Two years ago Maggie O’Farrell became an international literary star thanks to the multi-award winning ‘Hamnet’. The novel not only garnered ecstatic (and well-deserved) praise from critics, it also wowed audiences around the world and sold more than million and a half copies. O’Farrell dealt there with the never-before-told story of William Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, who died at the age of eleven and inspired ‘Hamlet’, and the wife of the genius of English literature, a character ignored and vilified by the biographers of him.
O’Farrell is now back with the highly anticipated ‘The married portrait’ (published by Libros del Asteroide and L’Altra in Catalan) and repeats the formula: it also deals with showing the lesser-known face of a world-renowned surname that exudes respectability, the Mediciand it does so by bringing to light a tragically truncated life story buried in oblivion: that of Lucrezia de Medici. Married at 13 to the Duke of Ferrara To guarantee the prosperity and the enormous economic and political influence of her family, she was assassinated by her husband only a year after they were married, probably for not fulfilling the main objective of the arranged wedding: beget offspring.
O’Farrell masterfully recreates the explosion of the renaissance: a court full of music, readings and whims like the exotic animals that Lucrezia’s father was collecting, Grand Duke Cosimo de Medici, married to the Spanish Eleonora Álvarez de Toledo, whom he let govern in his absence. “In his letters they mention little to Lucrezia. They say about her that she doesn’t do her homework, that she gets too distracted from her and that she lives in her daydreams. Her favorite was her sister Isabella,” O’Farrell explains. From Lucrezia (1545-1561) , Lucre for readers, hardly a trace remains. There is a portrait of Bronzino made a year before his death that is exhibited in a museum in North Carolina. “It caught my attention because it’s not like most portraits of the time,” O’Farrell confesses, “his face is anguished, as if he has something to say. It was seeing him and wanting to tell the story that perhaps she would have wanted to explain.”
suspected poisoning
The novel recreates the family life of one of the most famous dynasties of the Renaissance and the brief life of Lucrezia, who was said to be died of “putrid fever” (this is how tuberculosis was called then) although the suspicion of poisoning always hovered over the cold and Machiavellian Alfonso. “Lucrezia’s father sent a doctor to do a second autopsy, but when it arrived in Ferrara it was already buried. He hired a spy and Afonso was worried about possible reprisals. They are solid enough clues that point to guilt,” says O’Farrell, who portrays the loneliness and despair of a cultured and brilliant teenager, sent away from home as a bargaining chip, terrified on her wedding night (“one of the scenes that has cost me the most to write,” confesses O’Farrell) and suffocated by the intrigues of a wild political-domestic crossroads. What today we would call a manual ‘gaslighting’.
“When we think of the Renaissance we imagine a time of beauty and education, but there is a much darker side to it,” reflects O’Farrell. “The Medici were an institution, without them we would not have so many paintings and sculptures, the work of Michelangelo… But if you look closely at politics it’s never clean. There is always a dark side, in any age.” For O’Farrell, “the Renaissance is a dichotomy of beauty and brutality” in which leaders were educated to be “ruthless and cruel.”Henry VIII He had six wives and although he did not kill them with his bare hands, hired someone to cut off their headsthere is not much difference either ”, he points out.
Hamnet and the Royal Shakespeare Company
With this one, O’Farrell carries two historical novels linked. Has the present become boring? “Not at all!”, he explains, “You know the Chinese proverb that says, ‘May you live in interesting times’? I think we live in definitely too interesting times,” she jokes. “But during the lockdown I felt a great relief to be writing a novel set in the past. Especially at times when I didn’t know if we were going to overcome the pandemic”, confesses the writer, who has an important appointment this April: the premiere in Stratford-upon-Avon, by the Royal Shakespeare Company, of the stage adaptation of ‘Hamnet’. “I wrote that novel because history books hardly spend two lines talking about Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet. That this child is now going to be on stage in the city where he was born and died is very special to me”, he concludes.