Hamnet’s ending may make you rethink your understanding of Hamlet.

To spoil or not to spoil? This article discusses the ending of Hamnet .

Among the words that never appear in Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 book Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague , two in particular are notable for their absence: William Shakespeare . A historical note prefacing the text informs us that in the 1580s, a couple living in Stratford-upon-Avon had three children, that one, an 11-year-boy, died in 1596, and that “four years or so later, the father wrote a play called Hamlet .” And though even readers who flip past the first few pages might quickly guess the book’s subject, O’Farrell herself never lets the penny drop: To the last paragraph, the most famous author in the history of the English language is referred to only with common nouns: the father, her husband, the glover’