the death of a child and its effects on his parents, the book is also life-affirming as it suggests ways art can transcend misfortune. O’Farrell says she wrote it only after her own son celebrated his eleventh birthday, because she is superstitious.

As I read the novel, it occurred to me that perhaps Shakespeare too was superstitious. There are only a few peripheral mentions of the plague in his plays, such as in Romeo and Juliet when Friar John is sent to deliver a crucial message but is unable to do so because of quarantine restrictions. But other than such small instances, the plague seems strangely absent from the Bard’s work. Some critics have wondered about this, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, whom O’Farrell quotes in an epigraph. Hamnet depicts the plague as significantly affecting Shakespeare and his career.

The scant available records show that Shakespeare and his wife lived in Stratford-upon-Avon, on Henley Street, in the 1580s with their three children in a small addition to Shakespeare’s parents’ home. Their oldest child, Susanna, was born six months after they married and was baptized on May 26, 1583. They also had twins, Judith and Hamnet, who were baptized on February 2, 1585, and were named after the town’s baker and his wife. O’Farrell’s Hamnet begins in 1596, then flashes back and forth — imaginatively building on those few known facts.

O’Farrell frequently alludes to characters and scenes found in Shakespeare’s other plays. Agnes’s grudging stepmother, Joan, is reminiscent of the “greasy Joan” referred to in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Agnes’s grief and her husband’s bring to mind the scene in which King Lear mourns the loss of his daughter Cordelia. Bats, owls, and ghosts traverse the streets of Stratford at night.

The first chapter spotlights a free-spirited boy running through the hallway and down the stairs. We soon learn that this is Hamnet. If his gestures remind one of Puck, the trickster sprite in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that’s because he too is a trickster, as we will later understand.

O’Farrell employs the techniques of drama and poetry, with vivid language as well as appeals to the five senses. Agnes is an herbalist, and O’Farrell includes details regarding the appearance, history, and odor of numerous plants. At times, the novel feels like a prose poem but also somewhat slow and overwritten. Yet she keeps the narrative moving through dramatic irony, use of the present tense, and a variation of the objective point of view.

As O’Farrell imagines it, Hamnet and Judith come down with bubonic plague. Their mother, a healer who is almost preternaturally intuitive, lives with her in-laws while her husband works in London. She saves Judith but cannot save her son, who has, unbeknownst to her, tricked death into taking him in place of his twin.

Her husband returns to help Agnes bury their child but then leaves for London. Barely able to care for herself, let alone her two surviving daughters, she resents her husband. She believes he is unaffected by the death of his son and is too involved with his work. At one point, he tries to tell her that he is overcome with grief, but Agnes, caught up in her own sorrow, cannot relate and looks for evidence that Hamnet is somehow present, possibly as a ghost.

When she learns that her husband has written a play titled “Hamlet,” she travels to London, planning to berate him for diminishing the importance of their son’s tragic death. But as the novel ends, she sees her husband acting in the play and realizes what he’s actually done.

O’Farrell leaves many details ambiguous. When Agnes is first introduced she looks to be a boy, recalling Shakespeare’s frequent use of mistaken identity, a device that plays a large role in the novel. The twins, Hamnet and Judith, often trick the family into thinking one is the other, the same trick Hamnet ultimately uses to save Judith. Even the cover image of a boy with a quill across his face adds to the ambiguity. Is this the child, Hamnet? Or is it the son that Agnes’s husband re-created through his quill pen?

The novel is teasingly dedicated to Will, which happens to be the name of O’Farrell’s husband, but is also the name of Hamnet’s father, though he is never named in O’Farrell’s story. He is identified only by his work, actions, the places he’s lived, and the names of his family members. All of which brings to mind Juliet’s question: “What’s in a name?”

That question runs silently through this multilayered novel, as does another question from Hamlet’s famous soliloquy: “To be or not to be?” It is evoked in Shakespeare’s (as O’Farrell portrays it) suicidal impulse when he holds his dead son.

Both questions suggest another: Did Shakespeare name one of his greatest tragedies after his son? Was the name “Hamlet” just a coincidence, possibly a misspelling of “Amleth,” the hero of a Scandinavian legend? Or was it, as O’Farrell implies, his attempt to restore Hamnet to life?3

O’Farrell offers readers a penetrating look into the creative process itself, while her writing subtly becomes a metaphor for that process — which is the beauty of this novel and certainly no mean feat.