Magic

As I mentioned a couple of days back, I enjoyed reading Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet - a novel of the plague, about the death of Shakespeare's son (sorry, no spoiler alert, but it's obvious) whilst basking in the weekend sun. But, in truth, I've been enjoying reading it whatever the circumstances since it's just so very, very good. How does the writer know so much about what everyone back then was thinking and what really happened? It's magic - but sleight of hand magic, not the real thing (as practised by Agnes - Ann Hathaway, that is) in the book. She doesn't know (Ms O'Farrell, that is), she couldn't know, but she does. And now, so do I.

What she could know, of course, are the details of daily life in the England, the Stratford, of 1580-ish to 1596 (I think.) She'll have done her research, I guess, but magically it doesn't read like research.

Literature = magic that works. (Like Science, but better in terms of actual spell-casting.)