Writer Maggie O’Farrell repents for making the Bard’s father most foulDavid Sanderson, Arts CorrespondentTuesday May 26 2020, 12.01am, The Times

Maggie O’Farrell wrote about Shakespeare’s family life

The novelist Maggie O’Farrell has apologised for portraying William Shakespeare’s father as a tyrant, but insisted that the Bard must have had some source material for Coriolanus and Macbeth.The award-winning author, whose latest novel, Hamnet, explores the family relationships of Shakespeare, said that although the writer’s father, John, “might have been the life and soul of the party” she portrayed him as a “very tyrannical, quite violent man”.“I actually had no evidence of that,” she said. “But I did wonder where the Coriolanus and Macbeth of his plays come from. So I

was interested in that idea, these very angry despotic men that appears in the plays.”“Maybe,” she said of John Shakespeare, “you were a lovely man. I’m sorry.”

In an interview with the digital Hay Festival, O’Farrell bemoaned the absence of information about Shakespeare and said it “breaks my heart” that nobody in the 17th century had tracked down and recorded the observations of his daughters.Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, is known to have had three children: Susanna, and the twins Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet died aged 11 but the girls lived to what O’Farrell said was an “extraordinary age” and were alive when there was a 17th-century resurgence of interest in Shakespeare.

Scholars and biographers often lament the absence of information about Shakespeare, notably over the “lost years” between leaving school in Stratford and becoming an actor in London.

Although a wealthy man and renowned playwright upon his death in 1616, Shakespeare himself remained a mystery with little concrete evidence, O’Farrell said. It was seven years after his death before his plays were first collated into the First Folio, which allowed for later appraisals of his work.

“Judith was over 70 and Susanna was 67 which in those days was an incredibly good age to get to,” she said.

She said that after Shakespeare’s death his “reputation went into abeyance” before a resurgence of interest. “What really gets me is that not one of them thought of going to Stratford and saying to

Judith and Susanna ‘What was your father like? Tell us about him. What was he like to live with? What did he eat for breakfast?’

“Think about the value of information those two could have contributed to what we know about him. But it is gone and of course there are no direct descendants.”

O’Farrell said that her preparation for immersing herself in Shakespeare’s age had been fun. “I did a lot more physical research,” she said. “I learnt how to fly a kestrel, went mudlarking along the Thames, and grew my own Elizabethan physic garden. I even went on a course to learn how to make herbal medicines.”

She kept a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary by her side while writing Hamnet because she did not want to deploy any “cod Elizabethan dialogue” or “use any word that did not have that meaning in the 16th century”.“You can’t reach for the habitual imagery,” she said. “You can’t say the scream was as loud as a telephone bell. I worked much harder than ever before to avoid any anachronism.”

So out went the pleating of a skirt into “concertina folds”, a term not used until the 19th century, as did “shambles” which in Shakespeare’s age referred to the quartering of an animal carcass.