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Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit,

the podcasts in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs,

from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samarise,

relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft.

Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.

When it comes to Shakespeare's personal biography and his inner life, you'll find that there's a certain porosity of evidence.

There's enough for people to be able to theorise, of course.

That's why some people suggest it wasn't even he who wrote the plays, and others suggest that he was a Catholic.

There's even less to go on when it comes to his wife, the woman we call Anne Hathaway,

and his three children. But what if Shakespeare gave us a really big clue? What if he pointed

us towards an event that radically metamorphosed his world? What if he named his most famous,

most acclaimed play after his son, who died at the age of 11.

Hamlet? Hamlet? It's just one letter different, and we know that spelling was unstable in the

16th century. Has it been hiding there in plain sight all along? In 2020, Maggie O'Farrow won

the Women's Prize for F fiction with her exquisite novel

exploring this very question. It's a work of great and intense beauty that imagined the role

of Shakespeare's wife in his life, the role of women in society, the devastation left by

...