Shakespeare grieves his son’s death in Maggie O’Farrell’s poignant novel

When she was a teenager, Irish-born novelist Maggie O’Farrell became smitten with the works of William Shakespeare. While studying “Hamlet,” she was haunted by the brief life of the playwright’s only son, Hamnet, who died at age 11, possibly of bubonic plague. In “Hamnet,” she fashions a historical novel around the boy, whose death may have impelled his father to write “Hamlet.”