The authenticity of grief: attitudes towards life and death in Shakespearian England

Lynn Robinson and Janet Dickinson
in collaboration with the Oxford Preservation Trust

An experience which connects human stories across time. Experiences of grief and loss are recorded in only the starkest, most simple terms in the historic archives which survive. Maggie O’Farrell’s recent novel, Hamnet, and the film adaptation directed by Chloe Zhao, enter this emotional space, and fill it with a wrenching portrayal of grief and its impact on a family. Today’s conversation, between a literary scholar and a historian, will discuss the ways in which this fictional representation retells the story of the loss of William Shakespeare’s only son, and how reinvention and imagination can enhance our understanding of how historical people lived, felt, and remembered those closest to them.

Dr Janet Dickinson is Departmental Lecturer (History) at Oxford University’s department for Lifelong Learning and Lecturer at New York University in London. Her research focuses on the Tudors and court history and occasionally on shipwrecks and drowned books. Janet is a convenor of the Tudor & Stuart Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research and a committee member of the Society for Court Studies.

Dr Lynn Robson is Fellow Emerita in English Literature at Regent’s Park College, and an Honorary Academic Associate of Oxford Lifelong Learning. Her interests are in the representation of prisons and penitence in early modern prose murder pamphlets, early modern women writers, and Shakespeare. Her current project is
on Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy.