In 1596, when William Shakespeare was still emerging—he’d written five plays, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry VI—he and his wife of 14 years, Anne Hathaway, lost their only son, Hamnet. The bubonic plague killed the 11-year-old boy, who was survived by his twin, Judith, and older sister Susanna. In 2020, the Irish novelist Maggie O’Farrell lightly fictionalized Shakespeare’s real-life tragedy. Her critically-acclaimed novel Hamnet dramatizes the emotional and marital distress that ensued after the couple lost their child, and how heartbreak led Shakespeare to write Hamlet, a story in which the father, not the son, dies. The world premiere stage adaptation of the novel—now on at Royal Shakespeare Company—is already sold-out. (The theatre is located in the town where Shakespeare and his family lived, and where the playwright and his son are buried.) Luckily it heads to the Garrick Theatre, in London, in September. —Jensen Davis