The Trouble With ‘Hamnet’

Am I a bad person for not sobbing through Hamnet? Judging by rapturous early reviews out of Toronto and Telluride, my tepid response may mark me as heartless. The story, to be sure, intends to shatter viewers – it’s hardly a spoiler to admit that it revolves around the death of a child. And Chloe Zhao’s direction, clamorous and raw, aims to bring us as close to this experience as possible, universalizing it in the screaming grief and shattered stoicism of the boy’s mother and father, played by Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, respectively. But the story  is not the tragedy of common folk, or even fictional characters; it concerns William Shakespeare, the most celebrated writer in human history, and his wife Anne (here, Agnes) Hathaway. In Hamnet, the immediacy of these emotional actors and the distance of these long-dead historical figures never quite seem to align into one. Hamnet needs both aspects to make its story work, but for much of the film their relationship to one another is distractingly unclear.

The chasm between life and art is Hamnet’s theme, a void into which one disappears and emerges transfigured – sometimes, beyond recognition. For centuries, devotees of Shakespeare have marveled at the fact that the Bard’s signature tragedy, Hamlet (c. 1600) rhymes with the name of his deceased only son, Hamnet (1585–1596). Could it be a coincidence? As the scholar Stephen Greenblatt once noted in the New York Review of Books: “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” What to make, then, of the fact that Shakespeare’s work in the years directly following his son’s death represent the high point of his comedic output, including As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing (both c. 1599)? How about the fact that an earlier version of Hamlet, featuring a character of the same name and known to English theatregoers since at least 1587, was based on a 12th century story by the Danish grammarian Saxo, who used the name Amleth for the story’s brooding prince? 

As with almost all of Shakespeare’s plays, establishing the origins of the story takes one down rabbit holes, and into the uncertain world of medieval literary history. Nothing he produced was ever truly original, and Shakespeare’s themes are so sublimely expansive that they seem to contain the entire range of human experience within them. A reader who hopes to use Shakespeare’s writing as evidence that its author underwent some specific heartbreak or joy in his life will inevitably walk away vindicated. If life and art are one, Shakespeare has lived more than anyone.

Long the domain of Victorian scholars, this practice of theorizing on Shakespeare’s private life through his work has been revived recently, thanks to the success of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, on which Zhao’s film is based. What makes the novel so ingenious is its retelling of Shakespeare’s life without its central figure; his name never appears in the course of Hamnet’s 200-odd pages. Instead, he is referred to as husband and father by the rest of the family – Agnes, her daughter Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith – who pass their time in Stratford while the tender but distant patriarch conducts business in faraway London. O’Farrell’s writing, gorgeously attuned to the most intimate details of the house and fields around Stratford, provides readers with an immersive sense of daily life in the Elizabethan era. Were it not for a few allusions to a writing desk, readers would have no sense that this story concerns literary production at all, much less the catalyst of the world’s most enduring play. Shakespeare’s presence in O’Farrell’s Hamnet is thus managed through a kind of sleight-of-hand, one that works by keeping the story’s outsize figure offstage until its emotional last act.

Hamnet loses a lot in its transition from story to screen, but it notably gains the presence of one William Shakespeare. Played by Irish heartthrob Mescal, whose hoop earring and light beard seem to be modeled off the Chandos portrait (albeit, with a far more handsome hairline), he becomes a conspicuous presence in a film about his absence. The full scope of Hamnet’s story spans about 15 years, and, unlike the book, does not allow time for the pace of domestic life and the characters’ daily routines. By stripping O’Farrell’s story down to two hours, scenes in Stratford are mostly reduced to the moments when “Will,” as he’s called here, is coming or going. It robs the film of maintaining the revelatory notion that it’s not all about him.

Hamnet should, after all, be a film about Agnes, one of the most fascinating women to ever grace an English period piece. The self-proclaimed daughter of a witch, whose happy place is a sunlit spot in the woods next to a gaping abyss, she’s a falconer and an herbalist who is also bright, earthy and immune to the pieties of her uptight stepmother. It’s easy to see why Will, newly arrived to tutor her younger half-siblings, would rather follow her with his eyes than attend to their Latin. Once again, the film’s fast pacing runs roughshod over a very fine tale. Will and Agnes kiss within seconds of their first meeting, and make love in the apple storeroom a few short scenes later. (In between, he jots down the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, verbatim yet somehow off the cuff.) Filmed most unsexily in a high-angle wide shot, their coitus has hardly begun before Zhao cuts again, and they’re forced to deal with the consequences: Will is fired and Agnes exiled upon her first signs of pregnancy. Buckley has long been one of the most exciting actors of her generation, her audacity and vulnerability equally contained in her crooked smile, and this, her biggest role yet, proves to be her best. It’s unfathomable what she might achieve if the film would just slow down and give her more room to breathe. She and Mescal have chemistry, but Hamnet grants its viewers precious little time to study them.

By the time Agnes is pregnant for the second time, Zhao is resorting to jump cuts to speed things along. Agnes and Will engage in a 10-second scuffle at the news that he’s heading back to London. Ten seconds later, she’s gone from peeling eggs to heaving at contractions, and twins one and two pop out like cans from a vending machine. In the blink of an eye, the kids are half-grown. Will’s burgeoning reputation in London is still unknown, or abstract to those he’s left behind, so the point of all this jumping ahead feels immaterial. And if we’re meant to grieve the loss of dear, apple-cheeked Hamnet soon, shouldn’t we watch him grow up a bit first?

The point of all this rushing is, of course, so that the characters in Hamnet can join up with actors of Hamlet, which first requires Agnes to travel into Will’s London. In the book, this is a tremendous moment, one in which a character who is fiercely self-possessed confronts her smallness and terror at the world beyond her. In the film, which seems eager to avoid any additional encumbrance on its budget or time, Agnes and her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) teleport straight to the Globe Theatre, where the inaugural performance of Hamlet is soon underway. A few seconds with the milling audience serve to inaugurate this vastness beyond Agnes’s domain, and they feel like an important step back from the film’s otherwise precarious pace, a moment of arrival and focus. The play’s the thing, after all.

I won’t spoil the final few scenes of Hamnet, and it’d be difficult to, anyway, since they’re 400 years old. What matters is that O’Farrell’s core concept works brilliantly, somehow mining new relevance out of the same well-worn lines. In addition to the story of ambivalent revenge that plays on Hamlet’s surface, I could now see a subtext of filial loss, or at least I could see how other people could see it. The magic of Shakespeare is, of course, that his lines can be read in a million different lights. This triumph of his art, its sparkling irreducibility, was for me the emotional apogee of this film. Here, a gobsmacked Agnes makes for the perfect theatergoing companion – though she nearly gets kicked out of the Globe for rowdiness during the play’s first scene, when a lot of costumed strangers dare to speak her dead son’s name. By the end, she has borne witness to the transference of a loved one into an idea, a death that, transfigured, will now outlive her. It’s a catharsis more touching than the grief that caused it.

Hamnet is due to arrive in French cinemas on January 21.