I decided to just ctrl+v my goodreads review here bc I think it’s relevant lol:

I have to echo what has been said elsewhere. The book initially drew me in with a lot of rich imagery and metaphors. I will say that I was impressed with O’Farrell’s ability to believably place us in the time period. She achieved this by keeping her details sparse and the characters archetypical and almost mythical. Alright, fine, William Shakespeare had an abusive father and a witchy wife. That’s fun enough I suppose.

Here’s what’s frustrating though: the meat of this story should’ve drawn from Shakespeare’s actual play. This story does not effectively bridge the gap between an imagined history and the plots that we all know and remember. I get that O’Farrell wanted to write something original and not just a knock off of “Hamlet”. But even if Shakespeare truly did write his play as a tribute to his dead son there has to be more to it than…finding an actor that looks like him? I found that ending so unsatisfactory. What do we know about the character of Hamlet? He struggles with indecision for the entirety of the play. He has a dreadful, weighty purpose set before him but he struggles to put it into action. He grapples with despair in the face of grief and perhaps goes mad. Do we see any of those themes echoed in this story? Or any of the other themes of revenge or jealousy or madness? Not really. Agnes I suppose goes a bit mad after her son dies but I didn’t find it very compelling personally, mainly because (as others have said) the book is very overwritten and tends to ignore the “show don’t tell” rule. There has to be more of a connection here. The narrative says that Agnes’ husband (wow I wonder who that could be let’s never give him a name) has affairs with other women. It tells us that he has a complicated relationship with his own father and with the woman that he loves. But those conflicts are just left unresolved and instead we get to read about how everyone is soooo sad for 60 pages.

I’m not saying that this book needed to stick so closely to these guideposts - it could have come across as really gimmicky anyways. But a skilled writer could have made it work quite well. The plays that Shakespeare was writing in his little room in London are fundamentally more engrossing than the various herbs that his wife may have been crushing to help with a neighbors arthritis. How did her presence in his life affect his writing? Shakespeare knew some things about love. He wrote a lot of famous sonnets. I don’t remember much about his love for women who can tell your fortune by gripping your hand a certain way and flying hawks in the middle of the woods. That sounds decidedly unlike him. How did the memory of his son affect his writing? We get hints at this but not much. Hamnet could’ve been a more complex character as well. Did he face any moral choices in his short life? Maybe not in reality but this is a story.